Method Today
Redescribing Approaches to the Study of Religion
Edited by
Brad Stoddard [+–]
McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland
Brad Stoddard is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He has degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, Yale Divinity School, and Florida State University. His research explores religion and public policy, particularly as they relate to criminal justice policies in the era of faith-based initiatives.
Thirty or forty years ago, the phrase “method and theory” in Religious Studies scholarship referred to more social scientific approaches to the study of religion, as opposed to the more traditional theological hermeneutics common to the field. Today, however, it seems that everyone claims to do “theory and method,” including those people who shun social scientific approaches the academic study of religion.
Method Today brings together the contributions of scholars from a recent North American Association for the Study of Religion conference to explore the question of what it means to do “theory and method” in an era where the phrase has no distinct meaning. Contributors specifically address the categories of description, interpretation, comparison, and explanation in Religious Studies scholarship.
Series: NAASR Working Papers
Table of Contents
Introduction
Introduction: Method Today [+–] 1-11
McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland
Brad Stoddard is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He has degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, Yale Divinity School, and Florida State University. His research explores religion and public policy, particularly as they relate to criminal justice policies in the era of faith-based initiatives.
The Introduction summarizes the history of the concept of “method” in the academic study of religion paying particular attention to the field’s founders and the North American Association for the Study of Religion.
Part I
1. Comparison [+–] 15-35
University of Rochester
Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.
This chapter surveys comparison, one of the foremost methods employed in the academic study of religion since its inception. It provides a historical overview, critique, and suggestions for what a more sophisticated comparison might look like in the future. It does this by paying attention to the messiness of social interaction as opposed to essentialized and discrete religious traditions.
2. He who Knows One Language Knows None: On the Inevitabilities of Comparison and Translation [+–] 36-46
University of Colorado
This response expands on the three concluding features Dr. Hughes recommends as central to the modern comparative enterprise, arguing for attention to “presentism” in investigations of the past, to translation in work with original sources, and to the history of contemporary theory in efforts to avoid the essentializing, objectifying, and ahistorical errors of previous research.
Florida State University
Thomas J. Carrico, Jr. is a PhD candidate at Florida State University’s Department of Religion. Focusing on the matchstick industry in Victorian England, Carrico’s dissertation elucidates social, political, and economic constraints on moral reasoning, especially in response to industrial disease.
This response uses debates within comparative religious ethics to elucidate the institutional elements of comparative scholarship. Utilizing Karl Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, I argue for a more explicit differentiation between comparison as a methodology and comparison as a discipline or formal field of study.
4. On Z-factors and Empires [+–] 54-63
Florida State University
Andrew Durdin is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State
University. His work focuses on critical approaches to the study of religion with an emphasis on the Roman imperial period, the modern historiography of ancient religions, and magic and
religion in the ancient and modern world.
University. His work focuses on critical approaches to the study of religion with an emphasis on the Roman imperial period, the modern historiography of ancient religions, and magic and
religion in the ancient and modern world.
This chapter examines the often suppressed conceptual frameworks that normalize “religions” as privileged units of comparison in the study of religion. Starting from Aaron Hughes’s essay, this chapter highlights how the category of “empire” operates as such a framework, and argues that problematizing this framework (and other such frameworks) raises interesting questions about the historical conditions and specific motives that transform fluid social practices into discrete comparative units.
5. Complicating ‘Comparison’: On Perspective, Rhetoric, and Recognition in the Study of Religion [+–] 64-69
University of Victoria, PhD candidate
Stacie Swain is a Ukrainian-British doctoral student in the Department of Political Science and the Indigenous Nationhood Program at the University of Victoria, in lək̓ʷəŋən territories (Victoria, B.C.). Her research considers the intersection of Indigenous ceremony with the categories of religion and politics, particularly in relation to settler colonialism, Indigenous legal orders, and the governance of public space.
The author begins by addressing the conceptualization of “comparison” as an object of study and focus for dialogue.
6. Response 70-75
University of Rochester
Aaron W. Hughes is the Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. His research and publications focus on both Jewish philosophy and Islamic Studies. He has authored numerous books, including Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox, 2007); Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (Equinox, 2012); Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2012); and Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012). He currently serves as the editor of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.
Part II
University of Ottowa
Naomi R. Goldenberg PhD (1976), Yale University, is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies and former Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Her publications include: Resurrecting the Body: Feminism, Religion and Psychoanalysis (Crossroad, 1993) and Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Beacon, 1979). She has co-edited Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Brill, 2015) with Trevor Stack and Timothy Fitzgerald and is completing The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Taylor and Frances) with Kathleen McPhillips. Her book, The Religious is Political: An Argument for Understanding Religions as Vestigial States is in progress.
Contemporary analysis known as “critical religion” points theory and method in productive, provocative directions. Nevertheless, outdated habits linger in discourses about religion. This essay supports recent deconstructive approaches by employing examples from both popular culture and scholarship to argue that more accurate, specific language ought be used whenever “religion” is cited.
