William E. Arnal
Trained as a scholar of Christian origins and specializing in the study of "Q"--which stands for the German word for source or origin, Quelle, used to name a source document comprised of sayings of Jesus that scholars theorize must have existed in the earliest years of the social movement that comes to be known as Christianity--William Arnal's interest in Marxist social theory has led him to write considerably further afield than many scholars who work on early Christianity. Arnal carried out his doctoral work at the University of Toronto, under the direction of John Kloppenborg, the internationally noted Q specialist, earning his Ph.D. in 1997, with his dissertation winning the Governor General's Gold Medal. He is widely published in the field's leading periodicals and has held academic appointments at New York University, the University of Manitoba, and is currently Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. Arnal has served as Vice-President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) and as the English-language editor for Canada's primary academic journal in the field, Studies in Religion.
Major Works
Whose Historical Jesus? (1997; co-edited with Michel Desjardins)
"Definition." Guide to the Study of Religion (2000)
"The Segregation of Social Desire: 'Religion' and Disney World," Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 69/1 (2001): 1-19.
Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of
Q (2001)
The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism, and the Construction
of Contemporary Identity (2005)
Quotation
"[O]ur definitions of religion, especially insofar as they assume
a privatized and cognitive character behind religion (as in religious
belief), simply reflect (and assume as normative) the West's distinctive
historical feature of the secularized state. Religion, precisely, is not
social, not coercive, is individual, is belief-oriented and so on, because
in our day and age there are certain apparently free-standing cultural
institutions, such as the Church, which are excluded from the political
state. Thus, Asad
notes, it is no coincidence that it is the period after the 'Wars of Religion'
in the seventeenth century that saw the first universalist definitions
of religion; and those definitions of 'Natural
Religion,' of course, stressed the propositional--as opposed to political
or institutional--character of religion as a function of their historical
context.... The concept of religion is a way of demarcating a certain
socio-political reality that is only problematized with the advent of
modernity in which the state at least claims to eschew culture per
se"
- from William Arnal, "Definition," Guide to the Study of
Religion (2000)
Select Web Resources on Arnal
University
of Regina's faculty web page for William Arnal
An
article from the University of Regina's newspaper on William Arnal
For resources on the field of Christian Origins, visit Burton
Mack's page on this site.