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Revised: Comparative Religious Traditions
- Journal of the American Academy of Religion
- Oxford University Press
- Volume 74, Number 2, June 2006
- pp. 483-494
- Article
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Debates about "religious studies vs. theology" may be irresolvable because they are symptoms of a crisis of a different order: the academy's still-colonialist relation to our civilization(s)' folk-or-wisdom traditions, "religious" traditions in particular. Scholars of religious studies or theology practice a kind of "colonialism writ-small" when they remove their subject matter from its lived, societal contexts and re-situate it in conceptual worlds of their own devising. If endless debates follow, they concern these worlds we have constructed rather than the religions and theologies that we study.