Philosophy of Religion After Religion (Religion in Philosophy and Theology) 9783161608926, 9783161608933, 3161608925

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Preface
Contents
Introduction: Making the Reflexive Turn in Philosophy of Religion — Richard Amesbury
»Religion« under Erasure: Why the Concept is Problematic and Why We Still Need It — Sonia Sikka
Why Philosophers of Religion Don’t Need »Religion« – At Least Not for Now — Timothy D. Knepper
An Essentialist in Critical Religion Land, Or, How Fitzgerald’s Deconstructive Genealogy of Religion Is Compatible with an Essentialist Concept of Religion — Dwayne Tunstall
Vagueness and Its Virtues: A Proposal for Renewing Philosophy of Religion — J. Aaron Simmons
Race and the Philosophy of Religion — Vincent Lloyd
Nothingness and Self Transformation: Kim Iryŏp, Tanabe Hajime, and Jacques Derrida on Relgious Practice — Jin Y. Park
Whether Religion Is a Proper Subject of Study — Robert Cummings Neville
Contributors
Subject Index
Author Index

Citation preview

Religion in Philosophy and Theology Edited by

Helen De Cruz (St. Louis, MO) · Asle Eikrem (Oslo) Hartmut von Sass (Berlin) · Heiko Schulz (Frankfurt a. M.) Judith Wolfe (St Andrews)

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Philosophy of Religion after »Religion« Edited by

Michael Ch. Rodgers and Richard Amesbury

Mohr Siebeck

Michael Ch. Rodgers is Senior Research Advisor and Higher Education Consultant at Hanover Research in Washington, D.C. Richard Amesbury is Professor of Religious Studies and of Philosophy and Director of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

ISBN 978-3-16-160892-6 / eISBN 978-3-16-160893-3 DOI 10.1628/ 978-3-16-160893-3 ISSN 1616-346X / eISSN 2568-7425 (Religion in Philosophy and Theology) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023  by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany.  www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was printed on non-aging paper by Laupp & Göbel in Gomaringen and bound by Buchbinderei Nädele in Nehren. Printed in Germany.

Preface The chapters of this book represent answers to a question posed by Professor Richard Amesbury and myself. Our question was and remains this: in the face of criticism of the category of religion from a variety of academic disciplines, what are we to make of the philosophy of religion? With few exceptions, philosophers of religion have largely ignored these criticisms and continued on with other topics in their field. By inviting the authors included in this volume, our goal is to generate a greater awareness of the criticisms of the category of religion as well as explore responses from the field of philosophy of religion. The idea for the volume was conceived while Professor Amesbury was Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where he led the university’s Center for Ethics and directed the Institute for Social Ethics. This book would not be possible without the support of the Center and Institute.We could not hope to find a better publisher than Mohr Siebeck for this topic. I am grateful to Dr. Ziebritzki and his staff for their support and diligence in seeing this book through publication. Michael Ch. Rodgers

Contents Preface........................................................................................ V Introduction: Making the Reflexive Turn in Philosophy of Religion ...................................................................................... 1 Richard Amesbury »Religion« under Erasure: Why the Concept is Problematic and Why We Still Need It................................................................. 13 Sonia Sikka Why Philosophers of Religion Don’t Need »Religion« – At Least Not for Now.............................................................................. 31 Timothy D. Knepper An Essentialist in Critical Religion Land, Or, How Fitzgerald’s Deconstructive Genealogy of Religion Is Compatible with an Essentialist Concept of Religion ................................................ 43 Dwayne Tunstall Vagueness and Its Virtues: A Proposal for Renewing Philosophy of Religion....................... 59 J. Aaron Simmons Race and the Philosophy of Religion......................................... 85 Vincent Lloyd Nothingness and Self Transformation: Kim Iryŏp, Tanabe Hajime, and Jacques Derrida on Relgious Practice........ 107 Jin Y. Park

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Whether Religion Is a Proper Subject of Study......................... 127 Robert Cummings Neville Contributors............................................................................. 155 Subject Index........................................................................... 157 Author Index............................................................................ 161

Introduction: Making the Reflexive Turn in Philosophy of Religion Richard Amesbury Philosophy of religion is currently in a time of self-examination and transition. Long preoccupied with the claims of so-called »classical theism«, it is today expanding to encompass a much wider, more diverse range of religious topics. Yet in so doing, it faces an array of theoretical challenges, including questions about the category of religion itself. A field that has tended to be viewed with some suspicion by philosophers in other areas of study – and which in parts of Europe remains a branch of Systematic Theology – philosophy of religion occupies an ambiguous place in the academy, its Christian history and perceived apologetic aims placing it in tension with the norms of both Philosophy and Religious Studies. Open a college textbook on the topic and one is likely to encounter a now familiar roster of topics, including the attributes of the omni-God, arguments for that God’s existence, the problem of evil, and the tension between faith and reason. Some introductory texts conclude with the acknowledgement of »many religions«, but few present these religions as anything more than a »problem« to be dealt with in terms of the now familiar, if criticized, tripartite distinction between »exclusivism«, »inclusivism«, and »pluralism«. Seldom indeed are these religions accorded the respect paid the philosophical construct of »classical theism«; one searches usually in vain for serious philosophical engagement with Zen Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, to say nothing of Shinto, Candomblé, Salafism, or Pentecostalism. That, however, is beginning to change, as newer generations of philosophers of religion challenge the assumed boundaries of their field. Much of the impetus here comes from the world of Religious Studies, and in fact Wesley Wildman has proposed rebranding the field »Religious Philosophy« – a term deliberately modeled on »Religious Studies« and designed to distance philosophy of religion from philosophical theology and Christian apologetics. Religious Philosophy, as Wildman conceives it, is »religious« in

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the same way that Religious Studies is »religious« – i.e., it is secular. Religion belongs not to its methods, but to its subject matter.1 But what exactly is this subject matter? Scholars of religion will not be surprised – although some philosophers might – to learn that the concept of religion, while ubiquitous in popular discourse, is the subject of sustained analysis and critique within the field of Religious Studies itself. Over the past several decades, the study of religion has taken a reflexive turn, toward the study of »religion« – i.e., of the organizing categories in terms of which the field is itself structured.2

Contextualizing the Religious and the Secular »Religion«, it turns out, is a comparatively recent innovation. More precisely: what »religion« means today is not what the term (or its analogues) used to mean. On the modern understanding, »religion« names a sphere of society, or of individual life, which is analytically distinguishable from socalled secular domains, such as the state and the market. As a matter most

W. Wildman, Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), xiii-xiv. 2 For a sampling of this growing body of literature see, e.g.: T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); L. Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); D. Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); D. Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); T. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); J.Ā. Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 2012);T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 2005); R.T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); B. Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2015); J.Z. Smith, Relating Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004); G.G. Stroumsa, A New Science:The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); and T. Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 1

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fundamentally of belief, religion is ideally – if not always actually – private. So conceived, religion is a human universal – a dimension of what it means to be a person and an ingredient in every great civilization – but it takes many forms, the most significant of which are the »world religions«. Scholars of the category’s history disagree as to precisely when the term acquired its modern meaning, which is not surprising, given that the composite sketch offered above comprises a number of different lineaments. Tomoko Masuzawa has argued that the concept of »world religions« – which has grown over time to include some eleven or so »great traditions« – is a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By contrast, the idea that religion is separable from politics and the state developed in the early modern period, and the emphasis on belief – with its corresponding deprecation of ritual and material culture – is arguable attributable to Protestant theology. In antiquity, the term religio was used quite differently, in reference to binding duties, including, but not limited to, cultic rites.3 In De Vera Religione (»On True Religion«), Augustine used the term to mean worship. As William Cavanaugh points out, »Augustine’s subject is not ›Christianity‹ as a – or the – true religion alongside other religions understood as systematic sets of propositions and rites.«4 Rather, true religion is worship of the triune God. As recently as the late middle ages, the word »religion« was used infrequently and never in the quasi-sociological sense with which we are today familiar. Even in the early modern period, the convention was to speak not of religions (like Judaism and Islam), but of peoples (like Jews and »Mohammedans«).5 Precisely how these usages changed is the subject of a growing and impressive body of contemporary scholarship, which seeks to understand the complex relationship between discourse about religion and the practices to which that discourse belongs. Shifts in the latter – the Protestant Reformation, the rise of nation-states, colonialism, etc. – enabled new conceptual developments, but the latter in turn helped to bring into existence new social realities. Commenting on these developments, the anthropologist Talal Asad famously concluded that »there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.«6 Religion, on this view, is not a timeless, Dubuisson, Western Construction, 15. W.T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 63. 5 Masuzawa, Invention, 61. 6 Asad, Genealogies, 29. 3 4

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universal phenomenon for which modernity at last bequeathed us a name; rather, it is itself a distinctively modern, western formation. Indeed, Daniel Dubuisson suggests that religion is »the West’s most characteristic concept, around which it has established and developed its identity, while at the same time defining its way of conceiving humankind and the world.«7 A product of the West, religion came, ironically, to be associated above all with the East – as characterizing that which was not Europe. Paradoxically, those lacking the concept were assumed to be the most religious, deprived of the sort of critical distance necessary to wrestle religion into view as a discrete, limited phenomenon. If people in the »advanced«, differentiated, secularized societies of Europe and North America had religions, people in other parts of the world were had by them, their subjectivities and social institutions awaiting emancipation from religion’s all-pervasive and despotic grip.8 Orientalist discourses about religion thus helped to underwrite the colonial encounters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be fully modern, a society needed to circumscribe and contain religion, disentangling it from knowledge and power and making of it a repository of wisdom and value, on which individuals could electively draw for inspiration, guidance, and moral orientation. Distance from this ideal was a measure of cultural backwardness. By means of these encounters, the concept of religion found its way into novel cultural contexts, where it was taken up in ways that contributed to the disciplining and remaking of the larger social world. Whether celebrated or lamented, tolerated or feared, the »world religions« with which we are today familiar – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto – are assumed to be tokens of the same type, species of a common genus. Although often imagined as recognizing ancient or timeless »traditions«, this schema and its taxa are thoroughly modern. One reason, it might be argued, that we are apt to discover family resemblances among the world religions is that only those phenomena have been allowed to count as »religious« – or to merit the honorific »world« – which conform to roughly Protestant criteria of true piety. When »religions« transgress these boundaries – when, for example, they are perceived to be too political, or to take an unseemly interest in money – they are said to be mixing illicitly with the secular. The empirical argument for essential similarity among the so-called world Dubuisson, Western Construction, 9. Cf. W. Brown, »Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians«, in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. H. de Vries and L.E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 299. 7 8

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religions would seem, in other words, to draw covertly upon a stipulative definition of »religion« that disqualifies disconfirming evidence ab initio. Among scholars of religion, the study of the cultural history of religion has been paired with a corresponding interest in the larger imaginary within which the term functions, the background against which religion can be identified as an object of interest, anxiety, and academic study.9 We might call this background the secular, if we are careful to note the ways in which this use of the term – as a name for this frame of reference – differs from its use within that frame, where it denotes, inter alia, the non-religious. Indeed, this ambiguity offers an important clue to understanding what is distinctive about a certain modern present. Like »religion«, the term »secular« has undergone important shifts in meaning over time. Whereas an earlier use of the term – preserved, for example, in the Italian and Portuguese terms for »century« – denoted the temporal structure of chronology as distinct from eternity and kairotic time, secularity today tends to be conceived of spatially, as the shared domain of publicity, from which religion is excluded – the negative space of religion as a distinct phenomenon. As the earlier distinction between the secular and the eternal faded from view, secularity re-emerged temporally as history, the homogeneous progression of events within what Charles Taylor calls the »immanent frame«.10 Bereft of any obvious contrast case, secularity as temporal structure was rendered virtually invisible by virtue of being naturalized, thereby allowing the label »secular« to be transferred into the domain of space. In its self-sufficiency, history is conceived as a domain of facticity, the neutral baseline for adjudicating religious difference. As Saba Mahmood observes, »secularity flattens religious incommensurability, forcing religious traditions to confront one another in the uniform space of history, all equally vulnerable to the questioning For a sampling of this literature see, e.g.: T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); L.E. Cady and E.Sh. Hurd, eds., Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence; T. Fitzgerald, ed., Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (New York: Routledge, 2007); J.R. Jakobsen and A. Pellegrini, eds., Secularisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); S. Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); J.L. Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011); Ch. Smith, ed., The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Ch.Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 10 Taylor, A Secular Age, 543. 9

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power of the secular.«11 To call history »secular« – to thematize it as part of a distinctive and contestable (if hegemonic) imaginary – is to recognize that discourse about religion (and its others) belongs to a particular epoch, while acknowledging the paradox (and methodological inadequacy) of attempting to historicize »history« itself. To be sure, every category has a history, and to subject a concept to genealogical analysis is not necessarily to criticize or reject it, as though we were discontent with anything less than eternal forms. But such analyses can shed light on the regimes of power to which knowledge belongs, which can in turn prompt reflection on the role our own work as scholars plays in reproducing these regimes and/or putting them in question. Genealogy is thus an exercise in taking responsibility. To appreciate the point of these critiques is not necessarily to deny that religion sans quotation marks is »real«. Here an analogy with critical race theory might be helpful. Racial categories, like religious ones, are culturally constructed, contextual, and contingent, but race is real in the sense that the employment of these categories has real effects in the world.To attempt to counter these effects simply by rejecting the category – to pretend to be »color-blind« – would in many cases only re-entrench prevailing racialized dynamics of power. Similarly, it can be observed that the modern category of »religion« has taken on a life of its own. It is entrenched not simply in scholarship, but also in law, public discourse, and the broader liberal imaginary and, as noted above, has been appropriated well beyond the contexts of its origins, remaking other cultures and in turn being remade through this contact. It is too late in the day to simply abandon the field. Claiming, disclaiming, granting, and refusing the status of religion are inherently political acts – as, arguably, is failing to acknowledge it.The reality of religion, like that of race, is revealed in the lives to which this discourse belongs: the discursive practices anchor the reality. As a result, though, religion and race are inherently contestable; their reality does not prevent the revision of our practices. Indeed, it might be thought to demand it. Moreover, discourse about religion cannot neatly be disentangled from language about race, gender, and other forms of difference. The connection with race noted above is more than simply analogical: religion and its taxa are racialized and gendered. The same is true of secularity: as Vincent W. Lloyd has recently put the point, »whiteness is secular, and the secular

