Today, we’re excited to introduce a brand-new series drawn from the interdisciplinary study of religion, helmed by series editors Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern, and acquired by editorial director for the humanities and social sciences, Alan Thomas.

Class 200 offers the most innovative works in the study of religion today. Resting on a generation of critical scholarship that reevaluated the central categories of the field, the series aims to surpass that good work by rebuilding the vocabulary of, and establishing new questions for, religious studies.

The series will publish authors who understand descriptions of religion to be always bound up in explanations for it. It will nurture authorial reflexivity, documentary intensity, and genealogical responsibility. The series presumes no inaugurating definition of religion other than what it is not: it is not reducible to demographics, doctrines, or cognitive mechanics. It is more than a discursive concept or cultural idiom. It is something that can be named only with a precise and poetic wrestling with the nature of its naming.

Class 200 seeks to renew the study of religion as a field of inquiry that is open in terms of disciplinary affiliation, relishes archival and ethnographic immersion, and is scrupulous in its use of categories. The series is not defined by topics but by certain shared fundamentals: rigor, an investment in language, an awareness of authority, and a strategy regarding the politics of truth claims in any archival or anthropological situation.

Class 200 takes its name from the Dewey Decimal System call number for religion.

BTW, I have completely faith (no pun intended) that Class 200 has excellent potential on Twitter and you should follow them @Class200. Here’s a teaser:

Contact the series editors here:

Kathryn Lofton
Department of Religious Studies
Yale University
Email: kathryn.lofton@yale.edu

John Lardas Modern
Department of Religious Studies
Franklin & Marshall College
Email: john.modern@fandm.edu

To read more about Class 200 and other series, click here.