In Pursuit of Dialogue

In his combative response to my Perspectives essay, Robert Segal attempts to bring further clarity to an issue which we both agree deserves serious attention: methodological crisis in study of Unfortunately, I find his response so laden with poorly argued and picayune distinctions that it is neither clarifying nor helpful in producing a constructive dialogue between scholars in religious on different methodological approaches they employ. Nevertheless, I do appreciate opportunity which editor of JSSR has afforded me to further pursue that constructive dialogue by allowing me to answer Segal's charges and restate my position. First let me say that I do not believe that religious alone is besieged by a methodological crisis. Indeed, as Segal has pointed out, all of disciplines of social sciences and humanities have been experiencing confusion about character of methods they use and identity and integrity of their respective fields. Religious is certainly not alone in experiencing methodological confusion but, I would argue, it has never been clearly defined as a discipline distinct from various social sciences and humanities and that it is particularly susceptible to methodological crises because of this fact. Though Segal points out that with Max Miller's Religionswissenschaft and subsequent work of Joachim Wach, Mircea Eliade and others, an attempt was made to establish a discipline of History of Religion, I would argue that of rdigion, itself, borrowed its methods from history, sociology, phenomenology and theology. What made of unique was its manner of combining these borrowed methods and particular kinds of questions it asked of religions it studied. Yet even if we could establish some kind of uniqueness and internal integrity to of religion, given growth of different fields within religious during and after development of of from the scientific study of to religion and literature to philosophical and theological studies to biblical and textual studies, there are very few scholars outside of most power-hungry of historians of that would want to encompass all of vast types of scholarship that are done in religious under rubric of history of religion

Epistemology · Sociology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions