Abstract Following Hanegraaff’s (2020: 73) claim that pioneers in our field considered it “to be no less than essential for any adequate understanding of the history of human culture and society as such,” this text answers Schilbrack’s (2013) question: “After we deconstruct ‘religion’, then what?” The answer is formulated within the debate over the diplomacy of common world face-to-face challenges of the Anthropocene. Within the functionalist tradition, uncertainty and lack of control defined the situation from which religion and magic ought to originate. They constitute the key characteristic of the Anthropocene as a specific historical condition, too. Their practical handling unleashes the full range of world-making activities and processes that shape ways of inhabiting the environment and thus provides an excellent point of analytical focus that can efficiently do without concepts of both religion and belief.
Abstract This article develops a ‘natural history’ of the study of religion at public universities in the United States and links the 1960s proliferation of programs and departments in religious studies to Cold War era investments in expanding higher education. This material and institutional reframing of the origins of the field suggests new ways to respond to the ongoing pressures of neoliberalism, austerity, and politically motivated attacks on humanistic fields of inquiry like religious studies.
Abstract This essay explores the concept of academic freedom and its relation to what Judith Butler calls critique. Academic freedom, I argue, involves the institutionalization of critique. One such institutional space for the interrogation of claims to authority is provided by religious studies. But scholars of religion operate within a broader legal and conceptual environment in which the category of religion itself sometimes functions as an impediment to critique. A commitment to critique on the part of religion scholars might consequently require us to rethink the central concept in terms of which our field is often taken to be organized. The public has a reason to support academic freedom when it trusts the processes through which scholars arrive at conclusions. I consider whether multi-disciplinary fields like religious studies are more vulnerable than established disciplines and suggest strategies for addressing this challenge.
Abstract This paper argues that Arizona, as a border state, is a critical location from which to research and teach the relationship between law and religion in the contemporary United States. Drawing on legal cases involving religious activism in the borderlands and ethnographic fieldwork with a progressive religious community in Southern Arizona, I suggest that this Arizonan material can encourage our students to question the borders of both religion and scholarship. In so doing, I offer the “bordering” of law and religion as a productive lens through which to approach the socio-political realities of the US Southwest.
Abstract Interactions with health sciences and professions are shaping the field of religious studies. This article situates the University of Arizona’s Religious Studies for Health Professionals degree within its institutional history and trends of applied humanities. Rather than accepting defeat to “careerism,” these developments can reinforce the educational value of religious studies.
