Religion

ISSN: 0048-721X (Print) 1096-1151 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rrel20

‘What’s in a name?’: the case for ‘Study of Religions’

Steven J. Sutcliffe

To cite this article: Steven J. Sutcliffe (2020) ‘What’s in a name?’: the case for ‘Study of
Religions’, Religion, 50:1, 129-136, DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2019.1685181
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2019.1685181

Published online: 10 Nov 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 275

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rrel20
RELIGION
2020, VOL. 50, NO. 1, 129–136
https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2019.1685181

‘What’s in a name?’: the case for ‘Study of Religions’

Steven J. Sutcliffe
School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, New College, Edinburgh, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article makes the case for adopting ‘Study of Religions’ as a Poststructuralism; post-
single common disciplinary name for cross-cultural, comparative 1960s; discipline; paradigm;
and theoretical studies of ‘religion/s’. I argue that the grammatical religious studies; study of
religions
and substantive format of this name adequately addresses
disciplinary requirements and resolves a longstanding debate in
the field. It also supplies a distinctive, recognizable international
brand. While poststructuralist and deconstructionist work in the
field has been stimulating, it has not fostered positive disciplinary
identification. Adoption of a single name will promote centripetal
drive and theoretical coherence which is where the most effective
work in the Study of Religions has been done since the 1960s –
and continues.

Post-structuralist critique and disciplinary formation

Writing recently in ‘self-critical mode’, Michael Stausberg identifies an ‘institutional mar-
ginality’ in the academic study of religions which he claims corresponds to its ‘intellectual
mediocrity’ (Stausberg 2016, 793). He sees ‘little diffusion of specific issues in study of reli-
gion\s to other disciplines’, and suggests that the field has largely ‘been at the receiving end
of inter- or transdisciplinary innovations’ (Stausberg 2016, 793–794).1 Whether this
assessment is pessimistic or realistic, it comes within a reflexive tradition in the academic
study of religion which links methodological problems more or less directly to disciplinary
identity and thereby to name. An earlier phase of reflexive discussion focused on reform-
ing the field’s methodology and extending its reach and scope (for example, Pye 1989).
Subsequently, and in contrast, under the centrifugal impact of post-structuralism – here
serving as a meta-category denoting deconstruction, discourse analysis, post-colonialism
and neo-Marxian critical theory – a number of ‘whole field’ critiques were published
characterized by repudiation rather than reform. Some acquired near-canonical status
for early career scholars in the early 2000s: for example Manufacturing Religion
(McCutcheon 1997), Orientalism and Religion (King 1999) and The Ideology of Religious
Studies (Fitzgerald 2000).2 There is no space to engage adequately with these positions:
each offers bracing and occasionally brilliant analysis, but the point I wish to emphasize

CONTACT Steven J. Sutcliffe s.sutcliff[email protected]

1
Stausberg’s preference for ‘study of religion\s’ with the idiosyncratic back slash was first proposed in Engler and Stausberg
(2011): see below.
2
Including the present author: I was fortunate to be taught by Richard King at Stirling University in the early 1990s; I wrote
the back cover review of Manufacturing Religion attributed to the British Association for the Study of Religions; and as a
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, I was briefly a colleague of Timothy Fitzgerald at Stirling in 2001–2002.
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
130 S. J. SUTCLIFFE

