Religious Studies: A Global View

religious or even specific theological allegiances. In like manner, given the right

circumstances, one may be fortunate to supplement one’s familiarity with

Richard Trexler’s work on reverence and profanity in the study of religion

with the observation of the reverential attitude that perhaps prevails among

one’s colleagues. In short, however dangerous or deplorable or merely alien,

the cases just mentioned should remind us that dealing with religion is more

than dealing with the history of ideas or with colorful practices in exotic

locations, from which one is always able to return to the safety of modernity.

Confronting these cases forces us to engage in a second order reflection about

modernity, for it is within modernity that these concerns with promoting one’s

religious identity occur, in some cases simply as attempts to ensure institutional

survival in an unforgiving market; just as it is only within the horizon of

modernity that the solicitousness for one’s and others’ Otherness can thrive.

Theoretical approaches

At its best, reflexivity leads to the exploration of the many ways in which

‘religion’ has been understood in the history of the West; to placing the

scholarship on religion in its proper historical context; and to the investigation

of the extent to which terms in other cultures parallel Western ‘religion’. While

there is no North American equivalent of Hans-Michael Haussig’s Der

Religionsbegriff in den Religionen(1999), the first two tasks have been fulfilled

in an exemplary manner by Michel Despland in works such as La religion

en Occident(1979) and L’Émergence des Sciences de la religion(1999).

Unfortunately, the fact that these books have been written in French has led

to their neglect by some of those who, despite professing to have an interest

in the ‘construction’ of this contested subject, routinely ignore work that is

not available in English. Historical awareness also characterizes Ivan Strenski’s

work, most recently in Thinking about Religion(2006). Strenski’s earlier Four

Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History(1987) includes one of the

first discussions in English of Mircea Eliade’s right-wing political activities in

Romania during the 1930s. His Contesting Sacrifice(2002) shows how an

apparently neutral concept such as ‘sacrifice’ functioned in France from the

early modern age into the twentieth century, contributing to the slaughter of

the 1914–1918 war. The realization that scholarship on religion has been

intimately connected with political developments of a frequently reactionary

kind has been explored in a number of publications. Significant among them

is Steven Wasserstrom’s Religion after Religion(1999), a study of the scholars

associated with the Eranos conferences, particularly Gershom Scholem, Eliade,

and Henry Corbin. Despite its many virtues, Wasserstrom’s book should be

read with some caution, as the author’s righteous indignation results in some

unjustified indictments; regrettable also is Wasserstrom’s lack of reflexivity

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GUSTAVO BENAVIDES