who do not hold chairs in religious studies continue to make valuable contri-
butions to the non-confessional study of religion. Theory does not currently
receive much explicit attention in most other countries, apart from the sociology
of religion and new interest in theoretical matters in Finland (Pyysiänen and
Anttonen [eds] 2002) and Denmark (e.g. Jensen and Rothstein [eds] 2000;
Jensen 2003), often correlated with cognitive science. In recent decades, there
has been an ongoing shift of interest towards contemporary religions and
changing religious environments, and religions are increasingly studied with
ethnographic methods, sometimes combined with philology. In all likelihood,
philological methods will continue to lose ground, simply because training in
languages other than English is receding.
Last but not least, political and administrative issues will certainly continue
to influence the shape of the academic landscape. Current developments include:
the enforced mergers of departments; a focus on larger and interdisciplinary
research units at the expense of the classical monograph, built on decades of
individual research; operating in research groups for briefer periods of time,
e.g. five people working three years on a topic instead of one scholar fifteen
years; the politicization of research, with funding agencies favoring politically
correct and ‘relevant’ topics at the expense of the creativity and innovative
power of the individual scholar; the blossoming of symposia and conferences,
taking much time from extended primary research work and resulting in the
channeling of scholarly output away from journals and into conference
anthologies; and the increasing quantitative ‘measuring’ of academic and
scholarly output, resulting in a shift to shorter-term activities.ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For comments on previous drafts I am indebted to Catharina Raudvere, Erik
Sand, Jørgen Podeman Sørensen, Maya Burger, Ingvild Sælid Gilhus, Karl-
Heinz Kohl, Volkhard Krech, Nils G. Holm, Håkan Rydving, and Jan Bremmer.
In particular, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Giovanni Casadio for
numerous important corrections, clarifications, and suggestions as well as a
vigorous debate on several issues. I also wish to thank Charles Guittard, Sven
Bretfeld, Jim Cox, John Hinnells, and Michael Houseman for further
information. A much fuller version of this essay is scheduled to appear serially
in Religionin 2008.REFERENCES
Alles, Gregory D. 1991, ‘Rudolf Otto and the politics of Utopia’, Religion, vol. 21,
no. 3, pp. 235–56.38
MICHAEL STAUSBERG