Abstract
Valerie Hobbs’s An Introduction to Religious Language is the first introduction to analysis of religious language of its kind. The book is a comprehensive discussion of the ways in which language and religion interact, covering a range of different features of religious language and throughout a range of text types. The book is intended for use in the classroom and includes discussion questions and easy-to-understand, approachable examples that undergraduate students will be able to understand, but have a notable depth to them and will equally be useful for postgraduate students thinking about Language and Religion. The book comprises ten chapters.
Chapter 1 asks the question ‘Why religious language?’ setting out the rationale and aims of the book to help readers and researchers better understand the prevalence, meanings, and functions of religious language in the social world. Chapter 2 then addresses the question of what ‘religious language’ is and how the category is constructed and understood. To do this, the chapter introduces different definitions and understandings of religions. The challenges of describing the religious language are addressed in a discussion of the differences among ideological, religious, and sacred language, with Hobbs thoughtfully presenting the different ways one can think about and define language related to religion and religious experience.
In Chapter 3, the functions of religious language are covered, building on an analysis of an American billboard with the words ‘JesUSAves’, first asking the reader to think about not just the text but to create a ‘story’ to explain the meaning of the billboard. This process draws out the important connections between text and context, and between text producers and consumers and serves as a clear case study for how meaning is created. Chapter 4 then unpacks these points in more depth, the first of three ‘toolkit’ chapters, showing how contexts and text types can be related, for example, that one would expect to encounter specific text types in religious worship. The chapter argues that we are likely to see religious language paying an important role ‘moments of conflict and crisis’, suggesting that contexts and text types also need to be understood in temporal terms. Religious language occurs in specific places, in specific forms, at specific times, and needs to be understood in this specific context.
Chapter 5 discusses the topics of vocabulary, archaism, and parallelism, with an extended focus on corpus analysis as a tool to empirical identify explicitly religious language. The chapter then goes on to show how corpora can also be used to identify implicit religious language, with Hobbs referring to her own research showing that American Christian sermons about divorce focused much more on men and men’s actions, than on women: that is, the sermons showed a discourse of ‘men talking about men’. Chapter 6 then focuses on a key feature of religious language: metaphor. After a definition and a description of ‘religious metaphor’, the chapter focuses on intertextuality and how religious metaphor can be used within texts to refer back to sacred or other authoritative texts, including through direct quotes, paraphrase, reference, or parody, with examples taken from both texts and images.
Chapter 7 looks specifically at prayer, first differentiating between ‘upward’, ‘inward’, and ‘outward’ prayer, showing how the language of prayer reveals what people believe and what their desires are. Several prayers are presented and analysed, with reference back to some of the terminology that has been previously introduced in book, including metaphor, intertextuality, and archaism. Chapter 8 introduces the topic of religious language at the time of death, showing how the language about death regularly includes a reference to a ‘life well lived’. The chapter then refers to the discussion of religious language at times of crisis and conflict and shows how the phrase serves both axiomatic and social cohesion functions. Finally, Chapter 9 discusses the presence of religious language in other arenas: politics, sport, advertising, healthcare, and conversion. Hobbs shows examples of religious language in these different contexts, with clear examples of metaphor and intertextuality with religious texts in a variety of different ‘non-religious’ texts.
Chapter 10 provides a short summary of the book and suggests that closed definitions of religion limit researchers in considering the effects of religious language in day-to-day life. As Hobbs has shown in the book, religious language reveals beliefs, intentions, and ideologies that cannot be understood without specifically addressing them.
Hobbs’s book is well-written, accessible, interesting, and above all, essential contribution to the growing field of Language and Religion. Its clear and engaging style makes it particularly useful for researchers coming from both linguistic and theological backgrounds which is essential for the growth of the field. Readers from both backgrounds will feel at home in this book and Hobbs’s examples speak to a range of different situations in which students and researchers may be engaging with religious language.
While the book concludes with a call to action to see religious language more broadly, the religious language in the book is, most often, discussions of Christian, and specifically Western Christian language. This focus causes potential problems in how applicable the different models in the book are in other contexts. For example, the discussion of the orientations of prayer might be less useful in discussing prayer in Islam or Buddhism. Because the book works from general principles to examples, I often wondered if the same principles would apply to different texts. Statements like “What we pray reveals what we believe” (p. 114) feel too general and reductive to be useful starting places for analysis.
The book is an invitation to students and researchers to look more closely at religious language and to see religious language where people might have not traditionally looked. Hobbs’ book is an important work on the vanguard of the field of Language and Religion and a valuable addition to any personal or institutional library.