Robert A Yelle
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 976896 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Robert A Yelle |
| PRENOMES | Robert A |
| SOBRENOME | Yelle |
| ASSINATURA | YELLE R A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3191-162X |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 37 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Christianity and the Nation-State
Blood Lines
Sacrifice is mainly a patriarchal institution. Nancy Jay argued that sacrifice serves as a ritual supplement and replacement for natural birth, and attempts to establish the dominance and priority of descent through the father over descent through the mother. I demonstrate the cogency of Jay’s analysis across a number of traditions. My focus is not on sacrificial rituals, but instead on a series of myths – Hebrew biblical, ancient Greek, and Vedi…
Sacred Foundations
Journal Article Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, By Anna M. Grzymała-Busse Get access Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State By Anna M. Grzymała-Busse Princeton University Press, 2023. xiii + 235 pages. $99.95 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback or e-book). Robert A Yelle Robert A Yelle LMU Munich [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Acad…
Law As Religion, Religion As Law
The Sovereign Remains
Let me begin with a note of thanks and appreciation to my colleagues who contributed to this forum on Sovereignty and the Sacred. These essays vindicate my hopes when writing the book: namely, that it would inspire thoughtful reflection on the foundations of polity and economy, and sharpen critique of where we are in the present moment. The essays in this forum stand on their own, noting sins of commission and omission in my argument while markin…
Sacred Kingship in World History
Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. This collaborative and interdisciplinary book recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective
On Slaves, Aliens, and Other Threats to the Body Politic
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert A. YelleRobert A. Yelle is Professor of Religious Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1988), Berkeley (J.D. 1993), and Chicago (Ph.D. 2002), and has held fellowships from the University of Toronto, the University of Illinois, NYU Law School, and the John Simon Guggenhei…
Deprovincializing Political Theology
Having begun in the last century as a mode of reflection on the legacy of Christian traditions for the modern, ostensibly secular, European order, the discipline of political theology has now emerg...
Do Crowds Need Leaders
The Political Imaginarium, which is the topic of this special issue, is not static. Older modes of representing the body politic, as illustrated by Ernst Kantorowicz’s account of the King’s Two Bodies, were focused on the figure of the monarch. With the transition to democratic republics based on popular sovereignty, was this older aesthetic of sovereignty abandoned, extended, or transformed? I argue that the shift to focus on the People represen…
Was Aśoka really a secularist avant-la-lettre? Ancient Indian pluralism and toleration in historical perspective
Focusing on Rajeev Bhargava's claim that Aśoka was a secularist avant-la-lettre, I dispute the common understanding of secularism as the separation of religion and politics, and argue instead that such separation, to the extent that it existed, was characteristic of traditional religious societies. I then offer an alternative history of secularism as the demise of the traditional balance of power between church and state, and the rise of a unitar…
“An Age of Miracles”
Interpreting and Explaining Transcendence
In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of scholars uses history, sociology, anthropology, and semiotics to approach Transcendence as a human phenomenon, and shows the unavoidability of thinking with and through the Beyond. Religious experience has often been defined as an encounter with a transcendent God. Yet humans arguably have always tried to get outside or beyond themselves and society. The drive to exceed some limit or condition of fini…
Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization
"What does it really mean to be modern? The contributors to this collection offer critical attempts both to re-read Max Weber's historical idea of disenchantment and to develop further his understanding of what the contested relationship between modernity and religion represents. The approach is distinctive because it focuses on disenchantment as key to understanding those aspects of modern society and culture that Weber diagnosed. This is in opp…
Chastening and Disciplining Comparison
The article reviews two recent books on comparison in the study of religion authored by prominent scholars. Long out of vogue, comparison now must be defended as a or even the central methodology for religious studies. Both philology and critical theory have collaborated to undermine the universalist assumptions on which earlier grand comparisons in the study of religion based themselves. The question is whether the two books considered here mana…
By fire and sword’
Contemporary critiques of Islam and Judaism as political religions have a genealogical connection with older Protestant arguments that religion ought to remain apolitical. At the end of the seventeenth century in England, drawing on older polemics against Muhammad, the theologian Humphrey Prideaux argued that Islam, like Roman Catholicism, was an ‘imposture’ because it failed to maintain a distinction between religion and politics. The true Gospe…
From Sovereignty to Solidarity
Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism, written by Jakob De Roover
Secularism Reconsidered
The Peircean Icon and the Study of Religion
This essay addresses Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the icon: his reasons for choosing this term, its definition, and especially, its utility for religious studies. Particularly in the context
Coda and counterpoint
This essay responds to several of the issues raised by the various review essays on the author's book, Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History, while simultaneously offering some observations on the nature, current state, and future prospects of the semiotics of religion; on the explanatory ambitions and methodological limitations of this field; and on the location of semiotics in the human sciences and in historical and cultural st…
The language of disenchantment
'The Language of Disenchantment' explores how Protestant ideas about language inspired British colonial critiques of Hindu mythological, ritual, linguistic, and legal traditions
Orientalism and the Language of Disenchantment
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the connections between the religious Reformation and British colonialism in India, situates the book in relation to both postcolonial studies and contemporary debates over secularization, and traces the outlines of the Christian myth of disenchantment that informed British attitudes toward Hinduism.
Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat
Religion and Identity in South Asia and Beyond
After Secular Law
The language of disenchantment
'The Language of Disenchantment' explores how Protestant ideas about language inspired British colonial critiques of Hindu mythological, ritual, linguistic, and legal traditions
The Trouble with Transcendence
The Weimar- and Nazi-era legal theorist Carl Schmitt was one of the first to recognize that Max Weber’s theory of “disenchantment” encoded Protestant presuppositions. Despite his unsavory politics, I argue that Schmitt’s thesis—namely, that secular liberalism is a disguised and disenchanted “political theology” which depends on an exclusion of charismatic ruptures in the natural and moral orders—must be taken seriously. A genealogy of the prohibi…
The Ends of Sacrifice
The article argues that Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto (2006) offers a Christian defence of European colonialism as the agency that ends the brutality of Mayan sacrifice. In doing so, the director deploys symbols and techniques borrowed from Christian typology, which depicted the Crucifixion as the end of Jewish sacrifice. A comparison of Apocalypto with Gibson’s earlier film The Passion of the Christ (2004) suggests that the former is actually a s…
Do Crowds Need Leaders
The Political Imaginarium, which is the topic of this special issue, is not static. Older modes of representing the body politic, as illustrated by Ernst Kantorowicz’s account of the King’s Two Bodies, were focused on the figure of the monarch. With the transition to democratic republics based on popular sovereignty, was this older aesthetic of sovereignty abandoned, extended, or transformed? I argue that the shift to focus on the People represen…
Was Aśoka really a secularist avant-la-lettre? Ancient Indian pluralism and toleration in historical perspective
Focusing on Rajeev Bhargava's claim that Aśoka was a secularist avant-la-lettre, I dispute the common understanding of secularism as the separation of religion and politics, and argue instead that such separation, to the extent that it existed, was characteristic of traditional religious societies. I then offer an alternative history of secularism as the demise of the traditional balance of power between church and state, and the rise of a unitar…
From Sovereignty to Solidarity
The Peircean Icon and the Study of Religion
This essay addresses Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the icon: his reasons for choosing this term, its definition, and especially, its utility for religious studies. Particularly in the context
Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat
The Hindu Moses
To Perform, or Not to Perform? A Theory of Ritual Performance Versus Cognitive Theories of Religious Transmission
One of the more exciting recent developments in the study of religion has been the discovery of the relevance of cognitive science to religion. Anthropologists, psychologists, and even some historians of religion have applied the theories and findings of cognitive science to explain such important religious phenomena as the belief in supernatural beings and the regularity of certain forms of religious ritual. Although cognitive theories of religi…
The Rebirth of Myth
There is increasing evidence of the influence of various Romantic thinkers on Nietzsche's early philosophy, especially on The Birth of Tragedy, with its announcement or prediction of a rebirth of myth. The prophetic Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche introduced with the words "tragedy begins," expresses his later philosophy, particularly his central doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, in symbols, parables, and riddles, suggesting an attempt …
The Golden Yoke
Critical Terms for Religious Studies . Mark C. Taylor
The Rebirth of Myth
There is increasing evidence of the influence of various Romantic thinkers on Nietzsche's early philosophy, especially on The Birth of Tragedy, with its announcement or prediction of a rebirth of myth. The prophetic Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche introduced with the words "tragedy begins," expresses his later philosophy, particularly his central doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, in symbols, parables, and riddles, suggesting an attempt …
Rhetorics of Law and Ritual
Journal Article Rhetorics of Law and Ritual: A Semiotic Comparison of the Law of Talion and Sympathetic Magic Get access Robert A. Yelle Robert A. Yelle Robert A. Yelle, J.D., is a Ph D candidate in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL 60637 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 69, Issue 3, September 2001, Pages 62…
Poetic Justice
The Divyatattva, a Hindu treatise on ordeals, uses folk etymologies and other rhetorical devices to structure its rituals. This paper suggests that such forms of repetition, and particularly ‘exhaustion,’ or the enumeration of an entire paradigm class, may naturalise or, in Saussure's term, ‘relatively motivate’ rituals and diminish the appearance of their arbitrariness. Ordeals and other rituals may respond to situations of uncertainty by using …
Images of Law and Its Others
This essay uses Jonathan Z. Smith's concept of ‘canon’ to explore the structural and historical relations among British ideas of law, rel igion, and language in nineteenth-century India. Colonial projects of legal codification paralleled, and were influenced by, the Protestant valorisation of a canon of scripture, as opposed to the idolatry of custom. The British applied such ideas to privilege, alternatively, Hindu or Christian scriptures, legal…