here is that their relentless deconstruction has had the effect of sawing at the institutional
branch on which the field is perched. The most radical example is Fitzgerald’s argument
for the dissolution of Religious Studies into Cultural Studies (Fitzgerald 2000, 10, 19–20).
If you accept this, the logical conclusion is to quit the field.3
Across roughly the same period the field has had to deal with two additional pressures.
The first is the return of unresolved religion-church-state relationships in many of the geo-
polities in which the field has been strong, such as Western Europe and North America
(Wiegers 2002, Part One), as well as in the emerging landscapes of post-Soviet Eastern
Europe (Bubik and Hoffmann 2015). Both contexts supply examples of a newly
confident ‘public religion’ which has re-entered discussions on the relationship between
state institutions, including publicly-funded education, and religious organizations, who
may increasingly co-operate on common causes in the face of a secular civil society.4
The influence of these and related issues on a non-normative, scientific study of religion
may be discerned both in the sometimes fuzzy views expressed by undergraduate students
and in the expectations of research funders in relation to the requirement to contribute to
what in the UK is known as KEI: ‘knowledge exchange and impact’.
The second pressure on the study of religion, if cognitivist analysis is plausible, arises
from the possibility that there is an evolved human proclivity to overestimate agency
and to detect hidden purpose and telos in our environments. If this is so – and consider-
ably more cross-cultural data is required to test the hypothesis – it may make (religious)
accounts of meaning and design more palatable than the neo-Darwinian synthesis and
possibly ‘easier’ to grasp (McCauley 2011), both in the classroom and in everyday life.
On top of the poststructuralist critique of disciplinarity ‘internal’ to the field, these
‘external’ societal factors may reinforce emic and other normative understandings. This
combination potentially delivers a double whammy in classroom teaching and appli-
cations for research funding predicated upon a different model of studying religion.
Caught in this crossfire, it is encouraging that some audiences still want the kind of analy-
sis upheld by the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR).5 However,
I would argue that overall the effect of this ‘internal/external dialectic’ (Sutcliffe 2009, 370)
has been to undercut disciplinary confidence. The field is increasingly represented as a
methodologically inclusive arena with more-or-less unrestricted input and porous bound-
aries. But an ‘open house’ on interdisciplinarity – itself increasingly a banal invocation –
can allow subtly normative, confessional and theological positions to circulate in new
guises. Insofar as this happens, the field becomes repositioned as a kind of marketplace
of ‘views’, ‘approaches’ and ‘conversations’ rather than a centripetally-oriented theoretical
and disciplinary enterprise. As a result, the societal and environmental conditions for the
production of religion as a set of human practices may less often come to form the theor-
etical object of research or the subject matter of teaching. And analytical focus may grav-
itate to an ever-finer granularity in eliciting and parsing emic interpretations and
normative understandings.
3
As Pye (1994, 53) points out: ‘Why be concerned about admission figures and research funding in “religious studies” if the
subject has no backbone anyway?’
4
For example, see the complexities of the UK situation between 1997 and 2010 discussed in Beckford (2010).
5
‘The IAHR seeks to promote the activities of all scholars … contributing to the historical, social, and comparative study of
religion. As such, the IAHR is the preeminent international forum for the critical, analytical and cross-cultural study of
religion, past and present. The IAHR is not a forum for confessional, apologetical, or other similar concerns’ https://
www.iahrweb.org/about.php (accessed 20 October 2019).
 RELIGION 131

Insofar as comparative and theoretical focus is lost, some iterations of ‘Religious

Studies’ may imply that the term is used as a ‘flag of convenience’:
[T]here may arise the temptation to enjoy the flight to our personal interests in one specific
religious tradition, to disappear entirely into some specialized philosophical, textual study, or
to pursue just one or two analytical questions to the exclusion or at least the relative disregard
of others. Such anarchy may seem attractive, but then it also implies the dissolution of ‘reli-
gious studies’ except as a flag of convenience. (Pye 1994, 52)

The possibility of a ‘flight’ to ‘one specific religious tradition’ is in one sense a function of
the increasing specialization underpinned by digitization in the quarter century since Pye’s
critique. But Pye questions whether ‘single tradition tradition’ enterprises such as Buddhist
Studies, Islamic Studies or Christian Studies (for example) conducted solely on the basis of
internal hermeneutical analysis conform to the IAHR mandate. In fact, his metaphor
draws attention to the possibility of an enterprise appropriating ‘the flag’ of ‘Religious
Studies’ entirely strategically.