Ian Alexander Cuthbertson is an independent scholar who is broadly interested in exploring how the category “religion” is deployed to legitimize certain beliefs, practices, and institutions while delegitimizing others. Ian lives in England with his wife Virginia and their son Ciaran and often puts pineapple on pizza.
In this response, I argue the academic study of religion ought to limit itself to investigations of how the term ‘religion’ is deployed by social actors with varied agendas as a means of reifying a presumed distinction between apparently separate religious and secular spheres. I conclude by suggesting that religious studies scholars should reconsider not only the ways we describe ‘religion’, but also the audience to which these descriptions are directed.
9. Religion and Description [+–] 106-113
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Daniel O. McClellan works as a scripture translation supervisor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He completed his PhD in theology and religion at the University of Exeter in 2020. His research deploys the methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion to interrogate conceptualizations of deity, of scripture, and of religious identity within the Bible and its reception. His first book, YHWH’s Divine Images (SBL Press, 2022), is an open-access volume that develops a theoretical framework for the intuitive logic of divine images and demonstrates how that logic undergirds the Bible’s representation of entities like the Ark of the Covenant, the Angel of the Lord, and even the text of the Torah itself.
This paper argues that the practice of description is frequently understood as definition, which is too often precisely prescription. It contends that reduction to necessary and sufficient features is alien to the natural development and use of conceptual categories like religion, and so an alternative approach to description is recommended.
10. Perhaps Action Enough [+–] 114-118
University of Chicago Divinity School
Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and uses historical and ethnographic methods to make sense of the ways that religion, gender, and the reproductive body are entangled in the formation of personhood.
In “Description, Prescription, and the Category of ‘Religion,'” Emily Crews offers a response to Naomi Goldenberg’s “Toward a Pushier Critique of ‘Religion’ and Attendant Categories.” After a summary of Goldenberg’s argument, she focuses on three primary issues raised by the article: the imbrication of governments and the category of ‘religion,’ the relationship between categories and essences, and the generative tensions between the descriptive and prescriptive methods. She ultimately argues that Goldenberg’s efforts might be a persuasive roadmap for projects in Religious Studies that productively intertwine the normative and the scholarly.
York University
Neil George is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Humanities at York University. His research focuses on discourses of science, religion, and the secular.
Goldenberg’s “pushier critique” rightly places an emphasis on the importance of ‘governance’ for understanding the category ‘religion’ in various historical and geographical locations. It is not clear, however, that “institutions of government” play a major role in constructing and maintaining ‘religion,’ or that either “vestigial states” or ‘violence’ are as central for theorizing ‘religion’ as has been suggested.
12. Response to the Responses 128-130
University of Ottowa
Naomi R. Goldenberg PhD (1976), Yale University, is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies and former Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Her publications include: Resurrecting the Body: Feminism, Religion and Psychoanalysis (Crossroad, 1993) and Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Beacon, 1979). She has co-edited Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Brill, 2015) with Trevor Stack and Timothy Fitzgerald and is completing The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Taylor and Frances) with Kathleen McPhillips. Her book, The Religious is Political: An Argument for Understanding Religions as Vestigial States is in progress.
Part III
13. Explanation and the Study of Religion [+–] 133-157
University of California at Santa Barbara
Egil Asprem is a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Religious Studies, University of California Santa Barbara.
University of California at Santa Barbara
Ann Taves is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her most recent book is Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths (Princeton, 2016).
This chapter argues that explanation is a necessary, but under-examined, aspect of theories of religion. The authors argue that historical impediments to explanation in our discipline can be overcome if we shift our view from “religion” in the abstract to concrete human behaviors in interaction. Drawing on contemporary discussions in the philosophy of science, they submit that a new mechanistic approach that integrates meanings, values, and intentional actions as causal factors in nested, multi-level mechanisms holds great promise for explaining the complex phenomena associated with “religion”.
14. “Constitution God-Given Rights”: Explaining Religion and Politics in the Malheur Occupation [+–] 158-167
Centenary College of Louisiana
Taking the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom’s 2016 seizure of Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge as a case study, this essay argues against methodological approaches that reduce complex human circumstances to align with master narratives as well as those which reify religion as a distinct—and too often privileged—field of human thought and action.
Northwestern University
Joel Harrison is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the intersection between social theory, theology, and philosophy of religion at the turn of the twentieth century in Germany and questions of theory and method in religious studies.
This chapter argues that Taves and Asprem do not attend to the conceptual differences between explanatory accounts in the human sciences and those of the natural sciences. Instead, their theory reduces all phenomena, ideational or material, to a natural scientific material account of cause and effect, limiting the theory’s analytical power.
16. Is Explanation Existential? [+–] 178-185
SOAS
Explanation of religion or as religion? This chapter posits that as cognitively shaped eusocial beings, humans need reasons to act in the world (explanations we have embraced), individually and collectively. Accepted explanations must encompass all phases and exigencies of life in whatever material, historical circumstance the individual and group are ‘thrown’.
17. Causal Explanations in the Study of Religion [+–] 186-191
University of South Carolina
Erin Roberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina.
This paper summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of Ann Taves’s and Egil Asprem’s essay.
