Reflecting on the Breadth and Depth of the Field of Religious Studies

It is now generally understood that the field of religious studies is a truly interdisciplinary field. The tensions between the fields of theology and religious studies that plagued departments of Religion, Religious Studies and Theology in the 1970s and 1980s following the rise of Religious Studies as an academic field have thankfully waned. It waned as it should have, given that Religious Studies is not a unitary field. Rather, it is an incredibly broad and diverse field, one in which entails the study of theology and the deployment of theological methodologies, as well as history and historical methodologies, human communities and social scientific approaches, and so forth. Graduating from Columbia University with a Ph.D. in the history of religion with a focus on Buddhist Traditions in 2001, I may have paid lip service to the interdisciplinarity of our field. However, reflecting honestly, like many newly minted Doctors of Philosophy, I was deeply steeped in my own textual and historical studies of my area of specialization, in my case Indian and Tibetan Buddhist tantric literature, and had very little awareness of the breadth or depth of the field of religious studies as an organic whole. Fortunately, my perspective was broadened when I had the wonderful opportunity of serving as a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University from 2001 to 2003. I had the pleasure of being embedded in the Department of Religion there, and was exposed to a vibrant intellectual world that approached the field in a truly interdisciplinary manner, enriched by collaborative links with faculty in other departments whose work engaged with religious phenomena. Thence I moved in 2005 to Santa Clara University, where I had the pleasure of working in a Department of Religious Studies that likewise encouraged and open, collaborative and multidisciplinary approach to religious studies, and which likewise featured rich engagement with theology and the Ignatian approaches to interreligious dialogue and understanding. Meanwhile, while I was at Rice University, I began writing booknotes for Religious Studies Review, and eventually I came to serve as a Buddhism area editor from 2006 to 2007. When the management of Religious Studies Review shifted to Rice University in 2007, I was asked by my former colleagues at Rice to take on an editorial role at the journal. Initially, the role of editor was divided, with Andy Fort staying on as editorial chair, while I assumed the role of review essay editor in 2007. However, in 2011, Andy passed the editorial baton on to me, and I came to assume the role of executive editor for the journal, which included my earlier position of review area editor. I served in this role for four years, overseeing the production of volumes 37–41. I maintained until I stepped down from the position to serve as a department chair in 2015, passing the baton on to our current executive editor, Mark MacWilliams. As executive editor at Religious Studies Review one has many roles. These include overseeing the work of the various area editors and helping to ensure that a steady stream of booknotes is generated by each area. One also has the responsibility to recruit new area editors when this is necessary. The executive editor also coordinated between Rice University and the publisher, and helped plan the annual meeting in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion/Society for Biblical Literature national conference. The biggest responsibility of the executive editor is recruiting review essays for each issue. This also entails working with the area editors, for naturally we do not want these major essays to reflect a single area or methodological perspective. It was while serving in this role that I truly came to understand the truly multidisciplinary nature of our field. During my years as first a review essay editor and later as executive editor, I oversaw many dozens of review essays. I worked with area editors at the national meeting to brainstorm about possible review essay ideas. Typically, we would try to identify trends in our field, and would seek to come up with appropriate review essay topics to address them. Sometime the area editors would suggest authors for the essays, but often it would fall to me to recruit authors with the requisite expertise to write on the topic. I would then work with the authors to get the essays in on time for the issue, and would undertake the initial round of editing and revisions with the author. I always found this to be the most enjoyable part of the job, as it was generally a pleasant experience working with the authors, and I always found the end result to be a learning experience. Reflecting back on this period, I see that my experience working as an editor for Religious Studies Review deeply enriched my understanding and appreciation of the field of Religious Studies. The topics covered during my tenure were diverse, both topically and methodologically. During this period, we published review essays dealing with theology, the philosophy of religion, comparative religious studies, the history of religions approach, as well as social scientific approaches to the study of religions. The topics covered were also diverse, ranging from the ancient to the modern period, with focuses on religion in African, Asian, Euro-American, and LatinX cultural contexts, as well as new religious movements. I came to understand that all of these approaches were meaningful and worthy of serious study, and I was happy to play a role in creating a venue for such a wide-ranging exploration of religious phenomena. In conclusion, I feel that Religious Studies Review is a wonderful resource, one that enable anyone to widen their perspective beyond the concerns that arise from their area of specialization, to take note of the broader trends that are sweeping across the field as a whole. Doing so is beneficial for any scholar, for it brings to one's attention the broader intellectual trends that will eventually impact one's own field, and enables one to see connections between one's own research and the larger intellectual questions that are engaging the attention of the wider religious studies' intellectual community, and might soon come to be important concerns for one's colleagues in one's field as well

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