Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion

Abstract

At the end of a compelling account of his two-year sojourn among snake-handling Christians in southern Appalachia, Dennis Covington, a Georgia-based reporter for the New York Times, describes the night he realized that he could not join the handlers, whom he had come to love and respect, in their faith. I want to borrow this instance of one man’s discovery of radical religious otherness—a discovery that led him to turn away in sorrow and disappointment from his friends—as an opening onto the question of what a renewed emphasis on moral inquiry might mean for the academic study of religion.