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PREFACE 1 don't have any myself, but 1 believe in other people having religion. -David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down In April 1999, I delivered the introduction to this collection at the Eastern International Regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR)-a society to which I, like thousands of other North American scholars of religion and theologians alike, belong. Anticipating that "theory-talk" might have an adverse affect on the audience-after all, many in our field are against defining or theorizing religion-I opened by quoting a passage from David Lodge's wonderfully comic novel about conference-going British literary critics, Small World (1995 [1984]). The passage involved an exchange between: Angelica Pabst, a mysterious young American who studies romances; Persse McCarrigle, a slightly naive, underpaid Irish lecturer new to the conference circuit; Philip Swallow, an English department head committed to the enduring values of "Literature"; and Swallow's longtime friend, the provocative literary theorist and plenary speaker Maurice Zapp. After recounting to Persse the "hundreds of romances" she has read, Angelica says, "I don't need any more data, What 1 need is a theory to explain it all." "Theory," Philip Swallow's ears quivered under their silvery thatch, a few places further up the table. "That word brings out the Goering in me. When 1 hear it 1reach for my revolver." "Then you're not going to like my lecture, Philip," said Morris Zapp.! Unlike Zapp's theory-ladened lecture (whose most memorable line, to me at least, was his critique of the hermeneut's endless quest for meaning : "Every decoding is another encoding")-where a number of people either left or just fainted when he compared the act of reading to watching a striptease-no one stormed out on me, not that I noticed, anyway. Also unlike Zapp's talk, after mine there were quite a few questions and comments; one in particular still stands out in my memory. In fact, it was the last question of the afternoon; it came from a woman near the back of the lecture hall who asked, in a quiet voice, whether I was sayIX x CRITICS NOT CARETAKERS ing that religion was also social, biological, political, economic, and so on, or whether I was saying that religion was only social, biological, political, economic, and so on. Her subtle yet significant distinctionalso or only-nicely sums up the divide that continues to characterize the study of religion, a divide that I chronicle throughout this book. My answer? I leaned in close to the microphone at the lectern, and, in a voice familiar to anyone who has sat through a sound check before a rock concert, I simply said, "Only. Next question?" After a brief pause for effect, I dropped the pretense and elaborated by saying that if in fact it was also, then the onus would be on her to articulate clearly just what this also entailed or to what in the observable , intersubjective world of human doings it referred. If it entailed some mysterious, other- or inner-worldly intuition of deep, unseen, or transcendent meaning, value, or revelation, then, I went on to say, there were literally thousands of theological institutions scattered throughout North America where this sort of presupposition is not only welcomed but also nurtured and reproduced. I concluded by saying that if religion is studied in a public university as part of the human sciences, then we have no choice but to study it as a thoroughly human doing, from top to bottom-which means that those things we name as religion are conceptualized as historical (i.e., social, political, gendered, economic, biological , etc.) all the way down, without remainder. I then ended with a rhetorical question: "How else could public scholars of religion conceive of it?" Although some heads nodded in agreement-mostly, those heads were connected to the bodies of good friends with whom I had trained at the University of Toronto in the late 1980s and early 1990s-for a number of audience members, my answer was probably not all that convincing and, quite possibly, outright offensive. (Politely informing theologians at another institution some months later that I understood them to be data prompted the latter of these responses, though I later learned that the sharpest comments were reserved for the faculty meeting a few days after my talk.) Failing to understand the important difference between metaphysical reduction ("religion is nothing but ..." talk-an approach shared by believers...

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