Space allows me to do no more than enumerate several other important
issues concerning the institutionalization of religious studies. (1) Can and
should the study of religion take place in other locations besides the university?
In the United States, at least, a full 50 percent of basic research in the natural
sciences is done outside of universities (Drori and Moon 2006: 160). (2)
Chitando, Franzmann, and Stausberg note a connection between the study of
religions at the tertiary level and primary and secondary education, including
the training of teachers. Should the promotion of primary and secondary
education in religious studies be a goal for scholars of religion worldwide? (3)
In North America, Europe, and perhaps elsewhere, scholars of religion have
been active as media, legal, and policy consultants. Is this an emerging activity
worldwide? Especially in what has come to be known as a post-9/11 world,
in which concerns for national security seem unavoidably to touch upon
religions and religious identities, it certainly seems desirable for national leaders
to understand religions better than they sometimes do today. (4) Inasmuch as
the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services governs education, for
example distance learning, to what extent will that agreement have an impact,
beneficial or detrimental, on the study of religion, especially in poorer countries?
(5) Several authors note changing demands placed upon researchers by the
societies in which they live and work, as, for example, in Japan’s Twenty-first
Century Center of Excellence initiative. How should scholars of religions
conduct themselves in a world which increasingly demands that scholarship
should have social relevance and a potential for marketability?
Objects, methods, and theories
Gili Drori and Hyeyoung Moon (2006: 178) write, ‘To a certain degree...
all educational activities worldwide are glocalized [sic] forms of science,
presenting the adaptation of modern Western science into a local mold.’ The
chapters in this book raise many issues about the objects scholars of religion
study, the methods they employ, and the theories they develop. Here I address
only one, an issue that cuts through objects, methods, and theories, all three.
To what extent is the study of religion a form of Western science imposed on
the rest of the world?
One difficulty concerns the language in which to frame this question. It is
probably unhelpful to speak of a clash of civilizations in which the study of
religion fights as a foot-soldier in a global campaign to spread Western
civilization—terminology that would have the opposite effect from what
someone like Samuel Huntington (1996) would desire. It is also probably
unhelpful to see the study of religion as a representative of McWorld, one that
some people will inevitably resist through jihad(cf. Barber 1995). Such
language may capture something about the historical origin and expansion of
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GREGORY D. ALLES