Mahmood, Religious Difference, 207. Note, for example, the distinction commonly made by New Testament scholars between »the Jesus of history« and »the Christ of faith«. 11

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is white.«12 Both categories function – often interchangeably – as the »default« or »baseline« in relation to which difference is determined and managed.13 Furthermore, because religion tends to be viewed as optional – as a matter of voluntary belief – criticism of religion (or more specifically, of certain religions, like Islam) can function as a respectable proxy for sentiments that would be taboo if expressed in racial categories. In this way, race is reimagined as quasi-biological, and religion as choice.14 New approaches to philosophy of religion seek to move the field beyond the preoccupations of Christian theology and philosophical theism, toward an appreciation of a fuller range of religious phenomena. But if the concept of religion is itself the product of extrapolation from modern, Western, Christian understandings, does the new philosophy of religion – in its ambition to do justice to the whole range of religion – simply reproduce the deficiencies of the old, under the guise of a universalizing, albeit particularistic, category? And does the effort to conform to the secular canons of the modern university – to approach religion as it were from »outside« – reinscribe the boundaries of »religion« as a discrete phenomenon? To put it the other way around: does the identification of specific phenomena as religious – and so as suitable topics for philosophers of religion – presuppose and thus leave unexamined a distinctive regime of knowledge – the secular – which ought itself to be put in question? V.W. Lloyd, »Introduction: Managing Race, Managing Religion«, Race and Secularism in America, ed. J.S. Kahn and V.W. Lloyd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 5. 13 A similar point can be made about maleness relative to gender, and heterosexuality relative to sexuality. It should be noted in this connection that secularity tends to be associated with rationality and contrasted to religious irrationality and emotion. 14 For example, in responding to widespread criticism of claims he made deprecatory of Islam, Richard Dawkins wrote, »The concept of race is controversial in biology, for complicated reasons. I could go into that, but I do not need to here. It’s enough to say that if you can convert to something (or convert or apostatize out of it) it is not a race.« R. Dawkins, »Calm Reflections After a Storm in a Teacup«, Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Accessed at: https://richarddawkins.net/2013/08/ calm-reflections-after-a-storm-in-a-teacup-polish-translation-below/ In an explicit attempt to address the anticipated objection that »Race is not a biological concept at all but a socially constructed one«, Dawkins appeals to »the dictionary definition: ›A limited group of people descended from a common ancestor.‹« He adds: »You can define naked mole rats as termites if you wish (they have similar social systems) but do not blame the rest of us if we prefer to call them mammals because they are close genetic cousins to non-social mole rates and other rodents.« Ibid. 12

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The Contents The present volume is organized around the question of what it would mean to do philosophy of religion – or something resembling it – after »religion« – i.e., in the wake of the kind of genealogical, post-colonial critique briefly described above. Is »religion« a load-bearing category for philosophy of religion? If so, what work does it do, whether ideological or explanatory? What would happen were the category to be withdrawn as an organizing principle and treated solely as an object of study? Can philosophy of religion be reconfigured in new and perhaps more illuminating ways, freed from the logic of »religion«? Should the term be rehabilitated, its extension differently imagined? How might philosophy benefit from, and contribute to, critical examination of the concept of religion? In the opening essay, »›Religion‹ under Erasure: Why the Concept is Problematic and Why We Still Need It«, Sonia Sikka begins by noting the pedagogical challenges of teaching philosophy of religion, given ambiguities surrounding its subject matter. The category of »religion« and the topics commonly addressed in the field reflect Eurocentric biases, and efforts to redress these deficits by expanding the category to include nonWestern traditions can ironically have the effect of distorting the character of these traditions and naturalizing formations of Western colonial power. But Sikka is skeptical of the suggestion that we ought simply to abolish the »religion« in philosophy of religion, since this might in practice leave untouched the secularist assumptions that structure much academic inquiry. On Sikka’s view, the postcolonial critique of »religion« as a distorting, occidental category must be carefully distinguished from reductionist critiques of religion that serve an anti-theological agenda. The latter, she argues, rest upon (often unguarded) metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that are appropriate objects of philosophical analysis. Sikka thus argues for retaining the field of philosophy of religion, albeit with a critical focus on the various problems associated with the category of religion. Timothy D. Knepper’s contribution, »Why Philosophers of Religion Don’t Need ›Religion‹ – At Least Not for Now«, reaches different conclusions from similar premises. Knepper makes two central arguments: first, that the category of religion cannot simply be discarded, and second, that philosophers of religion do not actually need the category for most of what they do. On behalf of the former claim, Knepper argues that eliminativist views – according to which the category of religion ought to be abandoned – are unrealistic, insofar as they neglect linguistic change; unimaginative, insofar as they neglect linguistic context; and unaware, insofar as they neglect linguistic ideology. The meaning of »religion« has changed over time and is used differently in different contexts. Some of these uses

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are empowering for minority groups. Nevertheless, Knepper argues, philosophers of religion need not ordinarily invoke the concept in their scholarship and should not be limited by it. The category of »ultimacy« might be more illuminating. What matters for philosophy, he concludes, are the phenomena, not the labels, even if the latter are implicated in the former. The next two essays zero in on the question of definitions. In »An Essentialist in Critical Religion Land«, Dwayne Tunstall endorses the critical study of religion associated with scholars like Timothy Fitzgerald as of value for philosophers of religion seeking to avoid ahistorical understandings of what religion is. Discourse about religion has been instrumental to colonialism and paved the way for the flourishing of modern market ideologies, but – Tunstall argues – philosophers today need not be bound by these past uses of the term. Drawing on Robert Brandom’s pragmatism, Tunstall argues that the semantic content of a concept normatively outruns its history of application and can be taken to commit users to refined, more fitting uses. As an example of a nuanced and potentially useful definition, Tunstall cites Kevin Schilbrack’s suggestion that religion be understood as a constellation of »social practices authorized by reference to a superempirical reality«.15 Handled with care, an essentialist definition of religion, selected with an eye to scholarly concerns, can cast light on a range of phenomena, such as nationalism and free-market fundamentalism, that might elude folk definitions. J. Aaron Simmons, in his contribution »Vagueness and Its Virtues«, argues for a different approach: rather than crisply defining a stable object of inquiry, the philosopher of religion ought to appreciate religion’s inherent vagueness. According to Simmons, this vagueness is due not simply to linguistic inadequacy; the latter might reflect an underlying vagueness in what the term names – an »ontic vagueness«. Engaging with the work of critical theorists of religion like Jonathan Z. Smith, Russell McCutcheon, and Donald Wiebe, Simmons argues that while it is probably hopeless to attempt (other than stipulatively) to formulate necessary and sufficient conditions of application for the category, this fact points to something important about what religion is: ironically, vagueness is essential to religion. Sustained attention to the question »What is religion?« might help to renew philosophy of religion, moving it beyond parochialism and intellectualism. One reason »religion« is such a slippery category is that it overlaps significantly with other categories by means of which difference is articulated. In »Race and Religion in the Philosophy of Religion«,Vincent Lloyd draws attention to entanglements between the genealogies of race and K. Schilbrack, »What Is not a Religion?« The Journal of Religion 93:3 (2013), 313.

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religion and argues that philosophy of religion becomes distorted when race is not thematized. When they allow whiteness and Christianity to function normatively, philosophers of religion are complicit in the normalizing of racialized power: philosophy of religion is thus an inherently political field. What might it look like to take race seriously in the philosophy of religion? Lloyd begins by considering the work of two contemporary philosophers – Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben – who have raised questions of race in relation to religion. While each provides a model for how to think philosophically about the intertwined genealogies of race and religion, Lloyd argues that their work does not go far enough, inasmuch as they fail to give sufficient critical attention to the secular, multicultural frameworks in terms of which race and religion are today managed. Here Lloyd turns to the work of the Jamaican writer and feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter, which examines the violent dynamics of theological and racial exclusion that have given rise to the figure of »Man«. These dynamics cannot be overcome simply through the incorporation of minority voices into the discourse; rather, Lloyd argues that the discourse itself must be radically reconceived. Jin Park’s essay, »Nothingness and Self Transformation: Kim Iryŏp, Tanabe Hajime, and Jacques Derrida on Religious Practice«, represents the effort to engage in comparative, cross-cultural philosophical analysis unconstrained by western understandings of religion. Since, as Park notes, the genre of »philosophy« and the concept of »religion« were first taken up in eastern Asian contexts via the translation of Western-language documents in the nineteenth century, they do not always map easily onto pre-existing categories, and »the problems of transplanting Western expressions to the East Asian intellectual world through translated words are not insignificant«. Park’s essay seeks to compare ideas about nothingness and the self in the work of Kim Iryŏp, a Korean nun in the Zen Buddhist tradition, and Tanabe Hajime, a Japanese philosopher who studied with Husserl and Heidegger and was familiar with Shin Buddhism. Both, she demonstrates, exhibit the thought that self-transformation occurs through the mediation not of ultimate being, but of nothingness – a theme Park finds echoed in the writings of Jacques Derrida. Park argues that our concepts of both philosophy and religion can be renewed through engagement with traditions that proffer alternative understandings of ultimacy, thereby provincializing the onto-theological assumptions central to much modern Western philosophy of religion. Indeed, Robert Cummings Neville argues that the concept of ultimacy, rather than any particular conception of it, is what ought to anchor philosophy of religion. Defining »religion« as »human symbolic engagement of ultimate realities in cognitive, existential, and practical ways«, his contri-

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bution defends an affirmative answer to the question »Whether Religion Is a Proper Subject of Study«. Neville directs the brunt of his critique against »postmodern critics of the idea of religion«, who, he charges, operate within an insular philosophical environment and are insufficiently versed in non-western modes of thought. He finds a welcome alternative in the tradition of pragmatism, whose theory of signification, Neville argues, can more readily accommodate the reality of and possibility of reference to ultimates. Taking the view that religion is »a definable phenomenon that is internally complex and whose components are properly religious only when they fit together in actual engagements of ultimacy«, Neville concludes that it is a proper object of philosophical study. What, in conclusion, can be said of the prospects for philosophy of religion after »religion«? The present volume aims not to put forward a unified agenda, but rather to stage a series of interventions, with an eye to moving the field beyond the limits of religion alone. Its contributors defend a variety of positions on the central question of the volume, some of which are in tension with others, but it is hoped that taken together, these essays will be received as an invitation to debate and reimagine the future of the field.

»Religion« under Erasure: Why the Concept is Problematic and Why We Still Need It Sonia Sikka I. The Incoherence of »Religion« Of all the courses I have taught over the years, philosophy of religion is the slipperiest, and by a considerable margin. That is due in large measure to the multifariousness of the content belonging to what we conventionally call »religion«. The category groups together under the same heading many highly disparate phenomena, which often have little in common and require starkly different modes of analysis. In this regard, common confusions voiced by students can be highly revealing. For instance, in my experience, one recurring point of confusion among students arises from their assumptions about the meaning of the term »God«, which naturally effects their interpretation of the arguments for the existence of God discussed in virtually all philosophy of religion textbooks and anthologies. Attempting to incorporate non-Abrahamic religious traditions makes the situation worse. It is difficult enough for students to make sense of Aquinas’ notion of an unmoved mover, borrowed from Aristotle, and to understand why he calls this »God«. Introducing notions like brahman, the sometimes personified deific principle of the Upanishads, or »Tao« or »Buddha nature« can leave students either assimilating these ideas to the theistic ones with which they are more familiar, or altogether uncertain what we are talking about. Indeed, it is not clear what we are talking about if we bundle these disparate notions together, and even discussion of whether or not some divine being exists is misleading or entirely wrong in relation to some of them. Another example is the topic of »religious« or »mystical« experience, terms that can cover a truly vast assortment of radically dissimilar things. More than once in a philosophy of religion classroom, I have been startled by unexpected comments from students that bring this dissimilarity into stark relief. I might, for instance, be discussing complex metaphysical and epistemological issues pertaining to the veridicality of our ordinary apprehensions of space and time, and be confronted with a question that references an individual’s claim to have seen the face of Jesus in a piece

