[Schaefer's] approach to reading affect theory through the lens of animality will enrich critical engagement with the concept of religion as a theoretical tool and as a word of power in the world.
Pamela Klassen
Syndicate
Religious Affects is an important book, rendering helpful therapy for some of the myopic methodological tendencies that can afflict ... Read morethe field of religious studies.
Jason N. Blum
Syndicate
Schaefer . . . is blazing a trail in religious studies.
Jonathan Benthall
Times Literary Supplement
Religious Affects offers a new way to use affect theory to understand religion that better accounts for its connections with politics, globalization, and power.
Staci Poston Conner
Affectsphere
For all its breadth in Religious Affects Schaefer develops a well-crafted argument and clarion call:the study of religion must include,at its very core, the study of affect.... Schaefer's project is timely in an urgent sense.
Jonathan Russell
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory
Religious Affects is an original and challenging argument for the discipline, especially to social-constructionist approaches, as it aims to radically reconfigure how we think about religion as a phenomenon grounded in feelings and emotions (affects) that humans share with the animal world.
Matt Sheedy
Religious Studies Review
Schaefer's book is fascinating, mind-expanding, and entirely worth a read.
Barbara J. King
The Atlantic
Religious Affects represents a challenge to decenter our anthropocentric presuppositions more broadly, and, by appealing to human animality, provides a provocative angle for imagining affect over and above the all-toohuman parameters that usually characterize religious studies.... [M]any scholars will find Schaefer's animal religion and his strategies for affective readings of religious phenomena both theoretically exciting and critically useful.
Abigail Kluchin
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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