Blurb:

In this section, Monica R. Miller looks to past and contemporary cultural conversations over the “N-word”—who can say it, why, and when has a lot to do with various groups wanting to outline who can say what and when, so that certain groups can retain an option to have it both ways. Such tendencies are as much present in scholarship, not necessarily where a contentious word like “nigger” is concerned, but in other arenas. In this instance, the vignette helps to site and cite some of the more palpable implications of McCutcheon’s critique of Jeffrey Kripal’s The Serpents Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2006) in “A Gift with Diminished Returns: On Jeff Kripal's The Serpent's Gift.”