News

Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Review Symposium

• “Bruce Lincoln’s Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Review Symposium”

  Russell T. McCutcheon, Distinguished University Research Professor, University of Alabama Department of Religious Studies

  The following set of essays comprises an invited review symposium of Bruce Lincoln’s recent book, Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and His Protégé’s Unsolved Murder (2024). The overview article describes the book’s argument and situates it within the broader implications for the study of religion. Each of the four review essays, authored by an international group of scholars, examine his handling of the data and the implications for how we might now frame both the history of the field and its possible future. Lincoln himself provides a response, engaging the reviewers’ observations and reflecting on the challenges and commitments that prompted the book. All of this is offered in light of Lincoln’s analysis not only of Mircea Eliade’s early political past and possibly his undisclosed lifelong commitments but also their ramifications for those around him.

• “Mircea Eliade: The Alchemist”

  Daniel Dubuisson, Centre national de la recherche scientifique

   

• “Myth as Reality: Mircea Eliade and His Cult Movement”

  Wim Hofstee, Universiteit Leiden

   

• “Should Eliade Be Canceled? A Response to Bruce Lincoln’s Secrets, Lies, and Consequences”

  Adele Reinhartz, University of Ottawa and University of the Free State

   

• “The History of Religions and Its Character(s)”

  Christian Wedemeyer, Associate Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School

   

• “Response”

  Bruce Lincoln, Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School