Reading J. Z. Smith: Interviews and Essay ed. by Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (review)

Reading J. Z. Smith is a short collection of non-chronologically arranged, previously published interviews with Jonathan Z. Smith, the preeminent and idiosyncratic historian of religion who studied at Yale and later taught at Dartmouth, University of California Santa Barbara, and finally at the University of Chicago. The book also includes one previously unpublished, transcribed lecture that offers Smith's retrospective of his career in academia. This volume represents a preliminary attempt at assembling definitive autobiographical snapshots of the controversial scholar in the wake of his 2017 death. Perhaps a longer biography is forthcoming.

As is often the case with a volume compiled of interviews, there is quite a bit of repetition from one selection to the next. The same anecdotes get told, retold, retooled a bit, and told again. Smith's own account of how he became interested in studying religion appears with some regularity across the text. Further, his being the first religious studies student at Yale, the Supreme Court's decision in the 1960s about teaching religion in government-funded schools, his favorite definition of religion, and some other classroom antics appear again and again. While endearing on one level, such repetition in a slim volume distorts Smith's disestablishmentarian character. In short, he comes across as a rather conservative older gentleman who repeats the same stories. This is unfortunate, given the guru-like aura Braun and McCutcheon build in the Introduction: "We were lucky enough to get to know him in person—mostly through conferences, where he would sit, listening intently to a presentation, with his hands and head atop that tree limb of a cane that he used" (xi).

For those new to Smith's oeuvre, this volume tantalizingly touches on some of the major features of his approach, even if they are sometimes obscured by the interview genre and biographical features. Further, it is easy to see why the editors chose interviews: Smith is eminently quotable, since he often speaks in outrageous statements with near koan-like qualities, e.g., "There has never been except in a philosopher's fantasy, a monotheistic religion" (32); "Religions are alike when they're translated into English" (34); "If you want to falsify a translation, find the word religion in any other language" (37); and, "There's no natural similarity among religions" (38). He can be down-to-earth as well, stating simply that he likes to teach about religion because "everybody has an opinion about it" (40). But he quickly raises the bar to a near impossible level: "Do not teach or discuss a figure unless you have read the total corpus of their work that is available to you" (119, fn).

But perhaps the two best takeaways from the text are Smith's views about the current lacunae in the study of religion and his keen observations about teaching. In regard to the first, he observes: "The great unstudied area of religion we don't study is education—how are they transmitted? It's not just mommy-to-baby; it's a whole apparatus they have" (23). And, "The whole non-textual, non-verbal world is a large area that has not been theorized very much yet. We still see pictures dropped from texts as if they were mere illustrations" (59). In terms of teaching, he argues that, "If you're going to teach college students you need to know as much about late adolescent development cognition as you know about your own field" (27). Concerning the relationship to teaching and scholarship, he boldly declares: "I have never published anything that has not been generated and tested in the classroom" (61). Such crucial insights into the field and its practice are invaluable for beginning and experienced scholars alike. Unfortunately, this text does not explore more of Smith's observations on what is missing in the field, but it does devote two chapters to his...