Half a Life in Religious Studies: Confessions of an ‘Historical Historian’

Abstract

When people ask whether I am in ‘religious studies’, ‘history’, or ‘divinity’, I answer ‘Yes’. It all depends upon what question is being asked at any moment, in what context, and toward what end. We all express ourselves through various modes of being or universes of discourse. When asked at this moment to reflect on what someone in my generation of historians, particularly me, might wish to pass on to scholars in the two generations that are at work succeeding ours, I pause. Given my peculiar history vis-à-vis religious studies — a curricular zone for which I never consciously prepared myself — will not everything seem idiosyncratic if not idiopathic?