The Ordeal of Incongruity

Abstract

By contrasting his own personal experience dancing with Smith’s preference for reading, the author engages a complex and far-reaching discussion of the role and importance of experience both in religious subjects studied and in the lives of the scholars. From a biologically and philosophically based theory of experience, the chapter examines the importance of repetition, feeling kinds of knowing, and gesture, among other aspects of being bodied, to posit that religion and also the study of religion are skills honed through long repetitive experience. The chapter also engages the implications that sensory-rich religious experience is transduced into written description that is often the only access scholars have to their subjects of study. Countering the common understanding that Smith is reluctant to value experience, the chapter shows that the core role of incongruity and difference Smith attributes to religion and its study amounts to, in his own terms, an ordeal or determining experience.