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of toast. And the question is a fair one, for if the meaning of words lies in their use, the Jesus toast is also a »religious« experience, to which the term »mystical« may correctly be applied.Yes, one can use this example to reflect on the difference between »seeing« and »seeing as« in a way that might be relevant for assessing the accounts given by Teresa of Avila, Rumi, the authors of the Chandogya Upanishad, or Yoshitani. But the fact remains that we are speaking here of profoundly different phenomena, with not much more in common than that they are all »experiences«. Seeing divine figures in food might not be the best comparator, moreover, for analyzing states of consciousness in which the borders of the self seem to be dissolved, or a sense of sacred presence in nature, or claims to have directly perceived an immaterial, loving being. Nor is it obvious that these latter experiences are themselves similar enough to be interpreted and assessed through the same philosophical lens. The pedagogical challenges I am highlighting point to a serious problem with the unity of the subject matter of »philosophy of religion«, which comes into view as soon as one steps outside the established canon rooted, historically, in orthodox Christian theology and its various interlocutors. Once »religion« is conceived as including non-Abrahamic traditions, as well as the wide variety of actual beliefs and practices that characterize it as an aspect of human society, the standard topics and approaches that occupy philosophers of religion begin to look highly parochial.The classical proofs for the existence of God, the problem of evil, faith and reason, religious and mystical experience, miracles, life after death, even religious diversity: the selection and conceptualization of these topics, as well as the bodies of literature referenced in standard philosophical debates about them, reveal a definite orientation towards one religion, Christianity, from which the very idea of religion has been derived, and seem to continue a distinctly theological tradition. This has led a number of scholars, particularly in the field of religious studies, to raise critical questions about the coherence and legitimacy of the concept of religion, and in some cases to call for its abolition. One motivation for this proposal is the suspicion that the inclusions and exclusions enacted in the deployment of this concept betray a theological bias, counting as »religious« beliefs, practices and attitudes that fit with a particular theological view while discounting those that do not. It is, I believe, such a suspicion that leads Timothy Fitzgerald to ask: Are ghosts, witches, emperors and ancestors gods? How about film stars? What is the difference between a superhuman being and a superior person? Why should

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Benares, Mount Fuji, or the Vatican be considered sacred places and not the White House, the Koshien Baseball Stadium in Osaka, or the Bastille?1

Much of the debate on these kinds of questions has revolved around issues of definition, of whether problems concerning the meaning of religion can be resolved through some less essentialist model of definition than the one Fitzgerald, for one, seems to employ in his analysis, such as Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance. But it needs to be recognized that Fitzgerald’s concern is not only a semantic one, regarding the difficulty of grouping a variety of things under a single heading that properly distinguishes them from other kinds of things. The passage cited above also reveals a suspicion that the category of religion, at least as used in the discipline of religious studies, favors phenomena pertaining to belief in a transcendent being or reality whose existence Western theologians are inclined to affirm, while leaving out of the category, for particular reasons, phenomena that do bear a family resemblance to these. I have argued elsewhere that Fitzgerald’s real target is the view that there is some sphere of religion that is not reducible to sociological and psychological explanations.2 This is the view that he, along with other prominent critics of religious studies like Russell McCutcheon, sees as theological. The implication is that only this theological understanding of religion gives the concept and the academic discourses associated with it the meaning and form that they currently have. Another major concern among critics of the concept of religion has been that it especially distorts the character of non-Abrahamic traditions, which differ too profoundly from Christianity to fit an idea of »religion« derived from it. S.N. Balagangadhara, among others, makes this point in relation to Indian traditions.3 Daniel Dubuisson suggests the phrase »cosmographic formations« in light of similar considerations.4 A number of other scholars have argued that the idea of religion is in Asian countries a colonial import and imposition, and that the map of cultural space over the histories of these countries does not demarcate »religion« from, say, philosophy, art, politics and science. Focusing on the Kyoto School in Japan, Bret Davis draws attention to the non-separation of philosophy and religion in Asia and the difficulty this poses for a »philosophy of religion« that would T. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. 2 S. Sikka, »What Is Indian ›Religion‹? How Should It Be Taught?«, in Whose Religion? Education About Religion in Public Schools, ed. L. Beaman et al., 2015. 3 S.N. Balagangadhara, The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 4 D. Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religions: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. W. Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 17. 1

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be oriented towards Zen.5 Richard King notes that »the colonial domination of the West over the ›rest‹ in recent centuries has caused many Western categories, ideas and paradigms to appear more universal and normative than they might otherwise have been«, where »the category of ›religion‹ is one such category and could be described as a key feature in the imaginative cartography of Western modernity«.6 In addition, scholars like Talal Asad and Ashis Nandy have argued that models of secularism based on this Western category can have pernicious effects, serving in some cases to produce or increase hostility and conflict between religious communities.7 While such critiques may seem distant from the concerns of philosophy of religion, which usually does not engage with the political dimensions of religion or with religious violence, they are troubling if the field is in fact reinforcing a notion of religion that is not only distorting but increases social conflict. I will in a moment consider more closely some of the arguments advanced in these accounts regarding Eurocentrism and the social dangers of the concept of religion, with a view to consequences for philosophy of religion. Before doing so, however, let me state the counter-argument to the claim that »religion« covers too diverse a set of phenomena to be a meaningful category. While the category is problematic in a number of ways, it nonetheless does seem to capture some important phenomena that can be identified across various traditions on the basis of family resemblance, which philosophy of religion can play a useful role in analyzing. I have already alluded to some of these, while problematizing the way they tend to be sorted: – The existence of God or gods, and related metaphysical positions such as forms of monism in which the underlying unity is personified (e.g. as »Isvara« in Vedanta and yoga schools within Indian philosophy), or a sense of sacred presence within nature;

B.W. Davis, »Rethinking Religion, Faith and Practice: On the Buddhist Background of the Kyoto School«, Studies in the Philosophy of Religion 23 (2006), 1–12. 6 R. King, »Imagining Religions in India: Colonialism and the Mapping of South Asian History and Culture«, in Secularism and Religion-Making, ed. M. Dressler et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 38. 7 T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); A. Nandy, »The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Toleration«, in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. R. Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 321–344. 5

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– Experiences and states of consciousness of a non-ordinary sort: for example, extraordinary visions, communion with spirits, intuitions of the presence of God, unitive experiences, and experiences of pure consciousness or of emptiness; and – Soteriological claims and claims about life after death: reincarnation, resurrection, the possibility of the »soul« surviving the death of the body, salvation through faith, conceptions of heavens, moksha, nirvana and the like. It might be argued that we do not need a clear and universally application definition of religion to recognize affinities between these topics, nor are they confined to Christian or Abrahamic traditions. They are, moreover, areas in which truth claims are made whose evaluation is the special province of philosophy, involving questions of metaphysics and epistemology. Even if these topics group things that are not exactly like each other, why could we not deal with this by drawing the appropriate distinctions? Surely, philosophers of religion are eminently capable of distinguishing different concepts of God. In doing so, they can take into account and analyze appropriately metaphysical positions that are non-theistic but whose views of ultimate reality nonetheless warrant inclusion in the category of religion, especially in light of other features of the traditions in which these positions are located, such as monastic institutions and ascetic practices. Likewise, philosophical training should enable one to draw the right distinctions between the forms and truth-claims of different types of »religious« experience, to consider whether accounts of nirvana, presentations of God and Jesus toasts involve the same kind of experiential structure, and if not why not. If salvation and enlightenment are fundamentally different kinds of goals, moreover, or if theories of resurrection and reincarnation are situated within patterns of thought whose approach to such questions is dissimilar in important ways, who is better suited than a philosopher of religion to scrutinize such differences about the aims of life and the means of right knowing? Yet anyone who knows the field will, I am guessing, be aware that these are in fact not central topics within it. As currently practiced, Western philosophy of religion (and there is to date no other kind of »philosophy of religion«) revolves around the tenets of so-called »classical theism«, a product of the long history of reflective interaction between the Abrahamic religions and Greek philosophy. Rarely do philosophers of religion take into account, in anything more than a marginal fashion, views, practices or experiences lying outside this one historical stream. Searching for a multicultural philosophy of religion reader for students - a quest in which I have been engaged for many years - makes one acutely aware of this exclusion.

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The description given above of what could be topics within philosophy of religion does not actually match the material presented in the vast majority of textbooks and anthologies available for teaching the subject, which in turn reflects the state of Western scholarship in the field.8 Few textbooks include more than a passing glance at positions and practices within Asian, African or Native American traditions, and it is exceedingly difficult to find anthologies that contain readings from non-Western sources. It is reasonable to draw the conclusion that the practice of philosophy of religion is characterized by both Eurocentrism and a theological bias, as one is left with the impression that the claims of classical theism are the only ones most philosophers of religion see as worth taking seriously, or consider to be properly »religious«, whether their arguments attempt to support these claims or undermine them. It might seem that the way to remedy this problem is simply for philosophy of religion to become more inclusive. However, this remedy is not as straightforward, even in principle, as it may at first appear. One problem is that »inclusion« of, for instance, Asian traditions within the philosophy of religion unsettles the nature of the subject, because a proper examination of what are commonly positioned as non-Western »religious« traditions will sometimes reveal that they do not fit the concept of religion which, as noted, is derived primarily from the model of Christianity. Consider, for example, the fact that while there are arguments about the existence of God within the history of Indian philosophy, with which contemporary philosophers of religion might fruitfully engage, the classical counter-arguments are formulated by Buddhist schools, among others, and not only by materialists. To represent these debates accurately, it has to be understood that in this tradition, there are metaphysical positions that reject the existence of God and are in this sense atheistic, but that do not accept many of the other theses that Western atheism usually entails, such as complete extinction at death or a materialist ontology. It also has to be understood that there is in this tradition no word corresponding to »religion«, nor is there a concept of »faith« in the sense that term has acquired within the history of Christian or Islamic thought. Davis points out that in Buddhist traditions generally, terms that can with some legitimacy be translated as »faith«, denoting a form of trust, apply only to the preliminary stages of practice.That practice is expected eventually to provide confirmation through experi-

A noteworthy exception, although I find it too advanced for basic undergraduate courses where I teach, is G. Griffith-Dickson, The Philosophy of Religion (London: SCM, 2005). 8

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ence, and is in any case not directed towards a transcendent being.9 Thus, »including« traditions of this type within philosophy of religion requires a concept of religion to which neither faith nor belief in the existence of a god or gods is essential – a difficult move in a Western context where these characteristics define the category. Some non-Western traditions that have come to be classed as »world religions« might therefore be more accurately described as metaphysical and epistemological positions, worldviews, ethical systems with correlated sets of social practices, or analyses of the nature of consciousness. Recognition of these problems of classification might and should lead to critical reflection on the Eurocentrism of philosophy canons and curricula as a whole. Especially worthy of critical attention is the habit of categorizing all nonWestern thought as »religious« even when it deals with subject matters not placed in that category when they arise within Western texts, and rests only on appeal to experience and inference rather than divine revelation or faith. This habit is a major target of King’s critique of orientalism in Western constructions of Indian »mysticism«. King highlights the way all »Eastern« traditions are judged as »religion« within Western academic discourses, placing them outside the province of philosophy as a respectably rational discipline.10 Davis and King articulate a concern, which I share, that this judgment, with all its misrepresentation and double standards, is one of the typical gestures used to justify the exclusion of non-Western traditions of reflection from the idea of philosophy. Talal Asad’s analysis of the way the secular/religious binary operates to define European civilization as having moved to a stage of rationality, in contrast with non-European religious others such as Muslims, suggests that the gesture is also not politically innocent.11 A final problem with the proposal that philosophy of religion could simply be more inclusive is that if it makes this attempt while continuing to work with an idea of religion derived from Christianity, it will look for »other religions« to include. That means other faith-based and mutually exclusive systems of belief and practice, such as »Hinduism«, »Buddhism«, »Shintoism«, and remaining entries in the pantheon of »world religions«. But many of these were not »religions« prior to colonial mappings, not B.W. Davis, »Rethinking Religion, Faith and Practice: On the Buddhist Background of the Kyoto School«, Studies in the Philosophy of Religion 23 (2006), 7–8. 10 R. King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ›The Mystic East‹. (New York: Routledge, 1999); R. King, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction to Hindu and Buddhist Thought (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999), 24–41. 11 T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 9

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only in the sense that the cultural terrain to which they belonged did not draw its distinctions in terms of religion and other aspects of culture, but also because it did not contain religions, in the plural, as sharply separate and contending faiths. In the context of colonial power, moreover, the view that this is what religions are affects the nature of its object. It operates to produce the formations it sees, establishing practices of measurement and legislation that lead to the social construction – in a real, not only cognitive, sense – of communities of faith defined by opposing doctrines, scriptures, holy places and forms of worship. These identities, the products of a Western concept of religion imposed through colonial rule, can also be mobilized for violent and exclusionary political projects, as in the case of Hindu nationalism in India.12 In principle, philosophy of religion could help to deconstruct such rigid identities, by engaging with »religion« in an altogether different manner and by painting a more accurate picture of the history of non-Western traditions. This will not happen, however, if it leaves intact its traditional categories and approaches while trying only to incorporate a greater number of »religions«, thereby continuing to work with a conceptual model according to which religions are bundles of beliefs and practice defining different faith communities.13

II. Why We Nonetheless Still Need »Philosophy of Religion«. In light of such problems, why not abolish the »religion« in philosophy of religion, taking a cue from Fitzgerald’s proposal to abolish the »religion« in religious studies? What is now called »philosophy of religion« could then more honestly reconceive itself as an offshoot (not a branch) of Christian theology, or as philosophy of Christianity with relevance for other Abrahamic traditions. It could, for instance, be called »Philosophy of Theism in the Western Tradition« or, more elegantly, just »Classical Western Theism«. This is a perfectly legitimate field of philosophical analysis on its own, and by no means only a form of Christian apologetics since it includes discussion of counter-arguments to Christian and other Western theistic doctrines. The claims of non-Western traditions, since they do not fit well under the category of »religion«, could be better studied and assessed in other subject areas of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and political theory. Nandy, »The Politics of Secularism«. S. Sikka, »Teaching Religion and Philosophy in India«, in Living with Religious Diversity, ed. S. Sikka et al. (Delhi: Routledge, 2015). 12 13

