After Essentialism

By recovering a canon of continental philosophy forgotten by religious studies, After Essentialism resuscitates a key resource for addressing the challenges that face the field today.

Phenomenology was once the dominant philosophical methodology for studying religion. Early giants like Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade sought to identify both the individual experiences of religious believers and commonalities across world religions. Such an approach, however, was criticized and dismissed for ignoring the historical and social contexts that also exerted influence on religious belief and practice. But by discarding phenomenology of religion, the contemporary academy made a costly mistake: it also dismissed philosophical phenomenology.

In After Essentialism, Joshua Lupo resuscitates this neglected philosophical lineage, beginning with the insights of Edmund Husserl. He then untangles the relationship between classical philosophical phenomenology and phenomenology of religion, focusing especially on Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Mircea Eliade. Finally, he turns to Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology as a resource for grounding the practice of critique that is central to humanistic inquiry.

After Essentialism thereby offers a critical phenomenology that centers the first-person perspective for studying religion while simultaneously confronting the broader contexts of systemic issues, such as racism and sexism, that have effects on religious belief and practice at the individual and communal levels.