This article examines the felicity conditions (extending the sense assumed by this concept in speech act theory) of religious statements. In an analogy with love talk, religious talk is seen here as transformative discourse rather than as informative discourse that is, a discourse which speaks of whoever is uttering it rather than of the world, but which, in doing it, alters the world of which it speaks just as much as those who speak in it. The article then compares the truth conditions of scientific discourse, founded on the establishment of long mediating chains between word and world, and the felicity conditions of religious speech, a close-range speech rooted in 'imediation'. Providing an illustrative analysis of various ways of experiencing religious (visual) images in art, the article concludes by refusing the doubly stereotypic reduction of religion to belief and science to knowledge.
Religion; Science; Discourse; Image; Belief; Knowledge