Paradigm or field?
Notwithstanding the value of the deconstructionists’ wake-up/re-set call, I would argue
that the most effective iterations of the field as an intellectual and pedagogical site have
emerged when theories and methods have been developed within a ‘paradigm’, broadly
speaking. Arguably the most productive in the post-1960s period, especially in Anglo-
phone circles, has been phenomenology of religion: for example, in the version popular-
ized by Ninian Smart which combined vertical analysis of the ‘dimensions of religion’ with
horizontal description of a taxonomy of ‘world religions’ or ‘worldviews’ (Cox 2006, 159–
167). Since the early 1990s a new paradigm, the cognitive study of religion, has emerged. It
has shown a strong appetite for theorizing across the ‘two cultures’ of Geisteswissenschaft
and Naturwissenschaft, thus addressing challenges of interdisciplinarity seriously rather
than merely rhetorically (Sutcliffe 2008). However, its interaction with another recent
emerging paradigm – discursive study (Taira 2013) – has so far been modest. These para-
digms may ultimately be incommensurable but their existence is at least a sign of disciplin-
ary intent.
To ‘recapture the flag’6 – that is, to focus and nourish the disciplinary debate – I argue
that we should now adopt a single common name and brand that will be internationally
recognizable. Three brief caveats are required. First, I write from a UK context in which
‘Religious Studies’ has faced particular methodological obstacles since the early 1990s
through its incorporation within the hybrid rubric ‘Theology and Religious Studies’
(TRS). Second, I focus on nomenclature in English.7 Third, I refer only to the post-
1960s period because this is when the field achieved its recognizable profile.
To clarify what we are doing we need to know what to call it: this in a nutshell is what
‘what’s in a name’ means. Notwithstanding their internal debates, the name of modern
disciplines like sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics and philosophy have been
6
As a warning to the field from the practice of a new religion, Esalen Institute co-founder Dick Price (1930–1985) considered
that ‘to the extent that it lived up to its central insistence that “No one captures the flag”, [Esalen] had an uncanny ability
to become just about anything to anyone’ (Kripal 2008, 496).
7
Clearly there is important material in other languages which should be heard and rehearsed: nevertheless an Anglophone
focus is defendable on account of the lingua franca of IAHR and the globalization of English.
132 S. J. SUTCLIFFE

relatively stable. In comparison, in the post-1960s period alone, our departments have
veered between calling themselves Comparative Religion, History of Religions, Religious
Studies, Science of Religion, Studies in Religion, Study of Religion (singular) and Study
of Religions (plural). Although certain titles/translations predominate – ‘Religionswis-
senschaft’ or ‘Religious Studies’ is used in two-thirds (n = 70; Melvær and Stausberg
2013, 7) – as many as eight or nine names are in regular use.8
As with proliferation of names, so with content. In North America, Benson (1987, 91),
writing in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion, noted that ‘the religious studies
curriculum has become, increasingly, a crazy quilt of courses encompassing many disci-
plines, eras, regions, languages, and methods of inquiry’. Morris (2010, 330), writing in
New Zealand, found Religious Studies to be ‘huge, complex and coreless’. Long (1995,
15), sympathetic to hermeneutical plurality, nevertheless admitted that the field could
be considered ‘a confused patchwork of potpourri, a jabberwocky of loose ends and bad
fits’. From Kuhnian philosophy of science, Ryba (2009, 361) described the field as a ‘post-
critical witches brew’ characterized by an idiosyncratic and heterogeneous ‘viewiness’. ‘So
disordered is religious studies’, Ryba argued, ‘that it should be considered pre-scientific
(perhaps like Alchemy)’ (Ryba 2009, 361). Similarly Segal argues that ‘not only are
there concurrent … would-be paradigms, but they never engage each other. At most,
there are skirmishes between entrenched camps’ (Segal 2009, 353).
The disciplinary impact of this overarching ‘viewiness’ (Ryba) is summarized by Alles
in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion: ‘there is still very little by way of a
universally acknowledged theoretical or methodological canon’. Alles deduces, positively,
that ‘the field admits a considerable amount of creativity’, but notes that, as a result, his
own entry ‘will inevitably be idiosyncratic, reflecting regional and personal preferences
at least as much as any greater unity’ (Alles 2005, 8765). Alles is troubled by the question
of whether the study of religion is ‘an academic discipline, united in the application of a
specific method, or … an unruly, polymethodic field, including any and every academic
pursuit that somehow treats religious data?’ (Alles 2005, 8765). Pye previously rec-
ommended dealing with this tension through patient commitment to ‘discipline identifi-
cation’ on the practical grounds that ‘many recruits to Religious Studies programs are
trained in one or more [pre-existing disciplines] … and not necessarily in the study of reli-
gion’ (Pye 1991, 42). However, since the early 1990s the combination of growth in digi-
tized data, ever-finer specialization, and poststructuralist centrifugality have
dramatically increased pressure on ‘discipline identification’.

