T
HE PRECEDING CHAPTERSdo not yet provide a global vision of religious
studies. They provide satellite images, as it were, of the study of religion
in different parts of the globe. To have a global vision, these images need to
be stitched together. Placing them between the covers of a book goes part of
the way to doing that. It is like spreading satellite images out next to one
another on a large table-top. But it is not yet the composite image that one
finds, for example, when images are combined seamlessly.
In this Afterword, almost a chapter in itself more than a typical Afterword,
I want to try to stitch the images together a little. That is because a collection
of region by region views amplifies regional identities and commonalities, but
tends to neglect transregional connections and global movements. As a result,
it seems useful to transgress the normal, behind-the-scenes role that editing
entails and assume a voice. So in this Afterword I stitch the pieces together.
The composite image that results will not be seamless, and it will not have a
very high resolution. But perhaps it can contribute to developing a global vision
of religious studies.^1
In a sense, such a vision is not new. Each of the scholars whom as a student
I came to regard as the leading figures in the field had a global vision of religious
studies. I suspect that the same is true of leading scholars in other parts of the
world, too. I have already mentioned Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s vision of
interreligious dialogue in the introduction. Mircea Eliade’s vision may have
been more limited, but I still remember reading as an undergraduate many
years ago a sentence that may have been the ultimate inspiration for this book:When, in one or two generations, perhaps even earlier, we have historians
of religions who are descended from Australian, African, or Melanesian
tribal societies, I do not doubt that, among other things, they will reproach
Western scholars for their indifference to the scale of values indigenous to
these societies.
(Eliade 1969: 75)By the 1990s Ninian Smart was envisioning a global context for all kinds
of reflection having to do with worldviews, including not only the study of
religion but also philosophy (Smart 1999: 261–372) and Christian theology
(Smart 1996). Part of that vision was his proposal for a World Academy of
Religion, which would ‘not [be] tied to the rightly and strictly scholarly and
scientific stance of the IAHR’ and so would ‘embrace all kinds of committed
and non-committed scholarly organisations’ (Smart 1990: 305).
Smith’s, Eliade’s, and Smart’s visions mostly assumed the form of dreams.
They referred to what will or might occur. Today we should talk about what
is. What can we say about this activity of human beings all over the planet
that we call the study of religion? To avoid misunderstanding, I should
emphasize that a global vision is never, in Thomas Nagel’s (1986) still useful302
GREGORY D. ALLES