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Imagining ReligionFROM BABYLON TO JONESTOWNJONATHAN Z. SMITH, 1982&#160;With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological.Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them.(Text by the author)&#160;Contents:AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism2. In Comparison a Magic Dwells3. Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon4. The Bare Facts of Ritual5. The Unknown God: Myth in History6. A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams7. The Devil in Mr. JonesAppendixesNotesIndex