Reinventing Religious Studies

Key Writings in the History of a Discipline

Scott S. Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844656561
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317546627
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"Reinventing Religious Studies" offers readers an opportunity to trace the important trends and developments in Religious Studies over the last forty years. Over this time the study of religion has been transformed into a critical discipline informed by a wide range of perspectives from sociology to anthropology, politics to material culture, and economics to cultural theory. "Reinventing Religious Studies" brings together key writings which have helped shape scholarship, teaching and learning in the field. All the essays are drawn from the CSSR Bulletin, a provocative, occasionally irreverent, and always critical journal which has long been at the centre of debates in Religious Studies. This collection will prove invaluable for students and scholars of theory and method in Religious Studies. It offers readers a unique opportunity to understand the history of key issues in the study of religion and what remains central to the study of religion today.

1. FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS: THE COUNCIL OF SOCIETIES FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION, 1969–2009

Harold Remus

My first encounter with professional societies in the field of religion was at Union Seminary, New York, in December of 1962. I was representing Fortress Press, newly minted by bringing under one roof the publishing arms of two Lutheran denominations that had merged. I had come on as one of two editors hired by the new press in September of that year.

The other new editor, Norman Hjelm (later Director of Fortress Press), and I had both graduated from university and seminary, had done some graduate work, and had been working as pastors. And we were white and male. In my case, it had been employment as a pastor in Princeton, after two years as a translator and editor at the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva following a year on a Fulbright in Göttingen. In these respects we were fairly typical of the students I surveyed in 1969–70 for the chapter on graduate students in religion for Claude Welch’s Graduate Education in Religion: A Critical Appraisal (1971: 203–19): religious background and often religious commitment; college or university; ministerial training in a professional school; graduate study in a divinity school institution and/or a university often connected with such; and (not least) white and male.

Our backgrounds were also similar to those of the members of the National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI) and the Society of Biblical Literature meetings that December at Union. But changes were in the wings. Welch’s groundbreaking book spelled out those changes and why they were occurring. Following World War II education had become a growth industry. Included in the growth was the academic study of religion, distinct as a field from professional training in theology, with departments and programs of religion multiplying and expanding in both public and private institutions of higher learning (Welch 1971: vii). That entailed a move from teaching of religion (inculcation) to teaching about religion (in the phrasing of Justice Goldberg in Abington vs. Schempp), which became the assumed paradigm in the field, politically useful, if not necessarily academically defensible (Cady & Brown 2002: 91–2). These changes were evident among some of the graduate students who returned our questionnaires and those whom I interviewed. Increasingly they were younger, entered graduate study immediately after receiving a baccalaureate degree in religious studies, and enrolled in a graduate program in religious studies at a college or university, whether private or (since Schempp) increasingly in a public institution. While the students were still apt to be connected with a religious institution, the tie was looser than in earlier generations and their interest in non-Christian religions was often greater (Welch 1971: 203–4).

These demographic changes were not evident at Union that December. Nor were the thousands present at annual meetings today presaged by the attendance at that 1962 gathering. The plenaries at Union were seated comfortably in a large lecture hall. The book publishers—who now fill up a huge exhibition hall at meetings—were accommodated in a small classroom at Union, with the six or so of us present laying out our wares on modest tables. However, the NABI, representing college instructors in religion, was at that meeting already on its way to reconstituting itself the following year (1963) as the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) would soon also be in ferment, resulting in a sweeping reorganization initiated at its annual meeting in Toronto in 1969 and finalized in New York in 1970.

The numbers were growing in those societies as well as in other societies in the field, corresponding to the greater numbers of instructors in the field and of graduate students preparing to enter the field. For the six societies that came together to form the Council on the Study of Religion in 1970 that posed record-keeping problems: maintaining membership and subscription rolls. Today I still jot notes on the back of some 3″ × 5″ cards once used to keep track of members of a society that had been stored in a shoebox handed over early on to the newly formed Executive Office of the Council on the Study of Religion at Waterloo Lutheran (later Wilfrid Laurier) University in Waterloo, to be entered into the Council’s electronic database.

Another concern was scholarly communication. How to get specialized monographs into the hands of those few hundred scholars (or less) who would order them for their institution’s libraries or for their own libraries? The bottleneck was publishers who had to sell enough copies to break even; those monographs couldn’t pass the numbers muster and the prices seemed burdensome to scholars. There was also the question of how to alert scholars to these new publications through reviews.

Also of concern was the nature of the professional societies. Did the way they and their national and regional meetings were constituted and managed meet the needs of the increasing number of scholars and the newer breed of scholars? Were the meetings set up to take account of new fields or subfields or reconfiguring of familiar fields? What was the relation, if any, between the societies, those gatherings, the research society members carried on, and the questions around publication?

There was the question of connecting institutions looking to fill positions in the now more numerous departments and programs of religious studies with graduates seeking employment. Already at the time of the formation of the Council in 1969, employment of graduates was becoming a concern (cf. Welch 1971: 97–110). Some form of placement assistance was needed.