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However, anyone familiar with these subjects in Western academic contexts will know very well that non-Western traditions are even less likely to be represented there than in philosophy of religion. At least philosophy of religion provides a nominal space for non-Western traditions, including journals in which scholars of these traditions can publish and courses in which some multicultural philosophy can be taught. Apart from journals, publishing categories and courses specifically dedicated to non-Western traditions of thought – to Asian or African philosophy, for instance (and these are not exactly abundant) – philosophy of religion is the one disciplinary category where non-Western contributions occasion no surprise, even if they are still vastly under-represented. In addition, it is not as if Asian or African or native American traditions have no aspects that can rightly be described as »religious«, with the proper qualifications. There are family resemblances between certain phenomena commonly classed as religious that warrant studying them together, as long as scholars are at the same time sensitive to their differences and to the fuzziness of the border between religion and other aspects of culture. Philosophy of religion provides a scholarly forum through which these can be addressed, and through which students can be educated to think in an informed but critical manner about them. This is extremely important in a global context where the influence of religion shows no signs of waning in the manner predicted by those who see secularization as an inevitable consequence of the advance of reason. In my view, however, the most important reason not to abolish the »religion« in philosophy of religion has to do with the unexamined assumptions grounding the approach to religion of those who complain of a »theological agenda« behind academic discourses revolving around this category. The positions of Fitzgerald and McCutcheon, both of whom argue for abolishing Religious Studies as a separate academic discipline, rest on a view of religion as entirely reducible to sociological, political and psychological modes of analysis. This view needs to be carefully distinguished from other, not necessarily reductionist, analyses highlighting either the modernity or occidentality of the concept, such as those of Wilfred Cantwell Smith or S.N. Balagangadhara.14 The reductionist critique has often targeted the notion that religion is sui generis, as Rudolf Otto had argued in The Idea of the Holy. Otto’s well-known thesis is that the root of religion, as a cross-cultural phenomenon, is a sense of the »holy« or »numinous«, an awareness of some overpowering mysterium tremendum that evokes awe and piety. He claims further that the idea of the holy generated S. Sikka, »What Is Indian ›Religion‹? How Should It Be Taught?«, in Whose Religion? Education About Religion in Public Schools, ed. L. Beaman et al., 2015. 14

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by this experience is like the idea of beauty in that it cannot be translated into any other terms. It follows that while the sense of the holy can be expressed and conceptualized in different ways, and has been in the variety of religious forms that have existed through human history, the language expressing it cannot truly be understood by those who have never had the experience itself. It also follows that to understand the essence of religion, one has to analyze it in terms of the experience of the holy, which means that the phenomena thought to be appropriately captured by the concept have been selected and interpreted in light of this understanding of what religion genuinely is. It is fair to point out, against Otto’s account, that many aspects of religion as an aspect of human culture have little or nothing to do with any sense of the holy, and need to be analyzed in connection with social and political structures, values, and features of human psychology. I doubt that any religious studies scholars or philosophers of religion would deny this. But the complaint of theological bias leveled by religious studies scholars who are critical of the »religion is sui generis« position goes well beyond the claim that this position leaves out important dimensions of religion, or that it is too narrowly focused on a single species of religiosity that is not as universal as it supposes. The complaint is that the very notion of an »experience« of the holy, interpreted as pointing to something supposedly lying beyond the immanent structures of human society and psychology, involves a theological bias, which supposedly objective inquiry needs to avoid. It is one thing to argue, however, as Donald Wiebe does, that a methodological approach which excludes a priori the possibility that reductive accounts of religion may be true and exhaustive demonstrates a confessional bias, even if it is perhaps an ecumenical one.15 It is another to level this charge against any approach which does not accept a priori the view that, in the case of religion, reductionist modes of analysis of the sort employed by social scientists leave nothing further to be investigated. The reductionist view is itself subject to assessment, and it is not assessed by social science approaches to religion. Nor would one expect it to be, given that the questions involved in assessing it are not social scientific ones but D. Wiebe, »The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion«, Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 13, no. 4 (1984), 402, n. 7.Wiebe does not here accuse philosophers of religion of this bias, but in a more recent publication he does, as I will go on to argue. In the article I reference at this juncture,Wiebe targets religious studies scholars rather than philosophers of religion, and claims that those who accept the existence of an ultimate reality are guilty of a theological bias. He adds that inquiries which leave this question genuinely open are indistinguishable from philosophy of religion. 15

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metaphysical and epistemological ones. Such questions are precisely the province of philosophy of religion. Let me return to the three broad topics I outlined earlier: concepts of God or ultimate reality; religious and mystical experiences; and soteriological claims. How would a genuinely »objective« philosophy of religion, one that begins neither with theological nor reductionist assumptions, approach these topics? The answer is complicated by an ambiguity in the idea of philosophy of religion. It can refer, on the one hand, to philosophical reflection on religion as an existing set of phenomena, in which case philosophy of religion involves analysis and assessment of what religious people believe and do. Following this conception of the subject, a philosophy of religion approach to the question of God or an extra-mundane reality might survey various existing doctrines and positions on this topic in the world’s religious traditions, and ask whether there are legitimate grounds for these views, and whether one is more rationally defensible than another. Likewise, with respect to soteriology, it might again examine the panoply of beliefs about life after death across the world, or at least a reasonable sample of these, and again ask whether they can be defended, anticipating arguments for and against as per standard philosophical procedure. On the other hand, philosophy of religion can equally well be oriented towards theological questions in an independent fashion. It can ask, for instance, not about the defensibility of existing ideas of God or reality, but about the ultimate nature of reality and how we would come to know it, and whether its conception or explanation requires the hypothesis of a designing mind or is itself mind-like in some fashion. To give another example, it can ask about the character of consciousness and its place within nature, drawing out implications in relation to the self, reality and death. The line between this kind of independent inquiry and reflection on religion is not a sharp one, as all thought moves in conversation with existing ideas, and independent philosophical inquiry about issues like God, reality, experience and selfhood naturally engages with existing ideas on these subjects. It is not, however, confined to an assessment of these. It is also constructive, engaging in forms of speculation that the discipline of philosophy has often placed outside the subfield named »philosophy of religion« and in the category of metaphysics instead. Hegel’s thought provides a particularly clear illustration of this double relation to religion and theology. On the one hand, »Hegel’s philosophy of religion« construes religion as a stage in the development of the »world spirit«, a stage at which human consciousness grasps reality through feeling and expresses what it grasps in the form of symbols. On the other hand, the monistic metaphysics within which this view of religion is situated can itself be seen, depending on one’s interpretation, as a species of natural the-

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ology. It posits a »becoming God«, as Heidegger remarks of Schelling, who begins as pure possibility and is successively realized in time, first through nature and then through human history.16 This is not the God of classical Christian theism, but is a speculative revision of the concept of God, with parallels in other traditions. Thus, engagement with Hegel in the context of philosophy of religion could include either an analysis of his views on religion as an existing fact, or his revisions to the idea of God, or both. In fact, the conduct of philosophy of religion often moves between philosophizing about religion and philosophical speculation, for in practice evaluation of existing religious claims leads naturally to independent philosophical reflection on questions about matters such as the existence of God, the ultimate character of reality and consciousness, the means of right knowing, and the nature of death.We have tended to call all such reflection »natural theology«, which is fine if this term means the critical examination of matters related to divinity through the use of reason alone (where one may also reason about the limits of reason and the status of various modes of experience). Unfortunately, though, the word »theology« also connotes prior commitment to the truth of some version of a religious position. Thus, in the context of an examination of Religious Studies in Canada, Wiebe criticizes attempts at critical theology, which are not confessional in the sense of being committed to the tenets of particular religion, for still having a »crypto-theological« agenda insofar as they preclude »all possibility of reductionistic accounts of religion – that is, accounts of religion that do not a priori presuppose the transcendent reality on which all theology is based«.17 Wiebe contrasts such accounts with »a scientific approach to the study of religion that would be primarily concerned with explanatory and theoretical accounts of religious phenomena«.18 Now, philosophy of religion is not religious studies, and the possibility that all claims about a »transcendent reality« are wrong, and that reductionist accounts of such claims exhaust the nature of religious phenomena, are certainly on the table within this field. At the same time, philosophers of religion also do not assume the correctness of reductionist accounts, which themselves presuppose definite theses about reality and knowledge that philosophers might well consider naïve. It is hard to avoid the impression that scholars like Wiebe see »crypto-theology« in any analysis that does M. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), 159. 17 D. Wiebe, »The Learned Practice of Religion: A Review of the History of Religious Studies in Canada and Its Portent for the Future«, Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 35, no. 3–4 (September 2006), 484, 481. 18 Ibid., 492. 16

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not make this assumption, rather than merely in ones that preclude it. As evidence, consider Wiebe’s response to John Schellenberg’s proposal for a more open-ended approach than the one currently prominent within analytic philosophy of religion, dominated, Schellenberg maintains, by conservative Christian theologians. Schellenberg calls instead for »a nondefensive conversation with religious ideas and religious thinkers from far and wide«, a conversation that views religion as an evolving phenomenon, and is »open to many more possible views of the world than just theism and naturalism«.19 Wiebe objects that in making this proposal, Schellenberg »seems to treat religion as a primitive, sui generis reality that lies beyond explanation but permits a kind of explication«, which means that it »does not permit demarcation between theology and philosophy«, and remains »essentially a religious mode of thought«.20 Wiebe concludes that »philosophers of religion, therefore, are likely to learn more about ›thinking about religion‹ from scientific students of religion than from non-conservative theologians«.21 The problem is, though, that »scientific students of religion« presuppose, without argument, a reductionist view of all religion, a move that in turn rests on a host of assumptions about reality and knowledge. For example, to suppose that no experience classed as religious – whether the experience of the holy, or experiences like nirvana or moksha - can be taken as indicating a feature of reality rather than being reducible to sociological and psychological explanations is surely to beg the question. Perhaps that is not what Wiebe means in rejecting the sui generis account of religion advanced by Otto and Mircea Eliade, but then he needs to mark a difference between the semantic and the reductionist versions of the »religion is not sui generis« critique. One may conclude, without philosophical analysis and simply by surveying the range of phenomena classed as »religion«, that they are not all founded on a unique kind of experience, and also that there is no such thing as »religion« in general, meaning a set of phenomena that can be analyzed in a singular fashion or with roughly with the same set of conceptual tools. But that claim needs to be distinguished from the reductionist thesis that there is no unique sense of the holy, and that alleged experiences of the holy, along with other »mystical« experiences, are reducible to explanations in terms that remove any reference to a transcendent reality. Determining whether or not this is the case does require J. Schellenberg, »Philosophy of Religion: A State of the Subject Report«, Toronto Journal of Theology 25, no. 1 (2009), 103, 107. 20 D. Wiebe, »An Evolutionary Perspective in the Philosophy of Religion: Prospects and Problem«, Toronto Journal of Theology 26, no. 1 (2010), 82. 21 Ibid., 83. 19

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philosophical analysis, raising questions about the nature and structure of experience generally, about what are legitimate forms of knowing and why, and about the relation between human consciousness and the really real. Such inquiry can usefully incorporate questions about scientific knowledge, asking about its elements and conceptual framework, as well as the range of its objects. However, it is doubtful that philosophers of religion have much to learn from »scientific students of religion« who do not address, and are often unaware of, these questions. I do not wish to enter into the details of Wiebe’s debate with Schellenberg here, or of Schellenberg’s proposal itself (though I am sympathetic to his criticisms of the predominance of conservative Christian thinkers in the field of philosophy of religion). I have adduced it only as an example of what one might call »crypto-naturalism« among critics of »cryptotheology« in religious studies, many of whom make this charge as part of a critique of the concept of religion generally. In calling this »cryptonaturalism«, I do not mean that true objectivity requires being open to the existence of »supernatural« beings. I mean, rather, that the category of the »supernatural« is parasitic on that of the »natural«, and it needs to be recognized that »naturalism« involves a particular conception of nature, of reality as such and as a whole, correlated with theses about what are and are not reliable means of gaining true knowledge of this reality.These are, I have been suggesting, metaphysical and epistemological claims, which need investigation and cannot be presupposed as obviously true. Genuine objectivity requires that this view not be accepted as a presupposition, though it may still be reached as a conclusion. Philosophy of religion approached in this spirit is open to naturalistic reductions of religion, but it does not proceed as if such a methodology could be taken for granted. In a discursive context where many critics of the concept of religion, who are mainly not philosophers, do take this methodology for granted, philosophy of religion can serve as a valuable corrective.

