Robert A. Yelle is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Helen Hardin Honors Program at the University of Memphis. He received a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Explaining the Mantras and The Semiotics of Religion, and co-author of After Secular Law.

A rich contribution to scholarship on the growth and globalization of Christian language ideology. Yelle, an historian of religion, accomplishes two principal aims in his book. On a smaller (but still very large) scale, he effectively shows how various British colonial legal and religious projects in India were underpinned by Christian, specifically Protestant, language ideologies. More broadly, he presents a well-supported argument, following in the footsteps of Max Weber, that 'what we think of as modern, secular rationality is actually an inheritance from and a transformation of Christian soteriology'

• Contents ; Acknowledgments ; Abbreviations ; Preface ; Chapter One: Orientalism and the Language of Disenchantment ; Chapter Two: "A Disease of Language": The Attack on Hindu Myth as Verbal Idolatry ; Chapter Three: "One Step from Babel to Pentecost": Colonial Codification, Universal Languages, and the Debate over Roman Transliteration ; Chapter Four: "Vain Repetitions": The Attack on Hindu Mantras ; Chapter Five: The Hindu Moses: Christian Polemics against Jewish Ritual and the Secularization of Hindu Law ; Afterword ; Notes ; Bibliography

Robert A. Yelle is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Helen Hardin Honors Program at the University of Memphis. He received a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Explaining the Mantras and The Semiotics of Religion, and co-author of After Secular Law.

A rich contribution to scholarship on the growth and globalization of Christian language ideology. Yelle, an historian of religion, accomplishes two principal aims in his book. On a smaller (but still very large) scale, he effectively shows how various British colonial legal and religious projects in India were underpinned by Christian, specifically Protestant, language ideologies. More broadly, he presents a well-supported argument, following in the footsteps of Max Weber, that 'what we think of as modern, secular rationality is actually an inheritance from and a transformation of Christian soteriology'

• Contents ; Acknowledgments ; Abbreviations ; Preface ; Chapter One: Orientalism and the Language of Disenchantment ; Chapter Two: "A Disease of Language": The Attack on Hindu Myth as Verbal Idolatry ; Chapter Three: "One Step from Babel to Pentecost": Colonial Codification, Universal Languages, and the Debate over Roman Transliteration ; Chapter Four: "Vain Repetitions": The Attack on Hindu Mantras ; Chapter Five: The Hindu Moses: Christian Polemics against Jewish Ritual and the Secularization of Hindu Law ; Afterword ; Notes ; Bibliography

Robert A. Yelle is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Helen Hardin Honors Program at the University of Memphis. He received a Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of Explaining the Mantras and The Semiotics of Religion, and co-author of After Secular Law.

A rich contribution to scholarship on the growth and globalization of Christian language ideology. Yelle, an historian of religion, accomplishes two principal aims in his book. On a smaller (but still very large) scale, he effectively shows how various British colonial legal and religious projects in India were underpinned by Christian, specifically Protestant, language ideologies. More broadly, he presents a well-supported argument, following in the footsteps of Max Weber, that 'what we think of as modern, secular rationality is actually an inheritance from and a transformation of Christian soteriology'

• Contents ; Acknowledgments ; Abbreviations ; Preface ; Chapter One: Orientalism and the Language of Disenchantment ; Chapter Two: "A Disease of Language": The Attack on Hindu Myth as Verbal Idolatry ; Chapter Three: "One Step from Babel to Pentecost": Colonial Codification, Universal Languages, and the Debate over Roman Transliteration ; Chapter Four: "Vain Repetitions": The Attack on Hindu Mantras ; Chapter Five: The Hindu Moses: Christian Polemics against Jewish Ritual and the Secularization of Hindu Law ; Afterword ; Notes ; Bibliography