‘What’s in a name?’
The question of disciplinary name has been constant since the early days of IAHR. The
first article of its periodical Numen contains an impassioned rumination by president
Raffaele Pettazoni who points out that, just as the first issue of the earlier German
journal Archiv für Religionswissenschaft (1898–1942) opened with the question ‘was ist
Religionswissenschaft?’, so must he begin in 1954 with the same question: ‘qu’est-ce

8
Sometimes multiple designations are deployed in the same institution: for example, the web pages of Leiden University
used three different designations across their programme, track and course names: Religious Studies, Comparative Reli-
gion, and Study of Religion respectively (Melvær and Stausberg 2013, 35, fn. 7).
 RELIGION 133

que la science des religions?’ Whatever progress there may have been in the fifty years
between these two inaugural editions of major European journals, continues Pettazoni:
Il faut avouer que des divergences considérables subsistent encore parmi ses représentants,
qu’il s’agisse soit de la manière générale de la concevoir, soit de la méthode à suivre, soit
encore du nom a lui donner. (Pettazoni 1954, 1)

It must be admitted that considerable differences remain among its representatives, whether
in the general way of conceiving [the discipline], or in the method to be followed, or even in
the name to be given to it [my translation].

Conception, methodology, name: these ‘still outstanding and considerable differences’

were already in 1954 perceived as a disciplinary problem. They remain so today. The
most recent intervention is the proposal for a new name by Wiebe and Martin ([2014]
2016), first circulated in preparation for discussion at the 2015 IAHR Congress in
Erfurt.9 Wiebe and Martin ([2014] 2016, 9) point out that ‘issues with the name of the
“International Association for the History of Religions” have been with the IAHR from
the beginning’. After chronicling the name change debate up to the 1995 IAHR Congress
in Mexico City, when a motion to adopt the title ‘International Association for the Study of
Religion’ was defeated, Wiebe and Martin ([2014] 2016, 9f, 13) explain their rationale for
proposing the ‘International Association for Historical and Scientific Studies of Religions’
(IAHSSR).
Their case is carefully prepared and their proposed name has the merit of combining
plurality in theoretical object of study with a controlled methodology that incorporates
but extends the historical approach. However, the new name is long and complex:
difficult to remember, inconvenient to use, and awkward to brand.
I propose a different name with similar intent but based on a simpler and more prag-
matic case. I recommend the use of ‘Study of Religions’ for three main reasons. First, this
formulation embeds the crucial syntactical distinction between predicate (‘study of’) and
object (‘religion/s’) which is elided in ‘Religious Studies’. Second, the English term works
as a rough analog of non-anglophone terminology such as German Religionswissenschaft,
Norwegian religionsvitenskap or Swedish religionsvetenskap, which suggests that the pre-
dicate/object structure has transnational currency. The difference is that the object in
English is in the plural number: ‘religions’. I have argued elsewhere that the idea of ‘reli-
gions’ as multiple formations suggests a model of reified ‘things’ which can reinforce the
problematic discourse on ‘world religions’ (Sutcliffe 2016, 23–27). However, ‘religions’
strategically communicates a plural theoretical object and in an educational environment
in which the monoform ‘religion’ and/or ‘single tradition’ studies are becoming wide-
spread, the plural number is distinctive.10 I also use a forward slash, ‘Study of Religion/
s’ (SoR/s), to indicate that the courses I teach include (or assume) both empirical plurality
and theoretical uniformity.

