“Religion” in Theory and Practice; Demystifying the Field for Burgeoning Academics; Russell T. McCutcheon

Author

Russell T. McCutcheon [+–]

University of Alabama

Russell T. McCutcheon is University Research Professor and, for 18 years, was the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He has written on problems in the academic labor market throughout his 30-year career and helped to design and run Alabama’s skills-based M.A. in religion in culture. Among his recent work is the edited resource for instructors, Teaching in Religious Studies and Beyond (Bloomsbury 2024).

“Religion” in Theory and Practice follows on from Russell T. McCutcheon’s book Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion (Equinox Publishing, 2014) by offering an overview of the current state of theory in the academic study of religion, and examining a variety of practical sites where critical scholarship is implemented but also challenged. Although addressed to early career scholars, this volume will also be of interest to anyone curious about why so many in the study of religion continue to assume that their object of study needs special attention.

The first section outlines McCutcheon’s broader and more recent thoughts on the current state of the field (such as the claim, by some, that it is now “post-theory”) while the second section applies the first at a variety of discrete sites within the profession, from how we approach teaching the introductory course and the ongoing problem of contingent labor to the varied readers that we can now reach with our work. The volume concludes with a third section in which twenty-one different scholars, each at an early point in their career, take the stage, offering their own views on the challenges of professionalization, job market, gaining teaching experience, and work–life balance. The volume therefore invites readers to step back from their own individual, specialized work and to consider some of the structures in which the wider field exists—and some of the things that we all might do, regardless our career stage, in response to them.

Series: NAASR Working Papers

Preliminaries

Introduction [+–] ix-xiii

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

“Religion” in Theory and Practice follows on from Russell T. McCutcheon’s book Entanglements: Marking Place in the Field of Religion (Equinox Publishing, 2014) by offering an overview of the current state of theory in the academic study of religion, and examining a variety of practical sites where critical scholarship is implemented but also challenged. Although addressed to early career scholars, this volume will also be of interest to anyone curious about why so many in the study of religion continue to assume that their object of study needs special attention. The first section outlines McCutcheon’s broader and more recent thoughts on the current state of the field (such as the claim, by some, that it is now “post-theory”) while the second section applies the first at a variety of discrete sites within the profession, from how we approach teaching the introductory course and the ongoing problem of contingent labor to the varied readers that we can now reach with our work. The volume concludes with a third section in which twenty-one different scholars, each at an early point in their career, take the stage, offering their own views on the challenges of professionalization, job market, gaining teaching experience, and work–life balance. The volume therefore invites readers to step back from their own individual, specialized work and to consider some of the structures in which the wider field exists—and some of the things that we all might do, regardless our career stage, in response to them.

Acknowledgements [+–] xiv

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

In Theory

1. Feast and Famine in the Study of Religion [+–] 3-16

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Written originally as the Afterword for a volume of papers from the 2015 annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR), this chapter argues that, although it now seems to some that theoretical issues and critical acumen pervade the academic study of religion, what some call the post-theoretical field is still characterized by an idealist approach that presumes the word religion merely names a deeply personal, pre-social disposition that is simply expressed in varied situations.

2. Utility and Limits: On the World Religions Paradigm [+–] 17-31

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Much like those who argue that the field has gone through the so-called theory wars of the 1980 and ‘90s and is now critically-informed and thus post-theoretical, there are some who seem to accept the critiques, leveled over the last two decades, of the category “world religions” yet who merely argue that more social formations ought to be considered to be world religions. Rather than just opening the tent a little wider, this chapter—originally an Afterword to a collection of essays on the state of research on world religions today—reminds readers that critiques of this nineteenth-century category go well beyond merely examining the breadth of its application.

3. The Sociology of Religion or Social Theory of Religion? [+–] 32-52

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

This chapter aims to distinguish among different schools of thought within the sociology of religion, inviting readers to identify and address what can be see as significant differences among those who are interested in the so-called social dimension of religion. Originally written for a resource aimed at lower-level students, and using the work of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim as the ways into the issue, the chapter argues a far wider point, still relevant to much of the field: whether scholars merely chronicle religious expressions in day-to-day life (and thus their interactions with such other domains as politics or economics) or if, instead, we study the social and structural factors that not only cause people to be religious but, more importantly, allow some actors to claim that a subset of their mundane practices are uniquely distinct from all others.