Conclusion There are good reasons to be critical of the concept of »religion«: it denotes too wide a range of what are in fact highly disparate phenomena; it is modeled on the Abrahamic traditions, Christianity in particular; and it delimits the category in terms of a map drawn from the history of Western cultures. These shortcomings of the concept affect philosophy of religion, leading to confusions about the subject matter, a narrow focus on Christian doctrine, a lack of fit with Asian traditions, and a questionable understanding of »religions« as communities of faith identified by exclusive sets of

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belief and practice. I have argued that there are nonetheless good reasons to continue the enterprise of »philosophy of religion«, presupposing the use of this problematic concept. For one thing, the category of religion is not hopelessly empty of meaning. There are family resemblances among the phenomena commonly placed under it. For another, while the concept of religion may need serious revision in relation to non-Western traditions, it does at least provide an opportunity to include some aspects of them, a considerable benefit in a context where existing philosophy canons and curricula are highly Eurocentric. Most importantly, there is a need for philosophical analysis of the metaphysical and epistemological questions raised by an assessment of religious beliefs and theological propositions, and that is the special province of philosophy. This task includes critical assessment of pre-existing beliefs as well as independent reflection on »theological« topics, and philosophy of religion naturally moves between these modes. Moreover, within philosophy, a genuinely objective approach cannot take for granted specific metaphysical and epistemological premises, including those on which reductionist and »naturalistic« interpretations of religion are based, but must subject these to critical scrutiny. This analysis of the situation suggests that while there are for the time being good reasons to preserve »philosophy of religion« as a distinct field of philosophy, given what the alternatives currently are, those of us who work within this field should also be mindful of its problematic character. That character is due not merely to semantic difficulties raised by the concept of religion, but to how these correlate with realities about the way the field has been and continues to be constituted: the form it has taken, the blurriness of its methodology, and the questionability of its selection and exclusion of topics and traditions. Philosophy of religion should not be Christian apologetics, and Schellenberg is right to note the strong presence of the latter within the field. That kind of apologetics needs to be distinguished, however, from the sort of independent reflection that is part of the legitimate task of philosophy of religion. Such reflection might still be described as a kind of »theology«, but given the confessional overtones of this term, it might be better to search for alternative ways of describing philosophical reflections that focus on the subject of theos and neighboring ideas, but through a dialogue with a wide variety of relevant traditions and positions and without confessional commitments, whether religionspecific or ecumenical. »Commitment« should not be taken as equivalent to »sympathy«; we all enter philosophical discussions with initial sympathy for one side of a debate over others, and philosophy of religion is no different. But »theology« without confessional commitments would be of a form that is prepared to reach negative conclusions if that is where due consideration leads, such as that the God of classical theism does not exist;

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or that ultimate reality is material and not mind-like; or that there is no survival of any element of consciousness beyond death and so on. This is not »theology« in the traditional sense, not even »natural theology«, but it needs to be one of the tasks of philosophy of religion, in part because it is an important and valuable enterprise in its own right, and in part as a counter to the naïve view that a reductionist starting point is the default »objective« approach. I would like to end with some personal observations about my own relation to the field of philosophy of religion, a relation that has undergone considerable evolution. Until the last few years, I actually did not think of myself as a philosopher of religion at all, and did not even list the area as a competence on my curriculum vitae or university web page. This was in spite of the fact that philosophy of religion was the first university subject I ever taught, when I was still a graduate student, and one that I have been teaching regularly ever since, some 25 years now. Yet I did not imagine my work as fitting into this area of philosophy, given current North American classifications used in the context of job advertisements, publications, scholarly meetings and the like, which one tends to absorb unreflectively. Instead, my stated areas of specialization over the years have included »continental philosophy«, »German philosophy«, »philosophy of culture«, and »social and political philosophy«. Within the subject areas of continental philosophy and German philosophy, I am a specialist on the thought of Heidegger and Herder. It never occurred to me to classify any of my published work on these authors as »philosophy of religion«, in spite of the fact that a good deal of it engages precisely with questions such as the ontological status of God, the cognitive standing of experiences of the holy, and the meaning of being in relation to concepts of nature. When I considered the topics rather than authors with which I was engaged in examining these questions, I associated them with metaphysics and epistemology, and indeed natural theology, rather than philosophy of religion. Until recently, it also did not occur to me connect my work on social and political topics with philosophy of religion, even though much of it focuses on the fate of religion under secular political structures, and on constructions of religious identity. Upon reflection, I have come to see that this is precisely because I associate »philosophy of religion« with discussions that by and large take a traditional brand of Christian theism as their focus, not always apologetically but in order either to defend or criticize its doctrines. That has never been my own focus; I have always been more interested in exploring other options within Western thought, especially ones that have parallels in Asian traditions or can enter fruitfully into dialogue with these. In addition, I have always preferred to examine and evaluate particular metaphysical

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views rather than one or another or many »religions«, as if the latter were like individual units of belief to be accepted or rejected wholesale. Recently, however, I have added »philosophy of religion« to my stated research areas. This was a highly conscious and deliberate decision, made after explicit critical reflection on what the subject is and what it can and should be, instigated by engagement with critics of the concept of religion in neighboring disciplines. As a result, I now problematize the concept when teaching philosophy of religion, while trying at the same time to provide a more adequately multicultural curriculum and approach. Thus, my own experience has been that paying attention to concerns about the idea of religion, and the place of academic discourses in relation to this idea, does call into question what philosophers of religion currently do.The results of such critical self-examination can, I believe, ultimately enrich and expand the field rather than diminishing it.

Why Philosophers of Religion Don’t Need »Religion« – At Least Not for Now Timothy D. Knepper Just as things change, we’re told there can be no change – that no matter how much scholars or practitioners of religion recalibrate the modernwestern notion of religion, we are condemned only ever to see religion as organized sets of privatized beliefs, the study of religion as the liberaltheological affirmation of a diversity of such beliefs.There is no small value to this critique – it has been a crucial catalyst of the recalibration of religion. But insofar as it calls for more than just recalibration, insofar as it calls for a wholesale abandonment of the category of religion – or, in this case, of a religiously diverse and inclusive philosophy of religions – it is mistaken. This paper first gives three reasons in support of this claim: the critique of religion is unrealistic insofar as it neglects linguistic change, it is unimaginative insofar as it neglects linguistic context, and it is unaware insofar as it neglects linguistic ideology. The second half of the paper then turns to a different kind of argument – the argument that philosophers of religion do not actually need the category of religion for much of what they do. As philosophers of religion look for instances of general types of religious reason-giving to compare, explain, and evaluate, they should not limit their search to sites that are deemed »religious«; thus they should employ heuristic categories that do not involve the category of religion, at least not as such and at first. It might appear, then, that this paper is saying two contradictory things: religion both is and is not a useful category in the study of religion. In a sense, this is true: to understand religion as a category of inquiry is to appreciate that it changes over time and space, that it is only ever useful, not true, and that it necessarily carries ideological associations. The question about whether religion needs to be abolished or retained is therefore not one that can be settled »once and for all« – it will vary with the category’s contexts of use and changes over time, many of which are well beyond the control of the scholar.1 My understanding of the critique of religion is informed by the works of scholars such as Timothy Fitzgerald, Russell McCutcheon, J. Z. Smith, and W. C. Smith. I do not single out particular arguments of particular scholars here. Rather, I target a general understanding of the critique of religion as too Protestant in conception (in 1

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My first critique of the critique of religion is that it is unrealistic in the sense that it fails to appreciate an obvious linguistic phenomenon and fact – semantic categories change over time, and the semantic category of religion has changed over time. I dare say change is true of all semantic categories. And I would appeal to a basic semiotic distinction to show this possibility: the signifier/signified distinction. All signs, linguistic or other, are composed of a signifier that is taken to stand for a signified in some respect: the signifier »cat« stands for the concept cat; the signifier of a stop sign stands for the behavioral direction to stop a vehicle.2 But this »standing for« relationship is not established a priori; it is a cultural-linguistic fact that is subject to change. Signifiers, signifieds, and signifier/signified relationships change over time (and can also vary over space). Granted, this claim is somewhat controversial in the cases of so-called semantic primitives and natural kinds – perhaps there is a core set of signfieds that every language does and must possess and that therefore does not change over time and vary over space; perhaps signifieds that denote natural-kind things in the world are not arbitrary in the sense that such things determine the semantic content of the signs that are used to refer to them. No matter: religion is not a semantic primitive, and although there are physical and cultural realities that constrain usages of »religion«, these realities do not determine the meaning of religion as directly as in the case of natural-kind terms. Religion is a sign-function that changes over time and varies over space. There is a simpler way of making this argument: the concept of religion has changed over time. If Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion did nothing else, it demonstrated the cultural-historical fluctuations of religio from its ancient Roman origins to the Enlightenment: from correct cultic observance, to monastic institutions and practices, to a piety that prompts true worship, to a system of beliefs about God.3 Kevin Schilbrack’s recent article »What Is not Religion« does the same, though with a more directional sense of the way in which scholars of religion gradually broadened the meaning of religion as they wrestled with increasingly more diverse religious phenomena: from religion as Christianity, to religion as theistic religion, to religion as polytheistic religion, to religion as nontheistic emphasizing organized beliefs, individual faith, experiential core, private »practice«, church/state separation, etc.), too vague when de-Protestantized, and too Protestantly biased whether de-Protestantized or not. But as I hope will soon be clear, I am most concerned with the philosophy of language that seems to be presupposed in these critiques of religion. 2 I will use quote marks to designate, among other things, words as linguistic signifiers, italics to designate categories as semantic signifieds. 3 W.C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).

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religion as well.4 Of course, it’s possible to chalk some of this change up to variations in cultural values and ideals: there are countless ideological factors that have shaped the modern-western understanding of religion. But there are countless social and physical realities that have played a role too. It’s simply not the case that »systems of belief about God« fits much of the religion-like stuff that we find in the world.When scholars of religion look at forms of »belief about God«, they see that people often ritualize practice involving other kinds of superempirical realities; they also see that beliefs are not always very important in the institutions of practice that concern these superempirical realities. And so our understanding of religion changes – not in ways that float free of ideological influence, but in ways that are nevertheless informed by the corresponding physical and social realities. To recap: my first critique of the critique of religion is that it is unrealistic in the sense that it underappreciates semantic change in general and the semantic changes of religion in particular. Before going any further, I’d like to qualify this point: it’s not that the critique of religion outright ignores the semantic changes of religion; rather, it downplays, if not rejects, the role that physical and social realities play in this process. Indeed, this is just why I included a brief philosophy of language above – to highlight the role that physical and social realities play in affecting the meaning of linguistic signs. Of course, such a theory of language can hardly be proved. But I do think that a philosophy of language that recognizes a dialectical relationship between language and reality, one in which language both shapes and is shaped by reality, provides a more satisfactory account not only of linguistic innovation and change but also of linguistic failure and success – the ways in which language sometimes does and other times does not offer a useful guide to our interactions with »the world«. By contrast, it would appear that the critique of religion presupposes a rather static view of language, at least in the case of religion and with respect to change informed by social realities. Unlike all the many other terms that scholars use to analyze social realities, religion is, to a critic of religion, incorrigible – if it once was used to mean a set of beliefs about God, a privatized individual faith, a compartmentalized unit of society, then it must always mean these things and cannot possibly apply to societies where these things are not present. But of course religion has not always meant these things; it started meaning these things at a time and place where there were social realities and ideologies to confirm and create these meanings.5 And while powerful K. Schilbrack, »What Is not Religion«, The Journal of Religion 93/3 (2013): 291– 318. 5 Also consider the relatively recent innovation of and changes to spiritual: to be sure the concept of spiritual leads us to see forms of non-organized, non-institutional, 4

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social ideologies continue to create and disseminate these modern-western meanings, it has become manifestly evident to scholars of religion – critics of religion included – that these meanings do not match the social realities of pre-modern and non-western societies. This is to say that the category of religion does not determine perception and thought in a manner that blinds us to disconfirming evidence. But it is also to say that the act of seeing and showing such disconfirming evidence enacts semantic changes to religion, whether by implying that there are different meanings of religion or by restricting the semantic range of religion vis-à-vis other quasi-religious categories. Perhaps this is one irony of the critique of religion: it unwittingly does that which it says cannot be done – enacts changes to the category of religion by exposing it to the corrective force of extra-linguistic realities. Of course, there’s more to the critique of religion than the claim that it is too »Protestant« to be of any value in cross-cultural analysis. There is also the claim that when religion is purged of its Protestant biases in an attempt to apply it cross-culturally, it becomes too vague to be of any use. It would seem, though, that this critique also belies itself, this time because it presupposes other, better meanings of religion. If, for example, I want to criticize the narrowness of religion – as critics often do – I can point to a range of examples, conventionally considered religion, that do not fit this understanding. But my argument is really only as effective as these examples constitute »near misses«. If I complain that some definition of religion fails to cover lawn mowing, my audience will shrug their shoulders. But if I instead point to Zen as a problem for definitions of religion that privilege gods or doctrines, then my argument has some cogency since Zen is generally regarded as a religious tradition. Here, a broader category of religion is assumed, even if one with fuzzy borders. The same holds true for allegedly vague definitions of religion: insofar as we claim that some examples (Red Sox Nation) but not others (Civil Religion) constitute difficulties for such definitions, we assume a better understanding of religion, even if one that is again vague. In sum: only if a second understanding of religion is presupposed can examples count as better and worse counter-examples for a first understanding of religion. Moreover, vagueness is not the problem for religion that critics say it is (as decades of disagreement about the »demarcation criteria« of science suggest).6 In fact, not only is vagueness to be expected in the case of our categories for social realities (as Wittgenstein showed with existentially oriented religion in the world; but it also reflects this changing reality. 6 See, really, any philosophy of science textbook for an introduction to this century-long disagreement – for example, chapter one of J.A. Cover and M. Curd, Philosophy of Science:The Central Issues (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998).

