In "After Religion" today we had visitors - the creators of a most unusual new book called A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor. Mona Oraby and Emilie Flamme met at a liberal arts college, a professor writer and an undergraduate student designer, which seemed to me a perfect match with my class and context teaching a ULEC at the design-heavy New School. 
The story of the book is involved and serendip-itous. Perhaps the most important fact is that it grew out of an online project that most decidedly was not ever supposed to take book form, that was, indeed, conceived as outreach to digital native Gen Z college students more receptive to websites and Spotify playlists than to scholarly disquisitions. 
This website, also called A Universe of Terms, was a project of The Immanent Frame, a religion/ secularism themed site of the Social Sciences Research Council. Immanent Frame authors were polled for key terms in contemporary debates. 14 were selected and three brief accessible essays commissioned for each (to show multiple approaches), with yes, a Spotify playlist, too.
But the website also needed a visual identity, and for this the student designer devised a lexicon of images - Matisse cut-out-inspired stars, leaves, hands, dolls, circles, squares... I remember noticing them on the website and finding them deeply compelling. 
The story continued once the online Universe of Terms was released, over 2019-2020, and the world changed with covid and the murder of George Floyd. As classes were abruptly shifted online, Oraby and Flamme found themselves discussing what scholarship for this frightening new reality would look like, who were scholars, and whom scholars were accountable to. 
And somehow the idea emerged to design a book from the website, a book more like a graphic novel than an academic volume. Eight of the website's fourteen terms were chosen, and short resonant passages were chosen from the essays which had been written about them to inspire new illustrations. The sources of the quotations are given in endnotes.
The resulting book is gorgeous but also a little confounding. The images dance from page to page (another of Flamme's inspirations is Calder's mobiles), only occasionally making space for blocks or lines of text. A bookish colleague of mine found it upsetting. But designers I showed it to loved it. One, whom I hadn't told the backstory, wondered if the text was necessary at all!
I'm not sure what I think (the uniformity of the images seems in tension with the polyphonic aspirations of the original project, for instance), but I'm intrigued enough by it that I want to build the Universe of Terms - book and website - into "Theorizing Religion," which I teach again next semester.
From today's class discussion I'm fascinated by the possibility of representing concepts in this visual way. Not just illustrating them, as though thought must always default to words! In some way this book of imagery is not just supported by all the scholarly work behind it but rises above it. Some things are lost, certainly (though it tells you how to find them); aren't others gained?
I look forward, for instance, to working from these panels back to the essay from which the text is taken. The ideas, from Sylvia Wynter, are dense and difficult; do the images simplify, clarify, amplify?
