Editor’s Introduction to Drudgery Divine at 35

DRUDGERY DIVINE: ON THE COMPARISON OF EARLY CHRISTIANITIES AND THE RELIGIONS OF LATE ANTIQUITY. By Jonathan Z. Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 147. Paperback, $30.00. In my years associated with the Religious Studies Review, editors have often voiced regret that we have failed to reflect on and celebrate scholars of significance when they shuffle off this mortal coil. I appreciate the sentiment. Without overindulging in the macabre, another’s end opens space for our rumination on works that no longer (or still) impact (or didn’t) the field for better (or worse). In our journal’s admitted rush to always review the new, the recent, and the latest, we unwittingly risk creating a sense of the field untethered from that which precedes this moment, works that still have much to teach us. Over the last decade, one scholar whose death elicited the kind of regret I mention above was the passing of Jonathan Z. Smith (2017). The Historian of Religions who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago had a preternatural ability to pen essay after essay full of boundary-defying ideas and theory that recalibrated the field. When Russell McCutcheon approached RSR with an essay—and a plan to expand it to a set of essays—that recontextualized Drudgery Divine in this moment, a symposium was born that creates the kind of reflective space RSR missed out on eight years ago. Space to reconsider Smith’s work not as a relic or a marker of a previous era in Religious Studies theory and method, but as an aid, if not a comprehensive map, for our field now and moving forward. Most of us have an origin story related to Smith’s work. Mine was in Jeffrey Kripal’s History of Religions course at Rice University. I distinctly remember Eliot Berger sharing a YouTube video of Smith that had me in awe. His prose and ideas simultaneously made me realize that achieving his level of scholarship would only ever be aspirational, but also filled me with determination and excitement to pursue my own small constructive acts of redescription. While this encounter lacks the gravity of Karen deVries’ trajectory-altering personal encounter shared in this symposium, it was impactful. Smith has a definitive place in the Religious Studies canon. The risk is that encounters with Smith are often in this kind of petrified context: a node on the developmental timeline of the field of Religious Studies. For whatever reason—perhaps our suspicion of canons, though Smith himself offered alternatives through his pluralized cross-lineage comparative study of canons—such contextualization of Smith’s work makes it fall flat. His oft-quoted but too rarely applied turns of phrase—as remarkable as if sometimes frustrating his erudition is—are not primarily what Smith offers. He constructed a circumscribed and replicable model for the field with infinite horizons. Reading the essays herein played a similar role for me to that classroom encounter all those years ago. They provide a welcome opportunity to leap back into Smith, to bring his succinct and still-somehow-novel approach to comparison into the classroom, to wrestle with his demands that the best of Religious Studies manages to demonstrate its constructed nature and constructive possibilities, and to admire and possibly replicate the fine line he walked between broad applicability without succumbing to the recklessness of universals. These essays do an incredible job of bringing us back to Smith. This symposium—“Drudgery Divine at 35: Reconsiderations and Applications”—is not simply a retrospective. The title situates Drudgery Divine as a historical moment and a present force, pointing us toward new, prescient, important, and crucial interventions and possibilities. In this symposium, we are treated to four essays from scholars of varied interests and expertise. While most of the essays focus on Drudgery Divine, Adam DeSchriver inaugurates the symposium with a wide-sweeping overview of Smith’s work. In “Locating Theory in the Work of Jonathan Z. Smith (1938–2017): An Overview,” DeSchriver wrestles with what the totality of Smith’s oeuvre teaches us, especially theoretically. DeSchriver expertly parses Smith’s differentiation between data, theory, and method. By emphasizing Smith’s notions of religion as constructed and constructive, DeSchriver argues that Smith’s contribution to Religious Studies is not definitional, per se, but the expansive and expanding theoretical horizon he invited the field to construct and pursue. Turning to Drudgery Divine, but not disconnected from DeSchriver’s elucidation of the difference between data, theory, and method, McCutcheon demonstrates Smith’s import for the field now and moving forward. In his essay, “Retooling the Study of Religion by Rectifying Our Bias Toward the ‘Unique’: On the Continued Relevance of Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine,” McCutcheon demonstrates Smith’s import broadly. This is not simply an argument for the relevance of Smith’s work to various fields far beyond Christian Origins, but specifically for the current precarity of the field within higher education. In a moment that demands adaptation, McCutcheon utilizes Smith to explore shortcomings in how Religious Studies has situated itself. But, in an important Smith-ian move (see deVries in this symposium), McCutcheon utilizes Smith to critique and to construct reliable knowledge and futures. Smith’s work demonstrates that Religious Studies’ continued relevance must be rooted in the tools it offers and not in the idea that its dataset is sacred, unique, etc. In this moment of tensions, budget cuts, and department closures in the field and higher education more generally, McCutcheon argues that Smith has provided us a roadmap to relevance, cross and interdisciplinary import, unparalleled classroom experiences, and institutional benefit. In “Drudgery, Terminable and Interminable,” William Arnal similarly bemoans lessons missed from Drudgery Divine, both in Christian Origins and the field at large. He does so by revisiting a review he penned shortly after Drudgery’s release and evaluating the three primary contributions of the book he noted in 1994. Arnal reevaluates the field’s application of Smith’s dismantling of a particular type of comparison in Christian Origins, and his construction of an alternative comparison via locative and utopian orientations. He ends by exploring what he views as “in many ways the most important contribution,” a methodology of analogical acts of comparison. Arnal concludes that Smith’s lasting contribution must be his calling the field to tools that disrupt, especially, if surprisingly, via comparison. Karen deVries opens her essay, “Thinking with Jonathan Z. Smith and Drudgery Divine on the 35th Anniversary of Its Publication,” with a narrative of her vital encounter at the University of Chicago with Smith and his work. From this, she launches into an important discussion of Drudgery Divine as a model of critique. One of the strengths, sometimes unappreciated, of Smith’s work is that while he critiques and dismantles, he does not simply raze. He utilizes critique to construct the conditions for the crafting of reliable knowledge. Like Arnal, deVries tarries with Smith’s elucidation of locative and utopian perspectives and how his emphasis on redescription lights a path from critique to knowledge construction. In their totality, the essays provide much fodder for the future of Religious Studies. Chief among these is that one way to ensure the future of the field—not as an act of self-preservation but in the service of knowledge production and higher education—is to resituate Smith as a map. The essays make a compelling case that a robust and flourishing field of Religious Studies is one in which the mundane magic of J.Z. Smith still dwells

Regret · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Study and Philosophy of Religion