Imagine No Religion ─ How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities

What do we fail to see when we force other, earlier cultures into the Procrustean bed of concepts that organize our contemporary world? In Imagine No Religion, Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin map the myriad meanings of the Latin and Greek words religio and threskeia, frequently and reductively mistranslated as "religion," in order to explore the manifold nuances of their uses within ancient Roman and Greek societies. In doing so, they reveal how we can conceptualize anew and speak of these cultures without invoking the anachronistic concept of religion. From Plautus to Tertullian, Herodotus to Josephus,Imagine No Religion illuminates cultural complexities otherwise obscured by our modern-day categories.

Carlin A. Barton is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster andRoman Honor: The Fire in the Bones.

Daniel Boyarin is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written and edited many books, including most recently, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ.