Response to Flood

GAVIN FLOOD CALLS FOR religious studies to become more open to “religiously based standpoints,” in other words, to “traditions’ self-inquiry within a framework of rational discourse.” His paper offers three main reasons for this. The first reason is that such standpoints greatly facilitate comparison, because, unlike reductive accounts of religion, which leave nothing substantive left to compare, and area-specific accounts, which are reluctant to hypothesize beyond their boundaries, religiously based standpoints seek to translate their “traditions’ semantic density” into a language that can “communicate and illuminate” other traditions. Religious studies, Flood notes, might ideally be akin to a “tent of meeting,” a place where religious traditions can encounter one another, be corrected and emended in dialogue with one another and with the social scientific study of religion, and inform a broader public about such concerns as the nature of the “human self” or the “human good.” The second reason is that by excluding religiously based standpoints, the study of religion misses something crucial about the material it is claiming to be theorizing about. As Flood puts it, “external accounts” (focused on cause and explanation) are “often antithetical to the internal claims of traditions,” and are therefore, on Flood’s reasoning, incomplete. The third reason is that “arguments from within traditions have broad implications for metaphysics, ethics, and cultural politics.” Only by taking such arguments seriously, contends Flood, will religious studies “survive into the future.”

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