Open AccessOn Knowing Faith
Author(s) -
Joel Robbins
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
religion and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.222
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 2150-9301
pISSN - 2150-9298
DOI - 10.3167/arrs.2019.100103
Subject(s) - ignorance , rappaport , faith , theme (computing) , humanity , sociology , epistemology , politics , certainty , philosophy , religious studies , law , political science , theology , computer science , operating system
I was very honored by the invitation to deliver the 2019 Rappaport Lecture, which forms the basis of this article. The theme of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion’s conference for which it was written, “The Politics of Religious Knowledge and Ignorance,” is one that is very close to the heart of Roy Rappaport’s work. After all, the foundation of his magisterial theory of the role of ritual in the development of humanity is our species’ radical inability, once language allowed expression to take on a life of its own, to know whether others are lying to us or not, and ritual’s ability to address the problem of radical social ignorance that this incapacity sets before us by creating certainty about who people are and what commitments they have taken on (Rappaport 1999). For Rappaport, ritual and religion were both from the start fundamentally entangled with issues of knowledge and ignorance.