Russell T. McCutcheon

“They Licked the Platter Clean”: On the Co-Dependency of the Religious and The Secular

This paper argues that a methodological puzzle that stands in the way of those who critique the adequacy of a secularist perspective for studying religion is that the modern invention that goes by the name of secularism is the only means for imagining religion to exist as an item of discourse. Drawing on a variety of efforts to move beyond the limits of binary thinking—efforts that invariably function to reaffirm one or the other pole by imagining it to predate its partner—the paper concludes that, for those interested in talking about such things as religion, faith, spirit, belief, experience, etc., there is no beyond to secularism, for it constitutes the discursive conditions by means of which we in the modern world think religion into existence. us, the now common effort to critique the adequacy of secularism for studying religion not only presuppose the idea of the nation-state but reinforce and extend it as well.

Redescribing “Religion and …” Film: Teaching the Insider/Outsider Problem

Classes organized by means of the ‘religion and …’ rubric cut both ways: they are elastic enough to attract wide student interest, thereby enhancing a department’s enrollment statistics, but they are often theoretically unsophisticated, thereby hampering the future development of scholars of religion. After discussing the costs and benefits of such classes, this article focuses on one particular example of this popular rubric that would benefit from redescription: the use of films in the religious studies class. After identifying two competing approaches to using films, the essay concludes by discussing three feature films that can be used in all of our classes to teach a fundamental theoretical topic in our field: the insider/outsider problem.

A Modest Proposal on Method

AbstractThis paper offers a diagnosis as to why NAASR’s identity has become more ambiguous over the past decade (i.e., the appropriation of postmodernism to authorize polemical positions) and offers a proposal on how the more precise definition of this journal’s key terms—method and theory—might assist the association to provide a hospitable home for two different groups of scholars who are equally alienated from the field’s dominant form.

‘Just follow the money’: the cold war, the humanistic study of religion, and the fallacy of insufficient cynicism

Contrary to studies that argue there is no direct link between Cold War era politics and the shift in the United States from confessional to tax‐supported Humanistic studies of religion, this paper explores whether such direct evidence does in fact exist. Focusing mainly on the National Defense Fellowships that were instituted by the US federal government soon after the launch of Sputnik, the essay concludes that there is considerable warrant for further investigations into the public and private funding that made the Humanistic study of religion a reality in the mid‐1960s to late 1960s. Given current worldwide political and military developments, and the manner in which some scholars of religion are arguing for the relevance of the study of religion for those wishing to ensure the spread of liberal democracy, it may now be the time to reconsider the Cold War history of our field.

The Role of Method and Theory in the Iahr1

Only thanks to the guiding lights and the overwhelming majority of the members of the International Association for the History of Religions have the most recent world congresses of this body avoided slipping into congresses of religion after the model of the Parliament held in Chicago in 1893. If the history of religions is to preserve its spirit and further its autonomy, it must not only work out the peculiarities of its methods, it must also revive its religio-critical, or rather, its ideological function.

I Have a Hunch 1

Abstract Using the same arguments that, in the 1960s, were successfully employed to establish the institutionally autonomous, non-reductive study of religion (generally understood as the public, institutionalized expression of a private experience, belief, or faith), this essay argues for the urgent need to establish a phenomenology and a hermeneutics of hunches—posited here as being among the only truly cross-cultural dispositions shared by all human beings.

Keeping “critical” critical: A conversation from Culture on the Edge:

In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge—a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions—had a conversation online on the use of the terms “critique” and “critical,” terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that the members of the group thought it worthwhile to focus some attention on them. What follows is the transcript of their conversation.

The State of Islamic Studies in the Study of Religion: An Introduction

Abstract This is an introduction to the commissioned set of papers in reply to Aaron Hughes’s assessment of the current state of Islamic studies within the academic study of religion.

Africa on Our Minds

The study of religion’s relationship to its colonial past offers a useful and complicated case study in how methodological self-consciousness actually impacts scholarship in the field of religious studies. And of all the sites from which one could draw to find ethnographic instances useful in pressing such issues, the continent of Africa—conceived either as an actual place or, far more interestingly, as a discursive space to which people can travel only in their imaginations—stands out. For, along with what was once called “New Holland” (or Australia) and “the New World” (or the Americas), “the dark continent” was a place to which our scholarly armchair predecessors imaginatively traveled as they poured over the diaries and reports of missionaries, traders, and soldiers in search of both their own evolutionary precursors as well as the origin of religion itself.

The ideology of closure and the problem with the insider/ outsider problem in the study of religion

insider/outsider problem-the edited collection, TheorizingFaith (Arweck and Stringer 1999)-as a point of entry into this topic, this essay explores why the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion is a problem, for whom it is a problem and the political implications entailed by trying to overcome the historically situated nature of all human behaviors by questing for a viewpoint with no apparent perspective. From the outset we should note that there are quite a few academic