4. Redescribing Spirituality: The Strategic Use of the Solitary Identifier [+–] 53-63

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Still implicit to much work carried out in the field is the longstanding assumption that religion is a personal, even ineffable disposition (variously known as belief, faith, feeling or experience) whose public expression is prone to misinterpretation and corruption. Seeing current discourses on spirituality (and thus people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” [SBNR]) as but the most recent version of this common approach (both within and outside of the academy), this previously unpublished chapter attempts to theorize such claims, in a manner consistent with practicing the study of religion as a social theorist might. Using the work of the Protestant reformer, Jean Calvin, as a case study, it attempts to persuade readers that such discourses are a practical mode of social rhetoric, used to negotiate everyday issues of place and rank.

In Practice

5. Making Experts Curious About Their Expertise in the Introductory Course [+–] 67-82

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Published here for the first time, this chapter revisits the choices that structure our introductory classes, doing so by reflecting on the goals that motivated my own 2007 book, Studying Religion: An Introduction. Emphasizing skills rather than data—but also recognizing that historical and ethnographic information is the necessary place where we model the use of these skills—the approach modeled here is in keeping with the broad-based skills that many faculty hope to convey to students enrolled in their lower-level, introductory courses. The implicit question of the chapter, then, is: How might one teach an introduction to the study of religion if the world religions approach is undesirable?

6. A Baker’s Dozen of Tough Choices [+–] 83-96

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Revised from an earlier published article, which itself resulted from a paper first delivered as part of the Craft of Teaching seminar at the University of Chicago (aimed at early career scholars), this chapter succinctly outlines some of the challenges that face not just novice but even experienced instructors in their introductory courses (e.g., are you teaching an introduction or a survey—and do you know the difference?). Regardless how each is decided, the chapter provocatively raises thirteen key moments where instructors must make a decision concerning their practical teaching goals and how they can best be attained.

7. There Are Advantages to Knowing Your Limits: On Making a Difference for Non-Tenure Track Colleagues [+–] 97-107

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Unpublished and originally delivered at a session of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) devoted to issues surrounding the challenges facing contingent faculty members, this chapter purposefully shifts the focus to tenure-track and tenured faculty—people who sometimes feel powerless to change the direction of the modern university. It argues that, while many influential structural factors are certainly well beyond their control, there are a number of practical and consequential things that a united group of faculty members can themselves do to help improve the situation of the non-tenure track colleagues whose labor more than just helps to create the conditions in which we all do our own work.

8. Perhaps (Not) Love… [+–] 108-120

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

This chapter, previously unpublished and originally delivered at a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) that was devoted to the AAR President’s 2016 conference theme—“revolutionary love”—argues that the theme is yet another practical example of the ongoing identity crisis in the academic study of religion. Seeing love as a folk designation used by groups (of which scholars are, of course, members themselves) rather than an analytic category of research, the chapter argues that scholars (like any social agent) would do well not only to reflect on the many different personae or selves that they possess but also the various venues in which each is best operationalized.

9. So You’re Not a Priest? Identifying the Scholar of Religion [+–] 121-132

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Published here for the first time, this chapter—a portion of which was originally a blog post as part of a series—addresses the challenge of not just describing ones work to non-specialists but, as a scholar of religion interested in category formation and the implications of classification systems, the difficulties often encountered when discussing ones work to other scholars who apparently take for granted the limited areas in which scholars of religion ought to carry out their work. Because of the influence that work on category formation has had over the past decades, early career readers would do well to think through the problem well ahead of finding themselves in a job interview—for the assumption that scholars of religions merely study one or more of the world religions will not go away any time soon.