9
the 2016 reprint appears as the first item in Part 1 of that volume, appropriately enough entitled ‘What’s in a Name?’ My
title acknowledges this usage. The question itself is asked rhetorically by Juliet in Act 2 Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet as she soliloquises on the problem that Romeo is a member of a rival family.
10
Adopting ‘religions’ [plural] also address the concern expressed by Wiebe and Martin ([2014] 2016, 13) that a name such
as the ‘International Association for the Study of Religion [singular]’ is ‘too inclusivist’ and ‘could well be seen as an invita-
tion to philosophers, theologians and other of similar bent’.
134 S. J. SUTCLIFFE

In an earlier intervention, Engler and Stausberg proposed inserting a backslash, ‘reli-

gion\s’, to communicate orthographically ‘a series of theoretical and meta-theoretical
questions regarding the referents and framing of “religion” and “religions”’ (Engler and
Stausberg 2011, 127, fn. 2). This is close to my preference while retaining a poststructur-
alist note in the surprise use of the backslash. However, the backslash is mostly found in
computing code and mathematics and as such has limited resonance within the study of
religion. In contrast, the forward slash usefully signals the conjunction ‘or’, an alternative
word choice, or a mark of relationship, and each has relevance to the field understood as a
controlled analysis of similarity and difference. There is thus a stronger orthographic-dis-
ciplinary case for using a forward slash rather than a backslash: hence ‘Study of Religion/s’.
At the same time, I recommend a further level of strategic use: when presenting the dis-
cipline ‘externally’, to colleagues in other fields or to the wider public, we can drop the
slash altogether lest ‘/’ be interpreted as a sign of irresolution or pretension: hence
‘Study of Religions’. Abbreviated, this gives two uses: SoR/s (internally) and SoRs
(externally).
Third, there is evidence that the name is already acculturating. Although Melvær and
Stausberg (2013, 8) found that ‘the Study of Religions is not (yet) established as a current
term’, they acknowledge that ‘several national and international associations carry this
designation in their names’. In his online response to their article, Bocking pointed to
the contribution made by UK and Ireland departments to consolidating this brand.
According to Bocking: ‘[T]he name “Study of Religions Dept” was invented by students
at Bath Spa University … ca 1990 (?) after we consulted our students on what would be
the best, unambiguous, alternative to “Religious Studies”’. Bocking mentions its adoption
at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London ‘when the new dept [sic] there was
formed’ and at University College Cork (UCC), Republic of Ireland, from the inception of
its new department. Interestingly Bocking claims that ‘in all 3 cases these were depart-
ments which have had an opportunity in recent times to choose a name rather than inher-
iting one from an earlier era’.11 UCC led on the formation of the Irish Society for the
Academic Study of Religions (ISASR) in 2011, and the IAHR webpage shows that the
plural object ‘religions’ is now used by a majority of member associations.12

Conclusion: ‘Study of Religions’

It might seem absurd to suggest that professional agreement on a common name could be
a good disciplinary move for our field as late as 2020. But I have argued that since the
1960s, a combination of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ pressures has contributed to an increas-
ingly vague or loose academic identity with impact, in some cases, on institutional pur-
chase. Adopting a unifying ‘brand name’ with centripetal resonance will help to
recapture the disciplinary flag and promote a renewed comparative theoretical focus.
To this end, the relatively simple ploy of adopting the name ‘Study of Religions’ can
refocus our field as the systematic study of a plural theoretical object, fostering a new
sense of ‘disciplinary identification’ after poststructuralism. It is true that ‘Study of
11
Brian Bocking, 7 December 2013, 11:13 am, and 1:28 pm: http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/2013/12/06/what-is-
the-study-of-religionsself-presentations-of-the-discipline-on-university-web-pages/ (accessed 31 August 2019). See
Thomas (1984) for an earlier UK usage of SoR(s).
12
https://www.iahrweb.org/members.php (accessed 31 August 2019).
 RELIGION 135

Religions’ does not easily generate a proper noun for the practitioner: compare the suc-
cinct ‘I am a sociologist’ with the slightly awkward ‘I work in the study of religions’ or
the banal ‘I am a student of religions’. But awkwardness can be the price of articulating
specificity, and a neologism has to take root sometime.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Dr Steven J. Sutcliffe is Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion in the School of Divinity, University
of Edinburgh.