The rhetoric of gesture in cross-cultural perspective
It has often been claimed that there is a natural or universal language of gesture, one that communicates directly without words. The present essay critically scrutinizes some older efforts to recover such a natural language of gesture, including John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century Chirologia and Chironomia , and the classical South Asian systems of Natyashastra and Tantra . Although these older systems lay claim to communicate and even to represen…
To Perform, or Not to Perform? A Theory of Ritual Performance Versus Cognitive Theories of Religious Transmission
One of the more exciting recent developments in the study of religion has been the discovery of the relevance of cognitive science to religion. Anthropologists, psychologists, and even some historians of religion have applied the theories and findings of cognitive science to explain such important religious phenomena as the belief in supernatural beings and the regularity of certain forms of religious ritual. Although cognitive theories of religi…
The Hindu Moses
The Trouble with Transcendence
The Weimar- and Nazi-era legal theorist Carl Schmitt was one of the first to recognize that Max Weber’s theory of “disenchantment” encoded Protestant presuppositions. Despite his unsavory politics, I argue that Schmitt’s thesis—namely, that secular liberalism is a disguised and disenchanted “political theology” which depends on an exclusion of charismatic ruptures in the natural and moral orders—must be taken seriously. A genealogy of the prohibi…
Religion and Identity in South Asia and Beyond
After Secular Law
After secular law
The Ends of Sacrifice
The article argues that Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto (2006) offers a Christian defence of European colonialism as the agency that ends the brutality of Mayan sacrifice. In doing so, the director deploys symbols and techniques borrowed from Christian typology, which depicted the Crucifixion as the end of Jewish sacrifice. A comparison of Apocalypto with Gibson’s earlier film The Passion of the Christ (2004) suggests that the former is actually a s…
Orientalism and the Language of Disenchantment
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the connections between the religious Reformation and British colonialism in India, situates the book in relation to both postcolonial studies and contemporary debates over secularization, and traces the outlines of the Christian myth of disenchantment that informed British attitudes toward Hinduism.
Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat
The language of disenchantment
'The Language of Disenchantment' explores how Protestant ideas about language inspired British colonial critiques of Hindu mythological, ritual, linguistic, and legal traditions
Coda and counterpoint
This essay responds to several of the issues raised by the various review essays on the author's book, Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History, while simultaneously offering some observations on the nature, current state, and future prospects of the semiotics of religion; on the explanatory ambitions and methodological limitations of this field; and on the location of semiotics in the human sciences and in historical and cultural st…
Secularism Reconsidered
The Peircean Icon and the Study of Religion
This essay addresses Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the icon: his reasons for choosing this term, its definition, and especially, its utility for religious studies. Particularly in the context
Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism, written by Jakob De Roover
From Sovereignty to Solidarity
Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization
"What does it really mean to be modern? The contributors to this collection offer critical attempts both to re-read Max Weber's historical idea of disenchantment and to develop further his understanding of what the contested relationship between modernity and religion represents. The approach is distinctive because it focuses on disenchantment as key to understanding those aspects of modern society and culture that Weber diagnosed. This is in opp…
Chastening and Disciplining Comparison
The article reviews two recent books on comparison in the study of religion authored by prominent scholars. Long out of vogue, comparison now must be defended as a or even the central methodology for religious studies. Both philology and critical theory have collaborated to undermine the universalist assumptions on which earlier grand comparisons in the study of religion based themselves. The question is whether the two books considered here mana…
By fire and sword’
Contemporary critiques of Islam and Judaism as political religions have a genealogical connection with older Protestant arguments that religion ought to remain apolitical. At the end of the seventeenth century in England, drawing on older polemics against Muhammad, the theologian Humphrey Prideaux argued that Islam, like Roman Catholicism, was an ‘imposture’ because it failed to maintain a distinction between religion and politics. The true Gospe…
Philosophy (29 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Sociology (18 obras) · Politics (16 obras) · Religion and Society Interactions (14 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Theology (13 obras) · History (12 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras)