Connections (J Z Smith)

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion. LV1II /1

ConnectionsJonathan Z. Smith

i l O W COULD ONE REFUSE an invitation to meditate aloud on thequestion of connections at the outset of our meeting when the issue wasso fetchingly framed by Jim Wiggins? He called, several m onths ago, totell me that the Program Committee had just met, here in Anaheim, andconcluded that there appeared to be nothing programmatic about ourAn nual M eeting. Jim recalled that 1 had on ce suggested that, if ourpresent course of atomization continued, allowing, at any given m omen t,no less than sixteen simultaneous fifteen minute sound bites (with anequivalent number in the parallel SBL meeting), the Academy might dobetter (and save some money) simply to provide each member with thetools that enable solitary vice, with an individual phone booth and acredit card, and give up the fiction of a plenum. "Is the re," Jim asked,"anything unifying, any contrary centripetal impulse governing ouractivities as an Academy?" In asking me to address this question inwhat he, then, termed a "kick-off speech" (now pleonastically dignifiedas an "inaugural opening address"), Jim left me with the rueful sensethat I was to attempt a task similar to that undertaken by the artist,Christo (itself a not insignificant name), wrapping gauze around analready existent and somewhat recalcitrant object. The blu rb in the Reli-gious Studies News did nothing to dispel this unease. The auguries do notbod e well. After all, in its recent mail survey of m em be r's "prima ryresearch," the AAR found it necessary to set out nine"ge ographic areas,"eighteen "traditions," eleven "approaches," and twenty-eight "subjectareas," with the doubtless unintended ironic result that if you, like me,understood religion to be the object of your studies, you had to write it in,under the rubric "other"!I chose the title, "Connections," in part because it shares with 'reli-gion' the root sense of 'bin ding' (although built on a different root, *nedrather than *leigh), but more particularly in homage to that remarkableBBC and PBS series on the history of science and technology, James

Jonathan Z. Smith is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities atthe University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637. This article was delivered as the Open ing Ad dress atthe Academy's 1989 Annual Meeting.


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Journal o f the American A cademy of Religion

Burke's Connections. Eschewing the usual picture of a process of linealinevitable development, or the heroism of individual geniuses andinventors, Burke portrays a more haphazard process, resembling brico-lage, that becomes clear and necessary only in retrospect (Burke:287-91). Our coherence, arguably, is of a similar character.Let me begin with two historical snapsho ts. Despite the short shrift

given to the rationale for the change of name from the already renamedNational Association of Bible Instructors to the American Academy ofReligion in our founding document of 1964 (Beck, et al.:200), the lattertitle has proved prescient. With the benefit of hindsig ht, it is possible tomaintain that the three elements in our title, taken together, constitute afirst map ping of our commonality. We are an indigenously Am ericanenterprise, a field of study that has chosen, and is comfortable with, theso-called 'secular' academy as a setting and our neighbors in the humansciences as colleagues and conversation partners for our work, a workdirected towards a theoretical object: religion. This could not have beensaid fifty years ago. The d istance we have collectively traveled can b emarked by contrasting a complaint from the beginning of our 'turn,'indeed, from the very first paragraph of the first issue of the Journal ofBible an d Religion (the ancestor oiJAAR) with the celebration of the same'turn' in a remark at our seventy-fifth anniversary banquet in Chicagofifty-one years later. In 193 3, Chester Warre n Quim by, in his presiden-tial address, lamented:

That all is not well with the teaching of the English Bible is a well-known and all too bitter axiom. The early hope that we [NABI] mightbecome an influential national society has failed. The Southern sec-tionthe very core of the 'Bible Belt'was stillborn. The Central andWestern sections have become vague societies of religion. The Bibledepartments of our own section are fast changing to Departments ofreligion, so that now although we only are left they are seeking our lifeto take it away. (Quimby: 1)By way of contrast, in 1984, Charles Long proclaim ed, with b arely con-cealed delight, that, as an Academy, we have moved "from the clarity ofthe Book to the chaos of discourse about religion" (quoted inO'D ono van:3 11). Although the first quotation denigrates, and the sec-ond celebrates, our 'turn,' their language is wholly congruent. Theresult of the 'turn' is "vague societies of religion" and the "chaos ofdiscourse about religion." Our scholarly 'tur n' is understood b y both tobe from a sharp focus on an object, the Bible, understood, authorita-tively, to be religious, to a highly contested co nstruct: religion.

The study of religion, especially at its more advanced levels, is
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SmitkConnectionsunique among the human sciences in its bi-locality, often denoted in ourprofessional shorthand by the dualism seminary/university. W hile thisbi-locality is not innocent of implications for the question of unity (towhich I shall want to return), here it helps clarify the reasons for thediffering evaluations by Quim by and Long. For the focus on objects andauthority is appropriate to the seminary; the insistence on construct andconflict is equally characteristic of the university.I have been repeatedly struck by the force of this wider duality overthe past year, as the Editorial Board, on behalf of the AAR, has struggledwith the construction of the Harper's Dictionary of Religion, conceived asan analogue to the SBL's Harper's Bible Dictionary. For beyond its physi-cal dimensions and some technical matters of format, the analogy breaksdow n. Any Bible dictionary, by its very nature, workin g with an exp an-sive yet delimited corpus, has as its conceptual spine a concordance, alist of every name, place a nd thing m entioned in the Bible (in the case ofHBD, every name used three or more times), to which is added a varietyof historical and archeological terms conceived to have relevance to theage and setting of the books, as well as a traditional list of theologicaltopoi. W hether merited or not, a positivistic rhetoric governs the enter-prise, even when it is being most speculative. To quote the HBD's"Preface":

Because the articles represent great care in reaching conclusions onlywhere the evidence will support such conclusions, much of what wasonce considered certain will be shown to rest on the smallest founda-tions of factual knowledge, while other things about which the readermay have been in confusion will be shown to have enough evidence toclear up the difficulties. Scholarship is an adventure in learning, inwhich new acts constantly open up new horizons of information, and thepages of this Dictionary reflect that adventure. (Achtemeienxx, em pha-sis added).Such a rhetoric would be sheerly impossible in our Dictionary of Religion.First of all, because there is no delimited co rpus. It is our particulargroup of editors who create a canonone that is responsive and respon-sible to no other community than the academyby their decisions onwhat to include and exclude. For example, in the assign men ts for theHarper's Dictionary of Religion, the largest number of entries (no surprise)refer to Christianity, but "new religions" will provide the second largestnum ber. Wh ile one might argue (unsuccessfully, 1 believe) that Christi-anity functions in a manner similar to a natural taxon, 'new religion' isclearly an artificial class, who lly the creation of the acad emy . Second ly,because there is no empirical corpus, connections are not 'at hand.'
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Journal of the American Academy of ReligionTerms do not 'cluster' in documentary, geographical or historical space.There are no 'given' metonymic or syntagmatic relations. Rather, con-nection s will have to be forged by the scholars' work. Terms can b erelated only in intellectual space. Their relations will be metaph oric a ndparadigm atic. Hence, there can be no concordance-like citation of tex-tual loci to supply co ntextual m eaning. Rather, each and every item willhave to be supplied with a cross-reference to an appropriate genericterm developed within the academic study of religion, which will serveas the sole locus for their conjunction. Thirdly, this means that the Dic-tionary of Religion will have to break with the archaic (though still puz-zlingly prevalent) notion that words name things. As the ph ilosophicaldebate over definitions has taught us, words refer to other words, and itis this relationship that our Dictionary will have to explore and evaluate.Finally, in a Dictionary that cannot, by its nature, celebrate "new hori-zons of information," the vistas it offers its readers must be theunfolding of questions of interpretation. W e must invite them, in BillGreen's precise formulation, to "use their intellects and imaginations toengage with previously unconsidered peoples, texts, behaviors, exper-iences and ideas. . .[and] to confront the previously unconsidered intheir own assumptions and in themselves" concerning religion(Green:278).

At stake is a view of the academic enterprise that challenges positiv-istic notio ns of authority and facticity, a view that sees scholars as partic -ipating endlessly in "negotiatory or transaction al" processes. From thisperspective, a professional society, such as ours, is as much, if not m ore,a "forum" for negotiating and renegotiating constructions of significanceas it is a means of transmitting "new information" (Bruner: 122-23).W hat we share are the intellectual problems attendant o n such a n enter-prise. In Richard Rorty's terminology, we have chosen "solidarity," th eparticipation in an o ngoing "conversation" and debate, over "Enlighten-ment" ideals of "objectivity" and agreement (Rorty).1 could contin ue in this vein and persist in using the pro posed Dic-

tionary as an emblem for our endeavor. I could, for example, suggest, asa thought experiment, constructing our Annual Meeting's Program Bookin a manner analogous to the Dictionary. That is to say, alongside ofmaintaining the fiction, expressed by the majority of our organizationalunits, that our collective work is "naturally"1 divided by geographic

'See the AAR's mission statement as contained in the Program Book for the 1968 Annual Meeting(5): "It is the aim of the Academy to function as a meeting place wh ere the study of religion in itsbroadest dimen sion m ay be fostered. The establishment of permanent Sections of the Academy,
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Smith: Connectionsareas, chronological periods or religious traditions, we might attempt asimilar system of cross-references for each presentation, making it possi-ble to read the program both serially and horizontally. To take up onlyone to pos that it is my lot to be engaged with at this meetin g: Sacrifice,Religion and Violence. A conservative count sho ws that som e thirty-twopap ers in twenty-three sections directly address im portan t aspects of thistopic. Thirteen of them are clustered in four sections, three of whichhave the misfortune to be scheduled to meet at the same time later thisafternoon. Such a retrospective cross-referencing is one way of tracingconnections as well as fulfilling the intentions of the founders of theAAR, who, believing that "specialists in religion particularly requirebrea dth " (Beck, et al.:200; Holbrook: 103-4) argued th at the n ew Acad-emy "must establish generalizing as well as specializing resources"(anon . 1965:4). Or, I could turn to the results of an informal analysis ofthe programs of the past ten Annual Meetings and of the contents ofJAAR for the same period in an attempt to expose the set of tacit under-standings which inform, but are rarely the objects of, our corporate dis-course about religion. W e seem, as a group, increasingly disinterestedin talk of "religion in essence and manifestation," preferring, rather, tosee religion as something deeply embedded in human culture, historyand social formation. Wh ile notions of transcen dence hov er in thebackground, much of our speech appears to intend to claim that there isa religious 'aspect,' 'approach,' 'perspective,' or 'dimension' to somesubject or area of human experience and expression which has non-religious dimension s as well. Eschewing past bold talk of the sui generis,the 'religious' most frequently appears to be conceived as a sort of 'extra-plus ' (the "most integrative" is quite comm on), but we have no apparentinterest in defining 'religion.' Indeed, if presse d, we seem to prefer thenotion that it is indefinable. We have, increasingly, taken no te of the'linguistic turn,' but have used it more to support a highly generalizednotion of homo symbolicus rather than any hard-edged structuralist orsemiotic theory. W hile we are persistently concerned with th e ethics ofintercultural translation, we have no discemable concern with the theoryof translation. All of this is congruent with two deeply held p ositions:the one, a strong commitment to particularity, a sense of responsibilityto the specificity and integrity of our diverse objects of study; the other, a

devoted to specific fields, disciplines or subjects within the study of religion [is intended] tostrengthen the Academ y's role as such a meeting place. |!) Chairmen of the S ections. . provideleadership for groups naturally taking shape within the Academy along disciplinary. . .lines."(emphasis added)
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strong reluctance to engage with theory. Both of these positions have ledto a surprising lack of interest, given our disciplinary history, in thecomparative enterprise. Thu s, in our several sections, we frequently jux-tapose materials but almost never explicitly compare them. Our disin-clination towards theory, however, has not led us to embrace moreempirical pu rsuits. Economics of religion, survey research, and the like,have been cheerfully abandoned to the Society for the Scientific Study ofReligion. W hile statistically we are still focused on the W est, it is oftenwithout an articulated claim of privilege; rather, a common-sense pos-ture of respect for pluralism prev ails. Of late, the question of the rela-tionship or priority of the insider and outsider has been muchdiscussedbut, this has neither sundered the field nor led to major revi-sionary projects as it has , for exam ple, in anthrop ology . Favored figurescome and go. Tillich remains the unacknowledged theoretician of ourentire enterprise. Durkheim ha s become interesting, but not W eber andnever Marx. Geertz still looms large, but n ot Levi-Strauss, and n o longerTurn er or Mary Douglas. In general, literary criticism has emerged asthe most interesting conversation partner, replacing symbolic anthropol-ogy and strands of continental philosophy. . . .1 could go on and on, andhope to gain your assent to the correspondence of my ethnography;however, it is time to pause in order to revisit and revision Jim Wig-gins's original question in a way that will focus less on the matter ofreligion and more on the nature of the academy.

Given what has already been said, it must be asked whether thequestion of unity and coherence is an appropriate one to ask of a profes-sional society that participates (regardless of the actual location of indi-vidual members) fully in the ethos of the modern research university,conceived as a sphere of contestation with an uncertain center andblurred boundaries, which has available to it, not processes of proof,but, rather, rhetorics of persuasion, and to which the notion of someclarifying Penteco st can app ear only as a nostalgic fantasy? Is not thedrive to unity more appropriate (to invoke our professional shorthand ofbi-locality once again) to the seminary and its agendum than to the uni-versity? Or, to put the q uestion ano ther way, while our subject matter,religion, is often characterized by imperialistic impulses towards total-ism, determinism, integration and unification, need the study of religionmirror its subject matter in these respects?

There are other, more general, reasons for raising the question of theappropriateness of impulses towards unity. The nineteenth centurymodels of the research university (under which we still largely operate)owe much to the sort of organizational thinking epitomized in Adam
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SmitkConnectionsSm ith's striking image of the pin factory: the notio n of a num ber ofspecialists, each contributing her or his separate (and often idiosyn-cratic) labor to form a single knowledge product as it moves down theuniversity's assembly line. This image was reinforced by a widelyshared understanding of 'the ways things are' which Alvin Toffler haswittily labeled "indust-reality," w hich extended the notio n of the factoryto the cosmos, the conviction that:The universe is an assembled reality, made of discrete parts put togetherin an assemblage. Matter can only be understood in terms of motioni.e., movement through space. Events occur in a linear succession, aparade of events moving down the [assembly] line of time. (Toffler: 113).While Marx might argue (correctly) that the result of the industrialmodel was "alienation," Durkheim, himself a major theoretician for theFrench educational system, asserted the faith of the tum-of-the centuryacademy that the inevitable interdependence of specialized laborresulted in "organic solidarity." Be this as it may, in ou r c ontempo rarysituation, decentralization and service functions, not the assembly line,are the regnant models of production. The nineteen th century image ofthe university as a knowledge factory, as a "smokestack industry,"would seem to doom it to be placed in the "rust belt" along with other,similar, anachronisms.

What appears to have emerged, in both industry and the academy aswell as in the civic realm, are shifting congeries of special interest orsingle issue groups where, in contradistinction to the older linear andhierarchical model, everyone contributes to the particular task at handand where the group will probably not outlast the task, thereby makingits activities more closely akin to play than to wor k. In unive rsitiesacross the country, the traditional, vertical departmental organization isbeing permeated by cross-cutting institutes, workshops and the like.Individual scholars, typically, find their most intellectually profitableassociations to be no longer within the fixed space of their campus, butrather in the highly mobile world of professional meetings and confer-ences, and they have transferred their loyalties accordingly, without,however, dismantling the departmental structure (which remains a con-venience for receiving mail). Extending the image of Jo hn Higham, theacademy looks like "a house in which the inhabitants are leaning out ofthe many open windows gaily chatting with the neighbors, while thedoors between the rooms stay closed" (Higham: 112).

Within the AAR, during the past decade, a parallel process has beenat work. The sometimes bewildering variety of "gr ou ps, " "se mi nars ,"and "consultations" often appear to generate more energy and attract
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more interest than the traditional (and industrial) organization by "sec-tions." Indeed, the latter, with the introduction of "themes," has begunto imitate the focused and ad hoc character of the former.2If, in an effort to deparochialize ourselves (itself, one of the leadingimpulses of the contemporary academy), we glance beyond our bordersto other professional meetings within the human sciences, we will

swiftly discern that their condition is analogous to ours. We willobserve the presence of continued debate over a relatively few issues, allof which we share: questions of objectivity/subjectivity/advocacy, andcontroversies concerning the interpretative privilege of theoutside/insider. Indeed, two important histories of professional socie-ties, one in history, the other in social sciences, have been writtenaround these themes (Novick; Fumer). This argument on what is prob-lematic leads one to suspect that these are intellectual issues inherent inthe academic enterprise itself and not indigenous to any particular fieldor subject matter.On the other hand, observation of other professional societies andmeetings will show that fragmentation and centrifugal processes areequally ubiquitous.Item: The American Institute of Biological Sciences is, in fact, aholding company for more than forty distinct research societies thatnever jointly meet.Item: The editor of a journal in biology says he expects to under-stand about fifty percent of the articles he publishes, and, he adds,'1 work harder at that task than most of my colleagues.' The editor of achemistry journal [says he) understands fifty to eighty percent of the arti-cles he chooses to publish, but he 'gets' hardly anything in most of theneighboring chemistry journals. (Booth:2)

The unseemly sprawl of the Modern Language Association is notorious,and those of us in religious studies must feel a wry 'shock of recognition'when we hear statements such as these from academic historians:History is the maverick among disciplines, the misfit, the bull in thechina shop . Since everything has a history and history, potentially atleast, deals with everything that ever happened in human society, thehistorian is a kind of licensed rustler who wanders at will across hisscholarly neighbors' fields, poaching their stock and purloining theircrops and breaking down their hedges. In a very real sense, it is not adiscipline at all. (Perkins:17-18)

^Compare the description of meetings of the American Historical Association in Novick (580, n.8).
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Smith: Connections

or :The bad news [in the 80's] was that the American historical professionwas fragmented beyond any hope of unification. The good new s wasthat the fragments w ere doing very well indeed. New fields were beingexplored in innovative ways; historical works of considerable originalityand even brilliance appeared every year. Among subco mm ittees of his-torians there were h igher levels of fruitful interaction and higher criticalstandards than at any time in the past. . . .At the level of everyday prac-tice, things had never been better. One thing the American historicalcommunity could not do was sustain a disciplinewide discussion on themeaning of the historical venture as a whole. . . .Discourse across thediscip line ha d effectively collaps ed. (Novick:5 92)I do not rehearse these anecdotes (which are but a few from a collec-tion wh ose na m e is Legion) in order to comfort us: "Se e. . . they can't

figure themselv es out eithe r." Rather, I inten d them b y way of a chal-lenge. For, desp ite the chaos of particula r clarities in th e wider wo rld ofprofessional associations, there ar e connect ions . I have spent some t imesince being asked to make this presentat ion reading through the pro-ceedings of various learned societ ies and speaking with a number oftheir officers. W ha t has eme rged is at least three areas of co m m on con -cern and discourse which give them a funct ional (al though surely not asubstant ive) unity . Moreover, each of these three areas conne ct theinsular work of a particular association with a different, wider audience.

The first of these is theory. Despi te our apparent assent to the propo-sition enunciated in one of Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales, "Theory ki l ledhim dead," most learned societ ies have found sustained publ ic at tent ionto ma tters of theory to be both nece ssary and enliv enin g. To the degreethat theory is a second-order discourse, i t provides us wi th the poss ibi l -ity of meta-languages which give grounds for the attempt to negotiateacross fragmentation in language intelligible to both ourselves and toother intellectual fields of inquiry, thus strengthening internal coherenceas wel l as connect ions to the wider academy.It is not the possibili ty of unity that I wa nt to stress toda y, but rathe rthe relat ionship of theory to argum ent and contes tat ion. A phi lo sop herof science writes:

In the absence of a paradigm, or some candidate for paradigm, all of thefacts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given scienceare likely to seem equally relevant. . . .In the absence of a reason forseeking some particular form of more recondite information, early factgathering is restricted to the wealth of data that lie ready tohand. . . .This is the situation that creates the schools characteristic of
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10 Journal of the American Academy of Religionthe early stage of a science's development. No natural history can beinterpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwinedtheoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluationand criticism. [Lacking an internal paradigm], it must be externally sup-plied, perhaps by a current metaphysic, by another science, or by per-sonal or historical accident. (Kuhn: 15-17)

While a leading student of the human sciences observes:Many of the problems of the social sciences are due to the lack of effec-tive 'disputatious' communities of scholars, who challenge each other'sspecific truth claims with cross-validation and critical argument. Toomany schools of thought are engaged in producing 'illustrations' ratherthan evidence for assertions of descriptive facts and theoretical interpre-tations. (Fiske and Schweder:9)That is to say, the most important function of theory for an academysuch as ours is to force an answer to that most blunt of all questions:"So what?" Too m uch of what we do (especially in the format of ourmeetings) may be placed somewhere between show-and-tell and para-phrase. Having persuade d ourselves that, whatever else it is, religion isultimately important (or, important because it is ultimate), we illicitlyuse that claim to justify anything we hap pen to study as being self-evi-dently significant. But significance is not a matter of peaco ck-like self-display, nor is it guaranteed by something merely being "the re." The-ory, and its attendant operations (such as comparison) are disciplinedexaggerations in the service of knowledge. They provide both thegrounds and the means by which we re-vision phenomena as ou r data,as significant in that they address our theoretical problems. Contestationarises over competing claims to comprehend the same data, an argumentthat, therefore, can never be settled at the level of data. The para taxis ofillustrations, of reports on whatever happens to be at hand"andthen. . . ." "an d then. . . ."w ithout ever forcing confrontation thatcharacterizes so many of our sections results in a comity approp riate to aclub, but incongruous within an academy.

It is not that we lack theoretical resou rces. Ou r AAR colleagues intheology and biblical studies have demonstrated that disciplined argu-ments between rival constructions of stipulated, shared data is possibleand desirable. Stunnin g, as well as stunning ly different, theoreticalworks continue to be produced by individual members of the AARworks such as Wayne Proudfoot's Religious Experience (1985), J. SamuelPreus's Explaining Religion (1987), Hans Penner's Impasse and Resolution:A Critique of the Study ofReligion (1989), and Peter Homan's The Ability toMourn (1989)but they are not produced out of the Academy, nor, save
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SmitkConnections 11for the occasional award or session, have they received sustained criticalattention within the Academy.

The second element is education. Attention to discourse on educa-tion, to questions of theory, method and practice is a central matter ofpersistent concern in most professional associations. In some, pres iden-tial address es routinely focus on some aspect of educ tion. Many learnedsocieties, in both the natural and the human sciences, have, alongside oftheir research journal, a second journal or newsletter wholly devoted toteaching. Committees and commissions on educational affairs abound,and they have frequently been the source of proposals and the site ofcontroversies that have engaged the attention and energy of the entireprofession. For many associations, because their subject matter is taughtin secondary, collegiate and graduate schooling, there is a wide range totheir concerns, from grade school textbooks to advanced certification.

I am sensible of a considerable irony in commending this topic toyou. After all, unique am ong learned society publicatio ns, JAAR is notclassified by the Library of Congress along with other general publica-tions in its field. JAAR is not to be found in "BL" alongside otherbroadly based journals in religious studies, but rather u nde r the classifi-cation, "LC 35 1, " which denotes, "Education/ Christian Education/Education Under Church Control" (Library of Congress 1975:11;Library of Congress 1984:138). This is in deference to our org aniza-tional history. In the past, our ancestor, the Natio nal Association ofBible Instructors, distinguished itself from the Society of Biblical Litera-ture and Exegesis on the grounds that the:

SBL has for its primary object technical and creative research. . . .NABIhas a mission of its own, to it fall matters relating to pedagogy andeducation. It deals with methods and contents of courses of study, andthe application of religion to character building. (Peritz:29)When the Association was reconfigured as the AAR, interest in the Biblewas maintained, the priority of research was newly affirmed (see Hol-brook), while pedagogy was largely left behind.

It has been good to see, in recent years, a number of harbing ers of itsreturn . The Education Com mittee has been revitalized. The Section onthe Academic Study of Religion is more focused. JAAR has published onpedagogy and religious studies in secondary schools. The inauguralissue of the Critical Review of Books in Religion concentrated on textbookreview. The AAR is participating, as one of a dozen le arned societies, inthe Association of American Colleges' inquiry into "study in depth."And, most exciting of all, since our Boston meeting three years ago,
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12 Journal of the American Academy of Religionthere has been increased attention to the study of religion in the publicschools, culminating in this year's general session.

