Remembering J. Z. Smith - A Career and its Consequence - Emily D. Crews
10. Transformed Agendas: Generalism in the Work of Jonathan Z. Smith and the Study of Religion (NAASR Panel)
Remembering J. Z. Smith - A Career and its Consequence - Emily D. Crews
Stephanie Frank [+]
Columbia College Chicago
Stephanie Frank is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Department at Columbia College, Chicago; she teaches a variety of courses in religious studies, philosophy, and history at Columbia.
Description
Unlike many who quote Jonathan Z. Smith’s claim that religion “is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization,” Frank focuses on these imaginative acts of comparison and generalization, concluding that, even to do their specialized work, all scholars of religion need to be, to some extent, comparativists and generalists.