NTT: Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 77, no. 1 (2023): 34-48. Please see: https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/NTT2023.1.003.BAKK 1 KEY TEXT Charles H. Long’s Significations (1986), or, Making Problems for the Study of Religion in the Netherlands Justine M. Bakker Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Justine.bakker@ru.nl ORCID: 0000-0002-7842-6015 Abstract As part of NTT JTSR’s series on Key Texts, this article discusses Charles H. Long’s collection Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Since its publication in 1986, Significations has inspired a wide range of religious studies scholars in the United States. In this article, I will outline some of the main themes and concerns of the text and review its reception in (Black) religious studies. I will then explore the potential impact of Long’s work on religious studies in the Netherlands, where it has been largely overlooked. To do so, I will bring Significations in conversation with the recent debate on Markus Davidsen’s vision for the study of religion in the Netherlands (published in NTT in 2020). I will argue that Long, as a “bringer of problems,” can help “reorient” the field of religious studies in the Netherlands towards a more thorough, forceful, and self-reflexive engagement with (Dutch) colonialism and its afterlife—both as a material reality and as a hermeneutical problem. Keywords race, religion, hermeneutics, colonialism, postcolonialism, Black religion, deconstruction, Charles H. Long, parareligion A “Bringer of Problems”—that’s how David Chidester characterized historian of religion Charles H. Long in his acknowledgements for Savage Systems. 1 During a crucial conversation about Chidester’s work, Long had informed Chidester that he did not “solve” problems, but “makes” them: “Charles Long reminds us that everything is much more problematic than we imagined.” 2 While this reminder has echoed far and wide in Black religious studies and, to a degree, religious studies in the United States more generally, it has yet to cross the ocean: in Europe, Long—a Black American scholar who was one of the pioneers of the Chicago School, alongside Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa, although he received the 1 David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), xviii. See also: Corey D.B. Walker, “‘Bringer of Problems’ – Charles Long and the Basic Question of Humanity,” AAIHS blog, December 9, 2015. https://www.aaihs.org/bringer-of-problems-charles-h-long-and-the-basic-question-of-humanity/. 2 Chidester, Savage Systems, xvii.