Was there some way to have one newsletter serving all the societies in place of those published by each society? Economies of editing, production, and distribution were envisaged and, not least, a means of facilitating communication among the various societies and specializations—interdisciplinary thinking and planning—and advancing religious studies as a field in the academy and in the public mind.

How could the electronic technologies coming on stream help societies address some of these needs in record-keeping, in research and publication, and in the organizing and running of annual meetings?

Not least, how was the new field—or new old field—to be conceived in light of the ferment on campuses in the 1960s and the general dis-ease of the boomer generation with the social, political, and cultural status quo in the wake of significant civil rights actions in the United States and in the midst of a very unpopular war?

Both the larger and the smaller societies saw formation of some agency that could address these concerns as a desideratum. Six societies led the way, forming the Council on the Study of Religion in 1969: the American Academy of Religion; the Catholic Biblical Association; the Catholic Theological Society of America; the College Theology Society; the Society of Biblical Literature; and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

This brief history will plot some of these concerns as they came to be addressed, or not, by the Council. It will also note how the changing nature of religious studies and religious studies societies and the needs and opportunities they perceived led to attrition in the membership of the Council, to diminishing of its influence and functions, and ultimately dissolution. More attention will be devoted to the beginnings, where the foundation and directions were established, than to the subsequent history that ensued. Much of the history can and will be documented from the pages of the Council’s newsletter, the Bulletin, to which this volume is devoted.¹

The mustiness, even quaintness, of much of this history may serve as a reminder that, once upon a time, time did not move as quickly as now or with so many digital resources to hand or as many pressures external to the field. Nonetheless, much that we today call “religious studies” and its current manifestations derive from those earlier decades.²

FIRST STEPS

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), notably in the person of ACLS Executive Associate James N. Settle, played a significant role in the formation of the Council and, in general, in a fostering and encouraging of new directions for religious studies societies and in outlining what makes for a successful professional society.

In an address to the Society of Biblical Literature in December 1968, Settle noted the recent development of professional societies from mere “clubs of scholars” into “mass societies” dedicated to scholarly communication in “matters pertaining to their discipline” (Settle 1969: 3). He also noted “the increasing decentralization of scholarship,” thanks to “modern air travel, the wide-spread use of microfilm, microfiche, and the like”—to the disgruntlement of some traditionalists (ibid.: 7). In response to such changes as these as well as those within academic disciplines, some societies had been “reorganizing in an effort to serve their growing memberships more effectively and more efficiently” (ibid.: 7). Those societies that failed to adapt to change would lose their members to new societies and remain scholarly clubs (ibid.: 4).

Essential to change was a paid, activist executive officer whose central office would provide information not available elsewhere, including opportunities for research and lists of recipients of research grants, a “personals column” on promotions and new hirings, announcements of scholars from abroad available for lectures, and updates on what was going on in government that would be significant for the field in question and which individuals in government were friendly to the field (ibid.: 5). Also essential would be a newsletter with an able editor ready to commit “time and effort to make it a good one” (ibid.: 5). Placement services, pedagogy, and the creating of good textbooks should also be of concern to professional societies (ibid.: 7). Academic standards, minimum library holdings for the various levels of instruction, and financial resources would also be part of the picture (ibid.: 6).

In words that would prove to be prophetic, Settle predicted (ibid.: 4) that serious response to change by a professional society would bring growing pains and evoke opposition:

Organizational problems will multiply. Membership dues will increase. The constitution will undergo strain. Opponents will accuse proponents. Members of essential committees will be classified as entrepreneurs. The executive secretary will be damned as an empire builder. But the association will grow in wisdom and prestige in size and effectiveness. And it will stumble into the last quarter of the 20th century, bringing its discipline along with it.

Flux was the order of the day, and in no field was “the pressure for reconstitution and redefinition more apparent than in the broad area of religion” seemingly characterized by “fragmentation” (ibid.: 8). Settle saw it otherwise, with a discrete discipline emerging and “humanistic scholars … waiting to see whether or not the appropriate scholarly organizations will exercise the degree of concern necessary to direct this foster child into its maturity” (ibid.: 8).³

Settle acknowledged (ibid.) that his observations drew on a background paper that Claude Welch had delivered at a conference of thirty-seven prominent scholars that the ACLS had convened in Princeton in 1968 “to discuss the coordination of the activities of academic organizations for the study of religion.”⁴ In the inaugural issue of the Council’s Bulletin, Welch, now the Chairman (as the terminology of the day had it) of the new Council, traced the steps leading to the formation of the Council, specifically a “constituting convention”, in New York in May 1969 and the first meeting of the Council in October 1969 in Boston, with official delegates as well as executive secretaries of the societies in attendance and invited guests and observers (Welch 1970: 4).

The “paradoxical answer” to the question “Why still another organization in the field of religion?” was that there were already too many such, resulting in overlappings and r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. For such a time as this: the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, 1969–2009
• Part I: Inventing and reinventing the field of religious studies
• Part II: Method and theory in religious studies
• Part III: Teaching religion
• Part IV: Women and the bible in religious studies
• Part V: Religion and religious studies in civic life
• Part VI: Religious studies and identity politics
• Part VII: Islam and 9/11
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index