18. To Our Critics 192-201
University of California at Santa Barbara
Egil Asprem is a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Religious Studies, University of California Santa Barbara.
University of California at Santa Barbara
Ann Taves is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her most recent book is Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths (Princeton, 2016).
Part IV
19. Interpretation and the Study of Religion [+–] 205-221
Appalachian State University
Kevin Schilbrack is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the Appalachian State University, USA. He previously taught at Florida International University, Wesleyan College, and Western Carolina University. He is the author of Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and of various articles on philosophy and the study of religion. He is the editor of Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2004), Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2002), and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religious Diversity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
My goal in this chapter is to clarify and defend the interpretive approach in the academic study of religion, and I do this by asking and answering three questions that have been contentious in the debates about interpretation: (1) Can one understand human behavior independent of the action’s meaning? (2)Does interpretation require access to people’s mental states?(3) Does interpretation preclude causal explanation?
20. Homo Interpretans [+–] 222-227
Tufts University
Jennifer Eyl is an Associate Professor of Religion at Tufts University. Her work focuses on religions of the ancient Mediterranean and theory of religion.
This chapter looks at Epicurean physics and ethics, nineteenth German Romanticism, and contemporary problems in criminal justice, to reflect on questions about interpretation, as raised by Kevin Shilbrack. I argue that interpretation is useful precisely where it overlaps with explanation.
21. Combining and Constituting [+–] 228-236
Mount Royal University
Mark Q. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. He is co-author (with Steven Engler) of In the Beginning was the Network; Semantic Holism and the Study of Religion (De Gruyter, forthcoming)
Mount Royal University
Steven Engler is Professor of Religious Studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. He researches Umbanda, Kardecist Spiritism and related spirit-incorporation religions in Brazil, as well as methodology, theories and meta-theory in the study of religions.
There is an ambiguity in Schilbrack’s discussion: should intentions and bodily movements be analyzed as separable components of actions or as parts of a unified whole? We point to problems with the former view and ask whether the latter is more useful.
22. Subjectivity and Meaning [+–] 237-244
Florida State University
In this essay, I argue that answering “no” to Kevin Schilbrack’s second question—“Does interpretation require access to people’s mental states?”—should not lead scholars to overlook the importance of subjectivity in a hermeneutic approach to religious studies. Drawing on the thought of Martin Heidegger, I contend that giving an account of subjectivity is necessary for understanding the dynamic ways in which norms operate within human communities and for articulating the grounds of scholarly critique.
23. Interpretation [+–] 245-251
University of Bonn
Matt Sheedy holds a Ph.D. in the study of religion and is a visiting professor of North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research interests include critical social theory, theories of secularism and atheism, as well as representations of Christianity, Islam, and Native American traditions in popular and political culture. He is the author of Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge, 2021).
In this paper, I examine Schilbrack’s self-proclaimed goal of building bridges between philosophy, social science, and the study of religions as a valuable aim, though one that needs to pay closer attention to the question of priority—that is, starting from the particular methodological and theoretical interests of variously situated scholars in order to better appeal to their interests and thus make a stronger case for what a revised philosophy of religion has to offer religious studies.
24. A Reply to My Critics 252-258
Appalachian State University
Kevin Schilbrack is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the Appalachian State University, USA. He previously taught at Florida International University, Wesleyan College, and Western Carolina University. He is the author of Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and of various articles on philosophy and the study of religion. He is the editor of Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2004), Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge, 2002), and The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religious Diversity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
Afterword
Afterword [+–] 259-274
McDaniel College
Gregory Alles is professor of religious studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He is co-editor of Numen, the journal of the International Association for the History of Religions, and a member of the steering committee of the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alles has served as President of the North American Association for the Study of Religions. His research has focused widely on rhetoric in Greek and Sanskrit epic, the history of the study of religions in Germany, particularly the work of Rudolf Otto, the study of religions in a global context, and most recently on adivasi (tribal) people in Gujarat, India, known as Rathvas. He edited Religious Studies: A Global View and is author of The Iliad, The Ramayana, and the Work of Religion: Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification as well as a number of articles.
The Afterword attempts to situate the discussions in the volume within a broader context in two ways. While acknowledging the valuable contributions which the discussions make, it uses a specific example to point out some practical limits in their application. It also seeks to draw connections between these discussions and other discussions, using indigenous research methodologies as its example.
End Matter
Index [+–] 275-280
McDaniel College, Westminster, Maryland
Brad Stoddard is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. He has degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, Yale Divinity School, and Florida State University. His research explores religion and public policy, particularly as they relate to criminal justice policies in the era of faith-based initiatives.
Thirty or forty years ago, the phrase “method and theory” in Religious Studies scholarship referred to more social scientific approaches to the study of religion, as opposed to the more traditional theological hermeneutics common to the field. Today, however, it seems that everyone claims to do “theory and method,” including those people who shun social scientific approaches the academic study of religion. Method Today brings together the contributions of scholars from a recent North American Association for the Study of Religion conference to explore the question of what it means to do “theory and method” in an era where the phrase has no distinct meaning. Contributors specifically address the categories of description, interpretation, comparison, and explanation in Religious Studies scholarship.