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game),7 it is also a virtue insofar as borderline cases aid in understanding and explaining some phenomena in general. All this is to say that there are effective uses of religion, even for its critics. It therefore leads to my second critique of the critique of religion: it is unimaginative insofar as it neglects religion’s contexts of use. It hardly needs to be said anymore that religion is not »really« in the world – at least not if our notion of »being really in the world« takes pine trees and pit bulls, rather than science and art, as its exemplary cases. Religion is not the sort of thing that is true or false of stuff in the world; it’s the sort of thing that is more or less useful in understanding and explaining stuff that humans do in the world – just like science and art. It seems manifestly useful to have categories such as science and art since they help us organize and analyze many of the significant things that humans do and produce. Why is not this the case for religion too? Of course, there are bound to be questionable cases of science and art, just as with religion. And science and art can become so semantically broad that they become analytically ineffective, just as with religion. Moreover, there will be issues in the cross-cultural misapplication of science and art, as with religion. But this is just how is goes with the categories that get used for social realities. These matters will need to be sorted out on a use-by-use basis, insofar as that is possible. This is to say, again, that the usefulness of religion cannot be determined once and for all; rather, it will turn on how religion gets used in particular cases. With regards to the academy, I do believe that in fact there are cases where the category of religion will not be helpful to scholarship; I will deal with just such a case in the second half of this essay. But with regards to the wider world and local community, this is a different issue.The fact of the matter seems to be that, for better or worse, religion has become a global category; to fight against it will have all the effectiveness of a flat-earth society. Still, when it comes to the academy, my point remains: it is a misunderstanding of religion to think that it can and should be abolished or retained once and for all; rather, its usefulness must be ascertained with respect to particular contexts of use. Insofar as the critique of religion calls for its wholesale abandonment, it reifies not only semantic categories and social realities but also our uses of the former to understand and explain the latter. Finally, there is the issue of justice: insofar as religion carries modernwestern biases, is it unjust to use it in our analyses of premodern and nonwestern cultures? I want to begin by expressing solidarity with this critique.There are matters of justice at stake in how we understand and de L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations:The German Text, with a Revised English Translation 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), §66. 7

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ploy religion. Insofar as we use religion to describe and explain cross-cultural phenomena, we need to do our best to tame its cultural-religious biases. But I would argue against those who maintain that the most just course of action is that of abandoning religion wholesale. In fact, my experience with the many different religious communities in my city lead me to believe that religion is a term of empowerment for them.8 Not only does it bring a certain amount of respect and equality from those outside the community; it also empowers the community to regard itself as as a community. I know that a certain critic of religion advocates that I too should be a critic and not caretaker of religion. But I cannot help care about those religious communities that I study. And one of the things that I care about most is that they are treated with respect and equality. From where I stand, religion is a category that has served this end for them. But is such care effectively colonization? Is my application of the category of religion to what goes on at the local Vietnamese Buddhist temple and Sikh gurudwara an act of colonization? Is the application of the category of religion in general an act of colonization? Or is it so only when it is applied to those who do not themselves understand what they are doing as »religion«? But there was a point in time – in both human and individual history – when no one understood what they were doing as »religion«. So are all applications of the category of religion acts of colonization? And every category has a point of origin in time. Are, then, all applications of all categories acts of colonizations? And since all signs are categories – general types that govern the application of specific tokens – is all signification, whether linguistic or not, colonization? There is a sense in which all this is true; it is, I believe, one insight behind the Derridean claim that language is violence.9 Language affects the way we perceive and conceive reality, if only ever so slightly. As we learn new signs, new signifiers for existing signifieds, or new signifieds for existing signifieds, our network of signification (and consequently our ways of perceiving and conceiving) is »violently« altered, if only ever so slightly. Moreover, some signs – perhaps all – involve value judgments and are involved in power relations, and so this alteration is sometimes noticeably »violent«. So there is a sense in which what is true of religion is true of any category – and perhaps all the more true of the categories that English-speaking scholars apply to the rest of the The majority of time that I spend visiting local religious communities in Des Moines, Iowa happens at a Vietnamese Buddhist temple (Tu Vien Hong Duc), a Sikh gurudwara (Sikhs of Iowa Khalsa Heritage Inc.), and a Hindu temple (Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Iowa). 9 I am thinking in particular of J. Derrida, »Violence and Metaphysics«, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 79–153. 8

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world in an effort to describe and explain. This leads to my third and final critique of the critique of religion: it would appear unaware that any category that gets used in scholarship »colonizes«, its own categories included. And insofar as the description and explanation that occurs in scholarship is really just a formalization of what happens in »ordinary language« every time someone tries to understand another, the critique of religion would also appear unaware that all language »colonizes«. Now, I do recognize that there have been occurrences, all too many occurrences, when religion has been applied in deliberate efforts to make inferior and demonize the other. These occurrences are still with us; we must be vigilant in combating them. But it seems to me that it is the general public, not scholars of religion, who are most guilty of this. From where I stand, scholars of religion have done a commendable job of broadening the category of religion such that it does not carry as many of the modern-western biases as it once did. Such efforts must continue. And they must be realized in the classroom and the community as much as in the academy. Thus far I have been critiquing the critique of religion. My arguments have been that the critique of religion is unrealistic insofar as it neglects linguistic change, unimaginative insofar as it neglects linguistic context, and unaware insofar as it neglects linguistic ideology. At the root of these arguments is a claim that the critique of religion rests on an impoverished understanding of language – one that fails to recognize that language never fits reality, always carries bias, and continually changes in dialectical relationship with what is other. Of course, these changes are not always useful. And there is not any single, foolproof test for determining usefulness. But in the case of religion, it would seem that our scholarly category now not only picks out many more cases with much less bias but also serves the interests of the marginalized as much as the powerful. It would seem that religion has become a category that is useful to many more people with respect to many more phenomena. (It is particularly useful in showing the unsuitability of earlier categories of religion.) Scholars of religion would therefore be well advised to think twice before abandoning the category of religion wholesale. But just as I do not advocate tossing out the category of religion once and for all, so I do not advocate employing it always and everywhere. As I said above, the question of the usefulness of religion should be answered with respect to particular contexts of use. And as I also said above, the category of religion is in fact not useful to some of what the philosophy of religion does. I turn now to that argument. This argument is contingent on a certain understanding of what the philosophy of religion is and does, which in this case is my own philosophy of the philosophy of religion. I do not take it to be exclusive of other philosophies of the philosophy of religion; in my opinion there are many dif-

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ferent ways in which we can and should philosophize about religion. But I do find my own philosophy of the philosophy of religion commendable in several ways, most pertinently, its focus on a cultural diversity of historical acts of religious reason-giving. Let me explain. As I argued in The Ends of Philosophy of Religion, taking historical acts of religious reason-giving as a focal point in the philosophy of religion has two distinct advantages: concreteness and completeness.10 By »concrete«, I mean that philosophers of religion should train their primary sights on actual instances of written or spoken acts of reason-giving, not on the ideas that populate acts of religious reason-giving and the worldviews that acts of religious reasongiving populate. This gives an empirical rootedness to the philosophy of religion. And although it does privilege the linguistic over the bodily and mental, it does so only for the sake of having a primary focus of inquiry. It certainly does not exclude the bodily and mental. In fact, this is what I mean by »complete« – that the unpacking of linguistic forms of religious reason-giving would lead the philosopher of religion to the bodily rituals and mental ideas that those reasons concerned, but in a way that tied such analysis to concrete and discrete speech acts.11 This is not to say that the analyses of these corresponding rituals or ideas could not themselves constitute additional reasons, some of which were absent from or in tension with the primary act of religious reason-giving. Rather, it is merely to give a central target of sorts to inquiry in the philosophy of religion. Under this picture of the philosophy of religion, the philosopher of religion is most interested in the ways that humans actively reason about religion. What does a philosopher of religion do with these acts of religious reason-giving? These four things: first, the philosopher of religion seeks to thickly describe both the content and context of some act of religious reason-giving (along with its relevant encompassing practices and beliefs). This involves looking not only at the grounds and meanings of such acts but also at their cultural-historical settings, social-ideological uses, and personal motivations and ends. Second, the philosopher of religion attempts T. Knepper, The Ends of Philosophy of Religion:Terminus and Telos (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 11 It also leads to investigation of the philosophical presuppositions concerning these concepts (e.g., ritual, belief). Kevin Schilbrack has a better way of representing these »three axes« of investigation in the philosophy of religion: an x-axis of all religious traditions, a y-axis of all dimensions of religion, and a z-axis of all the philosophical presuppositions involved in the dimensions of the y-axis – see chapter one of K. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions:A Manifesto (Malden:Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). My approach, by contrast, is to prioritize a focal object (religious reason-giving) and let the tertiary fields of study unfold as the focal object dictates and suggests. 10

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to formally compare one set of descriptions with other sets of descriptions of the same general type (e.g., against the existence of a »soul«). This involves identifying important and interesting similarities and differences with respect to a comparative category that has been critically vetted. Third, the philosopher of religion engages in multidisciplinary explanation in an effort to give reasons for why the instances of the comparative category are patterned as they are. Although this step need not invoke an actual multidisciplinary set of explanations, it should be open to explanations from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Fourth, the philosopher of religion attempts to critically evaluate these comparative instances of religious reason-giving in a manner that is informed by both relevant knowledge in the sciences and diverse inquiring backgrounds and interests. This is not, in my opinion, to evaluate entire religious traditions; rather it is to evaluate instances of types of religious reason-giving. Of course, comparison is not necessary; it’s quite possible for a philosopher of religion to move from the description of a single instance of religious reason-giving to a multidisciplinary explanation or critical evaluation of it. But to the degree to which the philosophy of religion attempts to philosophize about religion beyond the particular, it must compare between these particulars, whether »formally« or not. (In fact, even the description of a single particular involves implicit comparison insofar as it uses general categories in its description.) What I contend, then, is that the act of formal comparison should include non-religious and quasi-religious instances of reason-giving when there are such instances of reason-giving that are of the same comparative class as some type of religious reason-giving. Why? Because the multidisciplinary explanation of patterns of religious reasongiving will be more robust and the critical evaluation of instances of religious reason-giving will be more informed when they include parallel instances of non- and quasi-religious reason-giving. And these instances of reason-giving can be included only if the category of religion is absent, so to speak, from the identification of all such forms of reason-giving. Perhaps an example will help. I myself work on the subject of ineffability in general and ineffability discourse in particular – how people speak about things that they say they cannot speak about. I am most interested in studying ineffability in religion – allegedly ineffable first principles, ultimate realities, noetic truths, mystical experiences, and so forth. But I recognize that humans have called many more kinds of things ineffable – deeply felt emotions, overpowering experiences, non-linguistic forms of expression, cherished convictions, physical pain, know-how, and so forth. And I think that we will only be able to give a robust explanation of religious ineffability to the extent to which we understand it in comparison to these other forms of ineffability. Are religious experiences understood to be ineffable

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in the same way as other overpowering experiences? Is this just a trait of such experiences in general? Or are allegedly ineffable religious experiences also being protected from reduction to the mundane? Does such protection also happen in the case of cherished experiences that are not commonly classified as religious? Must first principles and ultimate realities be ineffable by definition? Does it work this way also in »non-religious« systems? Or are religious first principles defined as ineffable for other reasons? I hope that this line of questioning shows how a robust explanation of religious ineffability requires understanding it in comparison with forms of ineffability that are not commonly classified as religious. And the same holds true for evaluation. Is it possible for anything to be ineffable? Absolutely ineffable? Or is everything that is ineffable only relatively so? Is everything relatively ineffable? Is this a just a basic rule or fact of language? Or is everything effable? What are the repercussions for ultimate realities and mystical experiences if they cannot be absolutely ineffable? Are these repercussions the same as for »love« and »nature«? And so on, and so forth. So, again, I maintain that if philosophers of religion seek a robust explanation and informed evaluation of religious reason-giving, then they will want to involve non- and quasi-religious reason-giving in their investigations. They will therefore need to work without the category of religion, if only for a while. What category, then, will they use? Well, no category is perfect; all categories bias.This is particularly true when it comes to the study of philosophy and religion. But I do think that the category of ultimacy will suffice for now, particularly if it is specified in the ways that I indicate below.12 To start, I submit that the question of ultimate beginnings and ultimate ends are clearly philosophical questions about religion, both as applied to the cosmos as a whole and as applied to humans.This yields a number of distinct categories and questions for inquiry: 1. Is there an ultimate origin to or explanation for or nature of the cosmos? If so, what? Is there an explanation for how the cosmos comes to be? If so, what? 2. Is there an ultimate end to the cosmos? If so, what? Is there an explanation for what happens after the end of the cosmos? If so, what?

