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ABSTRACT
A better future for the study of religion would incorporate innovative and engaging approaches to bridge the gaps between popular and scholarly understandings of what comprises religion and why it remains relevant and significant in our world. This article calls for studying religion in a manner that emphasizes how it is thoroughly enmeshed with other ways of acting and existing in the world. The study of religion appears here as the study of how people attribute certain things as special, powerful, and authoritative, which conveys much about how people construct and manage social and cultural forms more generally. We argue that religion matters not because it supposedly represents a unique, autonomous realm of life, but rather because its workings are related to and paradigmatic for many other forms of human behavior.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Stephen C. Berkwitz is Professor and Department Head of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. His research focuses on Buddhist historical and poetic literature from Sri Lanka, but he teaches and publishes more broadly on South Asian Religions, Theravāda Buddhism, and Theories of Religion. He is the author of books including Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism: Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Buddhist History in the Vernacular: The Power of the Past in Late Medieval Sri Lanka (Brill, 2004).
J. Dané Stoneburner Wallace is an Instructor of Classics at Missouri State University. Her research and teaching interests include political and social rhetoric in the ancient and modern world; ancient religions and comparative mythologies; linguistics, languages, and the power of the Arts and Letters to enhance our collective understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and contemporary cultures across the globe.