Beyond the claims of professional responsibility, educational dis-course and debate, when moved to the center of a professional society'sconcerns, is a prime mode of fashioning conn ections. W hile the rule ofproliferation seems to govern the research activities and intellectualinterests of any group of scholars (an obedience, in even the mostaggressively secular field, to. the first c om man dme nt in the HebrewBible, "Be fruitful and mu ltiply"), the rule of parsimony remains regnantwith regard to curricula. Limited by rigid temporal co nstraints, in thisarea our expertise is best exhibited in the making of hard choices, in thecontinual (and sometimes fierce) debates over the "knowledge mostworth h avi ng ." As it join s these issues collectively, a field begin s todefine its core and forge its cano n. W ithin religious studies, there is noother appropriate public forum for this process than the AAR.

The third element is public discourse, where the academic society,acting, properly, as a special interest group, brings its particularresources and viewpoints to bear on matters of public policy and con-cern within the wider civic realm. This is comm onplace in other p rofes-sional associations, and I applaud Jim Wiggins's initiative, this summer,in circulating to the membership a letter concerning the Helms' amend-ment; Jorunn Buckley's organization of a general session, during thismeeting, on Rushdie; and Martin Marty's continued efforts better torelate the AAR to the Press. But, we need to do more, and we need todo it as a corporate body.

It is fantastic to me that our field, which might be said to 'own' thequestion of canon formation, and which has been deeply involved inteaching and studying both the western classics and the cultural cre-ations of 'other' folk for longer than any other field within the contem-porary academy, should have conceded, by its conspicuous silence, anyrole as an informing agent concerning this cluster of controversial issuesto adjacent professional societies.It is distressing to me that this year we have agonized as a nationover questions of desecration, sacrilege and blasphemy (in literature, inart, and with respect to public symbols such as the flag) without thebenefit of substantial input from the one field of study professionallycharged with expertise in such matters.It is outrageous to me that, as an Academy of Religion, we have b eensilent as the U.S. Supreme Court continues to apply an inadequate andoutmoded eighteenth century philosophe 's definition of religion as coer-cive dogma to recklessly categorize this or that symbol or activity as
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Smith:Connections 13being 'religious' or 'secular.' However, it is clear that before we talk toand with the public, we need* at our Annual Meetings, to practicespeaking and arguing with each other about such matters, in a way that,shunning univocality, aims, nevertheless, at displaying and clarifyinginformed choices.I conclude this attempt to sketch a possible view of our connectionswith the hope (not limited to the surreal location of this year's conven-tion) that our Annual Meetings continue as well to express (carnival-like) not only the seriousness of our enterprise but also the "collectiveeffervescence" of our engaging it together, that we demonstrate, again, inthe wonderful phrase of Peter Homans (writing on Freud and Weber)that religion can be "an object for the enjoyment of theoretical curiosity"(Homans:339).

REFERENCESAchtemeier, P.J.1985

Anonymous1965Anonymous1968

Beck, D., et al.1964Booth, W.1988Bruner, J.1986Burke, J.1978

Fiske, D.W., andR.A. Schweder1988

Harper's Bible Dictionary. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

"Editorial Preface." Journal ofBible and Religion 33:3-4.

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Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralism and Subjectivism.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Peritz, I.J. "The National Association of Bible Instructors and the1933 Society of Biblical Literature an d Exeg esis." Journal ofBible an d Religion 12:29.Perkin, H. "The Historical Perspec tive." In Perspectives on Higher1984 Education: Eight Disciplinary and Comp arative Views,pages 17-55. Ed. by B.R. Clark. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.
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SmitkConnections 15Quimby, C.W. "The W ord of God." Journal of Bible an d Religion 1.1:1-1933 6.

Rorty, R. "Solidarity or Objectivity." In Post-Analytic Philosophy,1985 pages 3-19. Ed. by J. Rajchman a nd C. W est. NewYork: Columbia University Press.Toffler, A. The Third Wave. New York: Morrow.1980

A bin qd on PresjIlluminating the relationship between history and theology

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Connections (J Z Smith)