To many investigators, the phenomenon of religion resembles a petri dish brimming with exotic specimens and puzzling data. Viewed under the microscope, it teems with strange cultures. Even to a trained eye, the study of religion – its structure, persistence, and meaning – poses acute interpretative challenges. Until recently, students of religion usually regarded their work as a matter of uncovering beliefs and worldviews that issue in religious behavior. Interpretation followed representationalist models, of one kind or another, that presumed realist correspondences between language and reality. Currently, however, both the category of “belief” and the act of “interpretation” are receiving critical attention by scholars in such areas as anthropology of religion, ritual studies, cognitive psychology, semantics, post-analytic philosophy, history of religions, and philosophy of religion. Radical Interpretation in Religion consists of original chapters by ten prominent authors in these fields who propose a variety of new ways of interpreting believers.

As a collection, these studies focus primarily on religion as a form of linguistic behavior. In Part I, Terry Godlove, Jeffrey Stout, Richard Rorty, and Wayne Proudfoot assess the pragmatics of radical interpretation in religion in light of recent developments in Anglo-American philosophy of language. The chapters in Part II by Catherine Bell, Thomas Lawson, and Maurice Bloch consider related questions of belief and interpretation in the context of cultural variations from Madagascar to China and experimental research from cognitive science.