Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion

by Charles H. Long

Significations is a criticism of several major approaches (phenomenological, historical, theological) to the study of religion in the United States, in which the author attempts (1) a reevaluation of some of the basic issues forming the study of religion in America, (2) an outline of a hermeneutics of conquest and colonialism generated during the formation of the social and symbolic order called the "New World," and (3) a critique of the categories of civil religion, innocence, and theology from the perspective of the black experience and the experience of colonized peoples.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction

246 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1991

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

despite frequently running into the unapproachability of structuralist and phenomenological language, I found Long’s text powerful and eloquent. He both works towards new frameworks (signs, symbols, images, methods) for the study of religion and assesses the state of theology in the 1960s and 1970s. also hugely helpful for hermeneutical thinking, especially with respect to the necessity (unavoidable nature of) opacity and misinterpretation.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa Nelly, this book covers a lot of ground. The venerable black historian Charles H. Long speaks of signification, the process of rhetorical misdirection, in which people can hide or disguise or alter the world to match their own biases. Essentially, Long things that pro-Western assumptions have completely colored the way historians of religion look at religious practices around the world. Long wants a postcolonial understanding of religion, where we no longer assume that all religions have to match or contain Christianity's components. But Long has another goal. He broadly supports a social science approach to religion, gathering empirical evidence and such. Yet even as he abandons old notions of Christian and European theology, Long recounts the long and varied history of religious scholars like Mircea Eliade and Rudolph Otto, who felt there was some sort of sacred energy out there, to which humans respond. Long may not want the old imperialist and Christian biases in the study of religion, but like Eliade and Otto he does think there is something mysterious out there. He wants a deeper sense of reality to come through in secular studies of religion. Now, I have NO IDEA what such a study of religion would look like. I don't know how you can be secular and study observable forms, and simultaneously say there is some mystic energy or mysterium tremendum shining through the observable evidence. But it's an interesting idea. I guess Long reminds us that the world is a strange and mysterious place, perhaps never more apparent than in regard to faith.

He also includes some neat essays on African American religion that test out these ideas.

[Roger Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite any ways this book may seem dated, it is a classic and superbly written. It remains insightful and cogent 30 years after publication.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea of "opaque" is central to this text. Opacity blocks light. Learning to read in opacity allows for signs and symbols to take on meanings.