Making the Familiar Strange

TWO DAYS AFTER the death of J. Z. Smith, I received a message from Tenzan Eaghll asking me if I was interested in a blog post that he wrote entitled “Something I Learned from J. Z. Smith.” I immediately took to the idea and ran with it as a series, which resulted in contributions from nine scholars on what Smith’s approach to the study of religion has added to their work.1 Four of these contributions (see contributions by Stanton 2018; Colascco 2018; O’Connor 2018; Woll 2018) offered personal anecdotes of their experiences as students of Smith, which provide a glimpse not only into his well-known generosity, humor, and prodigious appetite for reading across a wide range of academic fields (see, e.g., Smith 2004b; 2012), but they also highlight the importance that he placed on engaging with a wide array of seemingly incompatible material with the goal of making the strange seem familiar and the familiar strange. Smith describes this method in an interview with the Chicago Maroon, stating, “I look at the Book of Mormon in relationship to the Koran. I’m dropping one in the other’s pond to see what happens. So to me, if we’re a science, we have to do something analogous to an experiment” (Sinhababu 2008).

Art · Generosity · Linguistics · Maroon · Reading (process) · Sociology · Theology · Visual arts · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• Map is not Territory

  Jonathan Z Smith•Map is not Territory•1978

  Add to list

• Comparison

  Aaron W Hughes•Comparison•2017

  Add to list