10. Why I Blog [+–] 133-154

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

With the advent of online self-publishing (i.e., blogging), the venues in which scholars can now publicize their work has opened dramatically—though not all venues are equally valued by those who govern ones career progress. This chapter, published here for the first time, reflects on the reasons why one might decide to blog—a decision that depends on a variety of factors, from ones career stage to the intended audiences one hopes to reach with ones research. Beginning by taking seriously the popular writing of no less a scholar than the French semiotician, Roland Barthes, the chapter re-evaluates the place of blogging in scholarship, recognizing that, while it is indeed different from peer reviewed publishing in articles and books, it may still be one of the more consequential places where our work appears.

In Praxis: Responses to “Theses on Professionalization”

Preamble [+–] 157-159

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Introduction [+–] 160-163

Matt Sheedy

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).

Response to Thesis 1 [+–] 164-166

Matthew Dougherty

Independent Scholar

Matthew Dougherty graduated from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. He studies religion and empire in early America.

Response to Thesis 2 [+–] 167-169

Tenzan Eaghll

Mahidol University, Bangkok

Tenzan Eaghll is a Lecturer and Chair of the International M.A. program at the College of Religious Studies, Mahidol University, Bangkok. His research focuses on continental philosophy, religion and film, and method and theory in the study of religion.

Response to Thesis 3 [+–] 170-172

Shannon Trosper Schorey

Shannon Trosper Schorey, who earned her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is a Principal Communications Specialist in the tech industry as well as a freelance writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Dread Machine, Punk Noir Magazine, Machines in Between, and Religion Dispatches.

Response to Thesis 4 [+–] 173-176

Caleb Simmons

University of Mississippi

Department of Philosophy and Religion
Visiting Assistant Professor

Response to Thesis 5 [+–] 177-179

Matt Sheedy

University of Bonn

Response to Thesis 6 [+–] 180-182

Tara Baldrick-Morrone

University of Tennessee

Tara Baldrick-Morrone is Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee

Response to Thesis 7 [+–] 183-185

Andrew Durdin

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.

Response to Thesis 8 [+–] 186-188

Jeffrey Wheatley

PhD candidate

Jeffrey Wheatley is a doctoral student in American Religions at Northwestern University. He researches race, religion, empire, and state power in the United States, focusing on the categories of “superstition” and “fanaticism,” especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Related focal points include pedagogy, theory and method, global Christianity, secularism, the history of the study of religion, and popular use of the octopus as an image for visualizing dangerous others.

Response to Thesis 9 [+–] 189-192

Barbara Krawcowicz

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Barbara Krawcowicz received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Indiana University Bloomington and in Philosophy from Warsaw University. Currently, she serves as a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. She’s working on a book devoted to Jewish Ultra-Orthodox responses to the Holocaust. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Jewish thought, religious radicalism, gender and religion, as well as method and theory in religious studies

Response to Thesis 10 [+–] 193-195

Emily D. Crews

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.

Response to Thesis 11 [+–] 196-198

Jennifer Collins-Elliott

University of Tennessee

Jennifer Collins-Elliott is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Florida State University, writing her dissertation on sexual violence in early Christianity, tentatively titled “’Bespattered with the Mud of Another’s Lust’: Rape and Physical Embodiment in Christian Literature of the 4th-6th Centuries CE.” She is also a lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Response to Thesis 12 [+–] 199-201

Nickolas P. Roubekas

University of Vienna

View Website

Nickolas P. Roubekas is assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is the author of An Ancient Theory of Religion: Euhemerism from Antiquity to the Present (Routledge, 2017) and editor of Theorizing “Religion” in Antiquity (Equinox, 2019) and Explaining, Interpreting, and Theorizing Religion and Myth (with Thomas Ryba; Brill, 2020).

Response to Thesis 13 [+–] 202-204

Vincent E Burgess

Cornell University

Vincent E. Burgess is a Ph.D. candidate in the Asian Religions doctoral program of the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. His research is currently focused on discourses of renunciation and environmentalism with regard to modern, North Indian religious traditions.