Bibliography
Alles, Greg. 2005. “Study of Religion: an Overview.” In Encyclopedia of Religion. 2nd ed., edited by
Lindsay Jones, 8760–8767. New York: Macmillan.
Beckford, James A. 2010. “The Return of Popular Religion? A Critical Assessment of a Popular
Claim.” Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 23 (2): 121–136.
Benson, Thomas L. 1987. “Religious Studies as an Academic Discipline.” In Encyclopedia of
Religion. 1st ed., edited by Mircea Eliade, 88–92. New York: Macmillan.
Bubik, Tomáš, and H. Hoffmann, eds. 2015. Studying Religions with the Iron Curtain Closed and
Opened. Leiden: Brill.
Cox, James L. 2006. A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion: Key Figures, Formative Influences,
and Subsequent Debates. London: Continuum.
Engler, Steven, and Michael Stausberg. 2011. “Introductory Essay. Crisis and Creativity:
Opportunities and Threats in the Global Study of Religion\s.” Religion 41 (2): 127–143.
Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.
King, Richard. 1999. Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the “Mystic East”.
London: Routledge.
Kripal, Jeffrey. 2008. “The Roar of Awakening: The Eros of Esalen and the Western Transmission of
Tantra.” In Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, edited
by W. Hanegraaff and J. Kripal, 479–519. Leiden: Brill.
Long, Charles H. 1995. Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion.
Aurora, CO: Davies Group.
McCauley, Robert N. 2011. Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not. New York: Oxford
University Press.
McCutcheon, Russell T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and
the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press.
Melvær, Knut, and M. Stausberg. 2013. “What is the Study of Religion\s? Self-presentations of the
Discipline on University Web Pages.” Religious Studies Project Research Paper. Accessed August
31, 2019. http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/2013/12/06/what-is-the-study-of-religionsself-
presentations-of-the-discipline-on-university-web-pages/.
Morris, Paul. 2010. “Religious Studies in New Zealand: A Wrong Direction?” In Religion and
Retributive Logic: Essays in Honour of Professor Garry W. Trompf, edited by Carole Cusack
and Christopher Hartney, 323–344. Leiden: Brill.
Pettazoni, R. 1954. “Aperçu Introductif.” Numen 1: 1–7.
Pye, Michael, ed. 1989. Marburg Revisited: Institutions and Strategies in the Study of Religion.
Marburg: Diagonal-Verlag.
136 S. J. SUTCLIFFE

Pye, Michael. 1991. “Religious Studies in Europe: Structures and Desiderata.” In Religious Studies:
Issues, Prospects and Proposals, edited by Klaus Klostermaier and Larry Hurtado, 39–55. Atlanta,
GA: Scholars Press.
Pye, Michael. 1994. “Religion: Shape and Shadow.” Numen 41 (1): 51–75.
Ryba, Thomas. 2009. “Contemporary Religious Studies and Science - A Postcritical Witches’ Brew.”
Religion 39 (4): 361–369.
Segal, Robert. 2009. “Kuhn and the Science of Religion.” Religion 39 (4): 352–355.
Stausberg, Michael. 2016. “History.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion, edited by
Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 775–803. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sutcliffe, Steven J. 2008. “Two Cultures in the Study of Religion? – A Response to Håkan Rydving.”
Temenos 44 (1): 137–146.
Sutcliffe, Steven J. 2009. “Introduction: Opportunities and Constraints in Transnational
Disciplinary Formation.” Religion 39 (4): 370–371.
Sutcliffe, Steven J. 2016. “The Problem of ‘Religions’: Teaching Against the Grain with ‘New Age
Stuff’.” In After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies, edited by Christopher R.
Cotter and D. G. Robertson, 23–36. London: Routledge.
Taira, Teemu. 2013. “Making Space for Discursive Study in Religious Studies.” Religion 43 (1):
26–45.
Thomas, Terence. 1984. “Study of Religion(s).” In Penguin Dictionary of Religions, edited by John R.
Hinnells, 498–500. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wiebe, Donald, and L. Martin. [2014] 2016. “A Rationale for a Change of Name for the
International Association for the History of Religions.” In Conversations and Controversies in
the Scientific Study of Religion, edited by L. H. Martin and D. Wiebe, 9–13. Leiden: Brill.
Wiegers, Gerard, ed. 2002. Modern Societies & the Science of Religions. Leiden: Brill.