Note that many of the meanings of ultimate are involved below: ultimate as »the best or most extreme of its kind«; ultimate as »a final or fundamental fact or principle«; ultimate as »last in a progression or series«; ultimate as »basic, fundamental«; ultimate as »original«; ultimate as »incapable of further analysis, division, or separation.« 12

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3. Is there an ultimate origin to humans? How do individual humans become the individuals and humans that they are? Is anything beyond the physical involved? What is the ultimate nature of humans? 4. What is the ultimate end of humans? What (if anything) happens to human beings after they die? Note that in some cases one can drill down into these primary questions of beginnings and ends to reach some of the questions that have interested traditional philosophers of religion. For example: (1a) What are the attributes of God? (1b) Can the existence of God be proved? (3a) Can the existence of a soul be proved? (4a) Can the immortality of the soul be proved? But other types of religious beginnings and ends also fit in these categories, as do non- and quasi-religious answers to these questions. Question 1 includes religious beings and principles such as Brahman and Dao, philosophical systems such as Stoicism and Platonism, and scientific explanations such as Big-Bang Cosmology and the Four Fundamental Forces. Likewise, questions 2–4 include non-theistic, philosophic, and scientific answers as well. A second set of primary questions for philosophy of religion can then be generated by asking about the relationship between the questions of the first set. In particular, if philosophers of religion connect the ultimate beginnings and ends between questions 1 and 2 and also between questions 3 and 4, a set of questions about the ultimate paths between these beginnings and ends can be generated: 5. What is the »path« by which the cosmos »moves« from its beginning to its end? What significant obstacles, if any, lie in this path? How, if at all, are those obstacles overcome? What role, if any, do ultimate origins/ explanations play in this process? 6. What is the »path« by which humans »move« from their beginning to their ends? What significant obstacles, if any, lie in this path? How, if at all, are those obstacles overcome? What role, if any, do ultimate origins/ explanations play in this process? And if philosophers of religion connect the ultimate beginnings of the cosmos with the ultimate beginnings of humans, another set of questions about the ultimate connections between these »beginnings« can be generated: 7. What are the means, if any, by which ultimate origins/explanations are revealed or manifested to humans?

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8. What are the means, if any, by which humans experience or know ultimate origins/explanations? Note that at least one more core topic of traditional philosophy of religion is involved in questions 5–8: »evil« (natural in the case of question 5, moral in the case of question 6). But broader religious questions of »ultimate problems« (e.g., sin, suffering, disharmony, etc.) and »ultimate solutions« (e.g., salvation, release, harmony) are also involved in questions 5–6 (as are typical »philosophical« ones), and general religious questions of cognition, experience, and practice are involved in questions 7–8 (as, again, are typical »philosophical« ones). Of course religion is implicated in all these questions, for I maintain that they represent some of the most significant ways in which people think and argue about religion. Still, I advocate that philosophers of religion drop the term »religion« when investigating these questions, for doing so admits the full range of human answers to them, whether classified as religious or not.This enables a more informed evaluation of these answers with respect to their truth, value, and meaning – which is to say that these questions represent some of the most significant ways in which people think and argue about more than just religion. Dropping »religion« also enables a more robust explanation of the answers that are prototypically and tangentially religious, for our explanation of religious reason-giving is enriched by an understanding of the prototypically and tangentially non-religious ways in which humans have answered these questions. In fact, dropping »religion« might also enable an understanding of the ways in which that which is not commonly classified as religion functions religiously. It might therefore point the way toward new manifestations of »religion«, whether called religion or not. For it is the phenomena, not the labels, that are here important – even if the former are always entangled in the latter.

An Essentialist in Critical Religion Land, Or, How Fitzgerald’s Deconstructive Genealogy of Religion Is Compatible with an Essentialist Concept of Religion Dwayne Tunstall This contribution has been written under the belief that critical religion theory, a relatively recent subfield of religious studies, has some theoretical resources that can help philosophers of religion formulate historically informed concepts of religion and religions. The contribution might even convince some of them not to formulate yet more ahistorical concepts of religion and religions, as it also seeks to introduce an essentialist concept of religion that is compatible with the insights from critical religion theory, particularly from Timothy Fitzgerald’s deconstructive genealogy of religion. Critical religion theory is a subfield in which scholars engage in critical approaches to studying religion and religions. These approaches often involve scholars who study religion and religions to view them as being »the product of historical contingencies and complicated hermeneutic contexts«.1 This subfield consists primarily of work done by the scholars affiliated with the Critical Religion Association (CRA) at the University of Stirling, Scotland (e.g., Naomi Goldenberg and Timothy Fitzgerald) as well as work done by non-CRA affiliated scholars who study religion in a critical spirit (e.g., Talal Asad, Tomoko Masuzawa, Russell McCutcheon, and William Cavanaugh). Even though there are numerous theorists of critical religion, Fitzgerald’s work in critical religion theory can be regarded as representative of the entire subfield. This is the case because Fitzgerald is perhaps the most well-known theorist of critical religion in the field of religious studies. That alone should be enough for his work to be representative of critical religion theory. Accordingly, the discussion of critical religion theory below takes Fitzgerald’s deconstructive genealogy of religion as representative of how scholars associated with critical religion theory study religion and religions. K. Schilbrack, »After We Deconstruct ›Religion‹,Then What? A Case for Critical Realism«, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25, no. 1 (2013), 108. 1

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Theorists of critical religion study religion and religions with approaches that are critical in at least two senses of that word. First, they study religion and religions critically in the sense that they question the assumption »that what ›religion‹ actually is[,] is common knowledge and applies to all contexts, geographic and ideational (in Scotland, the Middle East, Asia, or in power and gender structures, etc.)«.2 Second, they study religion and religions critically in the sense that they actively reinterpret and reconceive religion »from a positive critical standpoint«.3 Such a standpoint involves studying the concepts of religion and religions not only »in the contexts of religious institutions, but also within the fields of hermeneutics, visual art, literature, history, gender studies, anthropology, politics, philosophy and so on«.4 Fitzgerald’s own critical approach to studying religion and religions, which involves a deconstructive genealogy of religion, is critical in both senses of critical described above. This deconstructive genealogy is part of a larger criticism of the discipline of religious studies. His criticism presumes that the following six statements are individually and jointly uncontroversial ones: 1. An academic discipline has a specific object or set of objects of study. 2. The object or objects of study (i.e., subject matter) of an academic discipline can consist of a variety of phenomena – e.g., social institutions, societal norms, cultural mores, rituals, ceremonies, natural events. 3. Practitioners of an academic discipline use concepts and theories to classify phenomena and separate those phenomena that are objects of study in that discipline from all other phenomena. 4. The objects of study in religious studies are religions. 5. The concepts of religion and religions are analytical categories that identify a specific category of human belief systems, traditions, ceremonies, institutions, experiences – namely, religious belief systems, religious traditions, religious ceremonies, religious institutions, and religious experiences. For the purposes of

»What is Critical Religion?«, Critical Religion Association: Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion, https://criticalreligion.org/what-is-critical-religion/, accessed December 28, 2014. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 2

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this contribution, we can refer to these items collectively using the term religious phenomena. 6. For religious studies to be a viable academic discipline, the concept of religion needs to enable scholars of religion to adequately identify religious phenomena and explain how religious phenomena differ from non-religious phenomena. In other words, for religious studies to be a viable academic discipline, its practitioners need to presume an essentialist conception of religion in their work – namely, that there are necessary and sufficient conditions for certain human belief systems, experiences, and practices to be religious in nature.

Fitzgerald’s criticism of religious studies is based on the apparent failure of religious studies scholars to satisfy the sixth statement above. Indeed, he thinks that the concepts of religion and religions used by scholars of religions do not enable them to adequately identify religious phenomena and explain how religious phenomena differ from nonreligious phenomena (e.g., erecting national monuments and engaging in annual national ceremonies). He does not think that there can be a non-arbitrary way of saying that »African witchcraft beliefs, Japanese public street festivals, Theravada meditation, Scientology, the Indian caste system, devotion to Elvis Presley, water divining, yoga, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholic monastic communities, and Calvinist attitudes to work and productivity [are] ›religious‹ or ›religion‹«5 whereas »devotion to capital, private property, the accumulation of money, or the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the glory of the nation state«6 are nonreligious phenomena. Scholars of religion could address Fitzgerald’s criticism here by adopting at least one of two anti-essentialist conceptions of religion and religions. First, scholars could adopt a Wittgensteinian family resemblance approach to the study of religion and religions. According to this approach, religious phenomena from different religious traditions belong together because they resemble one another in a manner similar to how different kinds of games resemble one another. For example, chess, bowling, water skiing, and Mario Kart 77 differ in numerous ways; yet, they are all classifiable as games. Religions could be conceived of in a similar manner. Adherents of Soto Buddhism, Disciples of Christ, Sufism, and Santeria perform vastly differ T. Fitzgerald, »The Myth of Religion and the Tyranny of Richard Dawkins’ Discontinuous Mind«,Critical Religion Associations (February 16, 2012), web, accessed December 18, 2014. 6 Ibid. 7 Mario Kart 7 is the name of the seventh main installment of a racing video game developed by Nintendo EAD and Retro Studios, featuring characters from various Mario-related video games. It was released in the United States December 2011. 5

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ent rituals, adopt vastly different belief systems, and participate in vastly differently institutional structures; yet, they are all classifiable as religious traditions.There seems to be something intuitively plausible in the analogy between the family resemblance of games and the family resemblance of religions. Nevertheless, this analogy is a weak one. At most, scholars can provide examples of apparent similarities between particular phenomena. To move beyond these apparent similarities between phenomena and use these similarities to place them into the category of religious phenomena requires one to presume that there are criteria that people can use to discern when a phenomenon is a religious one. Such criteria would function like the necessary and sufficient conditions in an essentialist concept of religion. However, apparent similarities are not sufficiently stable to constitute reliable and precise criteria necessary for scholars to distinguish between religious phenomena and nonreligious phenomena.8 And even if the family resemblance approach to the study of religion could convincingly answer this criticism, the question would remain: what warrants scholars’ denial of the resemblance between, say, veterans marching in their local Memorial Day parade and Eastern Orthodox parishioners taking the Eucharist or between the ritualistic tailgating done by fervent US college football fans before a home game and Japanese tea ceremonies? Perhaps a more successful anti-essentialist concept of religion would be a particularist one. A particularist concept of religion would require scholars to contend that there are legitimate reasons for a ritual, ceremony, belief system, etc. to be considered religious and for specific collections of these phenomena to be classified as religions. The spirit of particularism is exemplified by Martin E. Marty’s statement concerning the definition of religion used by scholars who worked on the American Academy of Arts and Science’s Fundamentalism Project: »We define religion as anything the [fifteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion’s] editors would include in that

The criticism of family resemblance approach to the study of religion advanced in this paragraph originated from S. Davies, The Philosophy of Art (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 34. Even though Davies advances this criticism of family resemblance with respect to Wittgensteinian family resemblance theories of art, I think that it equally applies to family resemblance approach of defining religion. For Fitzgerald’s own criticism of family resemblance theories of religion, see T. Fitzgerald, »Religion, Philosophy and Family Resemblance«, Religion 26 (1996): 215–236; see also chapter 4 of Idem, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8

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work«.9 Particularists would contend that scholars of religions, as experts in the field of religious studies, have the right to determine which rituals, ceremonies, experiences, institutions, and belief systems are religious. However, particularists would deny that scholars of religion can appeal to a comprehensive or even provisional set of principles to justify their judgments concerning which phenomena are religious and which ones are nonreligious. These scholars can only justify their judgments on these matters on a case-by-case basis. This case-by-case approach to determining which phenomena are religious ones leaves open the possibility that scholars’ evaluations of phenomena and their subsequent judgments concerning their religious or nonreligious status are ultimately unprincipled and arbitrary. And even if one grants that scholars can evaluate phenomena and then determine which ones are religious phenomena in a principled and non-arbitrary manner, Fitzgerald would still contend that such evaluations are dependent on scholars adopting an inadequate ontology of religion. This inadequate ontology of religion commits scholars to view once-existing and currently existing religions as locally and historically indexed expressions of »a preexisting, perennial domain of human culture that has always somehow been there in one form of another, having had some problematic relationship to some other preexisting nonreligious domain like politics, the relationship undergoing various vicissitudes.«10 This ontology of religion is inadequate because there is not sufficient evidence that there is »a preexisting, perennial domain of human culture« that the concept of religion denotes. His deconstructive genealogy of »religion« is meant to subvert this inadequate ontology and replace it with a more Foucauldian genealogy of »religion«, in which the discourse that birthed the modern concepts of religion and religions also birthed the idea that religion is a cultural universal. Given the problems with formulating a satisfactory concept of religion, Fitzgerald argues that, unless scholars of religion can formulate a concept of religion that adequately differentiates between religious phenomena and nonreligious phenomena, the concept of religion can only be a poor analytical category.11 Moreover, an academic discipline founded on a poor analytical category is not a viable one.12 Since scholars of religion have M.E. Marty, »Too Bad We’re So Relevant: The Fundamentalism Project«, Meeting Report to the American Academy of Arts and Science, 1995, http://www.illuminos.com/ mem/selectPapers/fundamentalismProject.html, accessed December 31, 2014. 10 T. Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 68–69. 11 Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 73. 12 Ibid., 95. 9

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not formulated an adequate concept of religion, they only have access to a poor analytical category to study their subject matter. Hence, the discipline of religious studies is not a viable one. Fitzgerald’s criticism of religious studies does not require one to discard the analytic concept of religions, even though Fitzgerald seems committed to an eliminativist position on this issue.13 One could accept his deconstruction of religion and investigate how »religion« in the modern sense was initially formulated in the late fifteenth century, at least in England, and then was developed over the course of several centuries, with »religions« becoming a functional concept in western (particularly English) discourse sometime during the nineteenth century. This genealogical approach is interdisciplinary, using resources from fields like philosophy, history, sociology, political science, economics, jurisprudence, and education to trace the multifaceted and contingent processes that coalesced to form the modern concepts of religion and religions that most early twenty-first century scholars of religion take for granted. When scholars study religion and religions this way, Fitzgerald thinks that they will realize that »[t]he construction of ›religion‹ and ›religions‹ as global, cross-cultural objects of study has been part of a wider historical process of western imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.«14 If this is the case, then religious phenomena cannot be known adequately until scholars demystify them and study them as part of the ideological superstructure of modern societies. In other words, we need to strip away the supernatural veneer of religious phenomena and investigate them as practices and attitudes that perpetuate a certain way of life and the emergence of separable social, economic, political, and religious domains first in modern western societies and later in non-western societies that were colonized by modern western societies.15 Fitzgerald constructs his deconstructive genealogy of religion, which he occasionally calls a critical history of religion in his later writings, by investigating quite a few English documents written between the late fifteenth century and the early nineteenth century. As he investigates these documents, he traces how »religion« in the English-speaking world gradually changed from simply meaning Christian Truth in the pre-modern period, to meaning Christian Truth as opposed to superstitions in the early modern period, to being a scientific category used to differentiate between the religious domain (e.g., the domain of faith and belief) and the nonreligious domain (e.g., the objective domain) in the nineteenth century. Among the See T. Fitzgerald, »A Response to Kevin Schilbrack«, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 25, no. 1 (2013), 103. 14 Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 8. 15 See, for example, Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity, 7. 13