Response to Thesis 14 [+–] 205-208

Adrian Hermann

University of Munich

Adrian Hermann is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany, working on Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Global Christianity (especially in the Philippines), Buddhist Modernism, and the Religious History of the Globalized World. From 2002–2011 he studied Comparative Religion, Drama Studies, Sociology, and North American Literature in Munich, Bielefeld and Basel. He received a PhD from the University of Basel, Switzerland based on a dissertation entitled “Distinctions of Religion: Analyses of the modern discourse on ‘religion’ in world society and the problem of the differentiation of ‘religion’ in 19th and early 20th century Buddhist contexts”. In 2014/15 he was a Visiting Scholar at Utrecht University and Stanford University.

Response to Thesis 15 [+–] 209-211

Kelly J Baker

View Website

Kelly J. Baker holds a PhD in Religious Studies and is a columnist for the Chronicle for Higher Education‘s Vitae project, Women in Higher Education, Killing the Buddha, and Sacred Matters. Her credits also include The Atlantic, Religion Dispatches, and Washington Post. Baker’s books include Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930, and The Zombies Are Coming!: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture.

Response to Thesis 16 [+–] 212-214

Lauren E. Osborne

Whitman College

Lauren E. Osborne is Assistant Professor of Religion at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her first book (in progress) is an aesthetic study of the recited Qur’an.

Response to Thesis 17 [+–] 215-219

Aldea Mulhern

University of Toronto

Response to Thesis 18 [+–] 220-221

Thomas J. Whitley

Thomas Whitely, after earned his Ph.D. at Florida State University, worked in university administration before transitioning to politics and local government; from 2018-2022 he served as the Chief of Staff for John Dailey, the mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, and he is currently the Director of Strategic Innovation for the City of Tallahassee.

Response to Thesis 19 [+–] 222-225

Sarah Lynn Kleeb

University of Toronto

Sarah Lynn Kleeb received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2015, with a dissertation exploring the legacy of Gustavo Gutierrez’s theory of liberation, through the lens of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. She is currently Director of Education at ALPHA Education, a social justice education non-profit in Toronto. She continues to teach academic writing, media studies, and humanities courses at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.

Response to Thesis 20 [+–] 226-228

Charles McCrary

Florida State University

Charles McCrary is a PhD student in American religious history at Florida State University. His dissertation is a study of “sincerely held religious belief” in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, focusing on the centrality of “sincerity” in issues regarding authenticity politics, secularism, and religious freedom.

Response to Thesis 21 [+–] 229-232

Katelyn Dykstra

PhD Candidate

Katelyn Dykstra is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. Her dissertation project explores contemporary representations of intersex in literature and film

End Matter

Index [+–] 233-236

Russell T. McCutcheon

University of Alabama

Reviews

Provides an overview of the current state of the academic study of religion by exploring both its theoretical and practical dimensions. One of the merits of the book lies in the intertwining of theoretical disputations with personal anecdotes and glimpses into McCutcheon's own professional experience and pedagogical practice. Such intersections not only facilitate the digestion of conceptually rich passages, but also serve the more practical aims of the book. Most notably, they encourage a revitalisation of the field by proposing innovative strategies to the study of religion tailored to the needs of the postmodern world.
BASR Bulletin

As the humanities job market becomes increasingly precarious, books like these are indispensable guides for pragmatic strategies in the changing workplace. Religious studies scholars across higher education would benefit from reading this book because McCutcheon not only offers practical advice for succeeding in a profession that receives less tax dollar support with each passing year, but also includes descriptions of his own theoretical framework and suggestions for “best practices” in the academic study of religion throughout.

Without sparing the harsh reality that an academic career is considerably less attainable, this book will equip readers with strategies for improving the quality of one’s scholarship, for sharing those skills with students in the classroom, and ultimately working with students and colleagues alike in such a way that ensures the integrity and continued existence of religious studies as a respectable academic discipline.
Reading Religion

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

“Religion” in Theory and Practice

Demystifying the Field for Burgeoning Academics

Russell T. McCutcheon [+–]

University of Alabama

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