ABSTRACT
In early 2000, a small group of people got together to prepare a place for Elijah (Elie) Derrida at the joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL).3 For noninitiates, the AAR/SBL is the largest worldwide conference on religion and is also, hardly coincidentally, Anglophone and North American, echoing back to Derrida all that he has said about “religion” as a word that “circulates in the world…like an English word [Comme un mot anglais] that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States.”4 The result was the conference “Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments” (Toronto, November 23-26, 2002) which this volume represents. We want to begin by saying, simply, thank you. Thank you particularly to George Aichele, John Caputo, Cleo McNelly Kearns, David Odell-Scott, and, above all, to Jacques Derrida, whose good faith ensured that this project did not languish forever in the à venir or flounder on the inherent fragility of a promise made in Paris. We hope that this anthology captures at least something of the excitement of the event-not least the plenary interview, which, with a turnout of well over a thousand people, made those of us on stage feel bizarrely like evangelists at a mass revival meeting. However, our aim was only “evangelism” in a very qualified sense.
