Words Hurt
Discourse and Violence in the History of Religion
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Investigates how discourse spills from language to action, generating, obfuscating, and perpetuating violence while also offering the words, principles, and practices that may interrupt it.
We are continually catching up with and being caught by words, especially words that hurt. These collected essays probe the interaction of violence and words across time, place, and circumstance. Often cited as the core source of violence, religion’s capacity for coordinating ideas, symbols, and groups has made it a potent force in the production and deflection of violence. Yet the production of the category “religion” has also contributed to violence; employed to surveille and subjugate targeted populations, “religion” enabled and conveyed colonial domination on a global scale. The claim that religion causes violence has therefore missed a fundamental insight: as a word, “religion” also acts in and on the world. Contributors thus ask: How does persecution become weaponized in and through language? Whose stories are told and who is allowed to speak them? And how do language, symbols, art, activism, and performance find ways to speak back, push back, and offer critique? Theorizing, historicizing, and addressing the violence of words and words of violence, “religion” emerges as critical theory and embodies the very practice of critique.
Elizabeth A. Castelli is Professor of Religion at Barnard College (Columbia University). Her publications include Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Westminster/John Knox Press 1991), Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (Columbia University Press 2004), as well as an English translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s San Paolo, the never-produced script for a film about St. Paul (Verso Books 2014).
Jennifer W. Knust (Edited By)
Jennifer Knust is Professor of Religious Studies, Duke University. She is the author of To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (with Tommy Wasserman, 2018), Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire (2011) and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (2005).
Todd S. Berzon (Edited By)
Todd S. Berzon is Peter M. Small Associate Professor of Religion, Bowdoin College. He is the author of Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (2016) and the forthcoming Holy Tongues: Linguistic Presence in the Religious World of Late Antiquity (2027).