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texts that Fitzgerald uses to construct his critical history of religion are some pre-modern documents reprinted in Charles Lloyd’s compendium of sixteenth-century documents, Formularies of Faith Put Forth by Authority during the Reign of Henry VIII (1825) and, more importantly, Samuel Purchas’s early seventeenth century travelogue, Purchas, his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in all Ages (1613). Purchas’ text provides Fitzgerald with quite convincing evidence that the term »religion« in England began being used to mean more than simply Christian Truth. Despite non-Christian religions remaining superstitions and false religions, Purchas contends that religion is a feature of all human cultures. This is one of the first modern English texts where someone claims that religion is a cultural universal. In this early expression of religion as a cultural universal, one could simultaneously believe in the European medieval idea that religion just means Christian Truth, yet acknowledge that non-Europeans have the potential to acknowledge and even accept the truth of Christianity.This is so because all non-Christian religions possess some seed of Christian Truth, no matter how distorted those seeds of Christian Truth might be in those religions. Fitzgerald also explores numerous English documents written from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, which were reprinted in volumes 5–8 of English Historical Documents.16 The documents from the fifth volume of English Historical Documents – which ranged from treatises to personal letters, statutes, diaries, declarations, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and sermons written from the late fifteenth century to the midsixteenth century – show that writers of that time did not consider the English commonweal to be a separate domain from the religious order. Rather, the English commonweal was a God-given hierarchical order in which people’s lives were determined in large part by their social rank. In addition, Fitzgerald investigates some English documents written between the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth century that were reprinted in the sixth, seventh, and eighth volumes of English Historical Documents to trace how the concept of religion developed in the modern period. These documents show how the term »religion« gradually became a cross-cultural category used to differentiate between legitimate religious traditions (e.g., the Church of England) and superstitions (African fetish These volumes are C.H.W. Andrew, ed., English Historical Documents, Volume 5: 1485–1558 (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996 [1967]); A. Browning, ed., English Historical Documents,Volume 6: 1660–1714 (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996 [1966]); D.B. Horns and M. Ransome, eds., English Historical Documents,Volume 7: 1714–1783 (New York: Routledge, 1996 [1957]); and A. Aspinall and E.A. Smith, eds., English Historical Documents,Volume 8: 1873–1832 (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996 [1959]). 16

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ism), on the one hand, and as a proxy for civilization, on the other hand. Civilized peoples had religious traditions approximating the ecclesiastical structures, ceremonies, belief systems, and rituals of European forms of Christianity. Barbarous peoples were those peoples whose rituals, ceremonies, and belief systems deviated too far from European forms of Christianity. Civilized peoples were viewed as possessing the authority to govern and dominate over barbarous peoples. That way, barbarous peoples could learn how to conduct themselves in a civilized manner while acknowledging the superiority of western European religious traditions (namely, the different denominations of Christianity practiced in European empires), economic systems, politics, education, and law. This was one of the justifications for the British Empire colonizing most of the Indian subcontinent and establishing plantations in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even those people of European descent residing in British North America who fought to free themselves from the oppressive colonial governance of Great Britain adopted a colonial stance toward the indigenous peoples of North America and people of sub-Saharan African descent. They, too, used western European forms of Christianity as the standard by which to evaluate who was civilized and who was uncivilized among the indigenous peoples and people of sub-Saharan African descent. Fitzgerald notes that this period in British and US histories coincided with the period in which political theory in England began to solidify the distinctions between church and state and between religion and politics. The aftermath of Reformation weakened the authority of the Christian church as a universal church. Christians in mainland Europe ceased to be governed under a single ecclesiastical order, namely the Catholic Church, while the Church of England lost most of its governing authority over the course of the modern period. Some late seventeenth century English political theorists, with John Locke being the most notable, responded to the demise of this ecclesiastical order in England by positing the separation of civil society from religious institutions. Such a separation of these domains was thought to defuse the inevitable conflicts between people of different religious affiliations in societies in which there was no longer a single ecclesiastical order that commanded the loyalty of virtually the entire populace (e.g., the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War). Those working in the institutions of civil society, such as education and law, gradually found themselves in a position in which they could justify their institutions’ existence by appealing to those institutions’ utility to society (e.g., promoting the general welfare) rather than appealing to some God-ordained hierarchical social order. In this environment, religion, specifically Christianity, ceased to be the exclusive influence on public affairs, popular culture, and the arts. Citizenship became divorced from any notion of divine order, and

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a nonreligious public sphere became realizable. As Frank J. Lechner writes in his entry on secularization in The Encyclopedia of Protestantism: [In a secular society,] citizenship requires no religious attachment, and society sets no rules for religious conformity. Secular events shape the rhythm of public life; publicly significant religious occasions tend to lose their transcendent content. Political authority derives its legitimacy from legal procedures and public support. State institutions execute policy with scant consideration of religious purposes.17

According to Fitzgerald’s genealogy, it took a while for the late seventeenth century distinctions between religion and society, religion and politics, and church and state to be enshrined in English culture and American culture. The First Amendment of the US Constitution was the crystallization of the English idea that the state should not affiliate itself with any specific religion and remain neutral with respect to its citizens’ right to exercise their religious freedom. This amendment was the result of US revolutionaries appropriating the political theory of Locke as well as the ideas promulgated by British and North American priests who gave sermons and wrote pamphlets advocating a political theology in which the church’s affairs ought to be separate from the state. They thought that the most effective means of preserving that separation would be to place religious communities in the domain of private voluntary associations and place the state in the public sphere. With the adoption of the First Amendment, the US federal government acquired the power to rule over its citizens and the economic sphere while ideally holding a neutral stance toward the exercise of religion by citizens. Religion became a private institution with the same status as voluntary associations, at least as far as national governments were concerned. European nation-states in the early nineteenth century tolerated numerous Christian groups, yet political secularism was only beginning to be a viable way of thinking about governance. European states remained, for the most part, Christian if not in terms of government, then in terms of their populaces. What Fitzgerald’s genealogy makes clear is that the emergence of religion as an autonomous domain of human life was a modern invention: The conceptualization of ›religion‹ and ›religions‹ in the modern sense of private faith, or the related sense of a personal adherence to a soteriological doctrine of God, was needed for the representation of the world as a secular, neutral, factual, comprehensively quantifiable realm whose natural laws can be discovered by sci-

F.J. Lechner, »Secularization«, in Encyclopedia of Protestantism, Volume 4, Entries S – Z, ed. H.J. Hillerbrand (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 131–140. 17

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entific rationality, and whose central human activity is a distinct ›non-religious‹ sphere or domain called ›politics‹ or ›political economy‹.18

The secular domain provided a way for scholars to get a critical distance from lived religious traditions so that they could study religious traditions scientifically. Of course, studying religions scientifically meant studying them in a nonreligious and objective manner. Scientific studies of religions ought to be performed at secular educational institutions; that way, religious beliefs and faith traditions can be evaluated in an objective and tolerant manner. Fitzgerald criticizes this modern approach to studying religion for imposing modern categories and concepts (e.g., class, religion, politics, economics) onto premodern western European peoples and nonwestern peoples, as though these peoples conceived of their relationships with one another and with their larger environing world in modern terms. He reminds us that the modern concept of religion (along with the modern concepts of society, politics, culture, and economics) is applicable only for modern western and westernized societies. They are not adequate means of studying premodern western peoples or of studying most nonwestern peoples. If anything these concepts are »imaginary objects which do not really give us understanding of [societies other than modern western and westernized societies] but rather validate our present ideological categories, including the illusion of scholarly progress and objectivity, that knowledge is about truth, which is an inherently worthwhile thing to have.«19 This view is the result of Fitzgerald applying his major methodological assumption to the history of »religion«. As he notes in the introduction to Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: »My own methodological assumption is neither that the past is more rational than the present, nor that the past is less rational than the present, but that the past is different and ›other‹. An imaginative grasp of the past’s otherness allows us to see that what we today assume as given in the nature of things is actually a rhetorical construction.«20 We should note that when he writes »rhetorical construction« in the third sentence of the above passage, he means more than simply the skillful and persuasive use of language. He seems to mean something along the lines of »human construction« or »social construction«. »Rhetorical constructions« is his way of emphasizing how modern religious discourse has been instrumental in creating an ideological envi T. Fitzgerald, »Introduction«, in Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, ed. T. Fitzgerald (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), 6. 19 Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity, 69. 20 Ibid., 16. 18

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ronment in which we can speak of there being separable social, cultural, religious, economic, and juridical orders in the first place.21 In this case, the concepts of religion and religions help create and maintain a social order in which westerners and westernized people in other parts of the globe impose categories onto non-modern western societies that misrepresent and misunderstand them. This is true of medieval and early modern European societies. This is also true of East Asian and Southeast Asian societies, African societies, and indigenous peoples in the Americas.22 It bears repeating that Fitzgerald thinks that the imposition of the concept of religion onto western and nonwestern peoples over the last couple of centuries justified the colonization of non-western peoples by westerners during the modern period and perpetuates a neocolonial order masquerading as a postcolonial order in many parts of the southern hemisphere in the early twenty-first century. He thinks that these consequences of scholars using the concept of religion to study nonwestern peoples are among the reasons that scholars should replace the concept of religion and related concepts with ones with less imperialistic and colonialist baggage. He also thinks that »the categories of the Enlightenment, in this case particularly ›religion‹ and what it helps to construct as ›secular politics‹ and the nonreligious state, have lost their rhetorical validity or persuasiveness, and that they now confuse rather than clarify meanings.«23 This is another reason why he wants to replace the concept of religion with a more adequate concept to study those features of human societies traditionally classified as religious. For him, a more fecund approach to studying contemporary human societies would be to study how terms like »culture«, »civility«, »barbarity«, »religion«, »nonreligious«/»secular« have actually been deployed »in a number of texts and try to observe how they are actually used, what differences are being claimed between them, what presuppositions are being imported unconsciously into the text, why anyone would think this was an important thing to do.«24 This would require scholars to engage in critiques of the role concepts like »religion« play in »limiting and marginalizing powerfully authentic emotions, narratives and values – people’s representations of truth, moral communities – and policing them in case they challenge the supposed superior rationality of politics and the science of economics.«25 Scholars of religion would also need to accept the idea »that the self-regulating markets of liberal economic theory, and the com 23 24 25 21 22

Ibid., 68–69. Ibid., 69. See also the chapter, »Methodology 2«, in ibid. Ibid., 16. Fitzgerald, »A Response to Kevin Schilbrack«, 106. Ibid., 104.

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modities and self-maximizers which mutually constitute them, are as much a sacrosanct fiction as medieval relics and the fetishistic values attached to them in their day.«26 There are not any sufficiently compelling reasons for scholars to classify medieval relics »as religious, traditional, superstitious, or ›faith‹-based; while markets [are classified as being] ›scientific‹.«27 I agree with Fitzgerald on these points. Yet, accepting these points does not commit one to being a proponent of Fitzgerald’s more controversial argument that »there is no essential difference between religious and nonreligious domains, but they are imagined and represented as if they are essentially different, along the axis of binary either-or alternatives.«28 One can grant the plausibility of his deconstructive genealogy of religion while thinking that »religion« can be an adequate analytical concept. What one cannot do is conceive of »religion« as an ahistorical category that can simply be applied unproblematically to any human society. One should acknowledge that »religion« and »religions« have been used to justify the colonization of nonwestern peoples. One also should acknowledge that modern discourse in which people presume that »religion« is an autonomous, privatized domain of human life has been instrumental in creating a secular sphere in which market ideologies can flourish. »Religion« and »religions« also have been used by many proponents of political secularism to marginalize people who question the superiority of secular politics over every other available way of organizing human groups. But one can acknowledge the past uses of »religion« and »religions« and still think that they are adequate concepts. One would just need to be mindful of the problematic past uses of these concepts as one revises and reformulates them. What Fitzgerald overlooks in his criticism of the concept of religion is that a concept’s semantic content is not exhausted by its origins or even its past uses. A concept’s semantic content also includes those commitments that remain unknown, but are implicitly associated with that concept as it is used by people when conversing with other people. For example, the semantic content of »religion« and »religions« is not restricted to their imperialist and colonialist uses. Their semantic content also should include their anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist uses in, say, Latin American liberation theology, black theology of liberation in the United States, Latino/a liberation theology, and Asian theology of liberation. In addition, their semantic content should include how people use these concepts when they interpret their sacred scriptures to critique Ibid. Ibid. 28 Ibid. 26 27

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global industrial agriculture and food production or environmental degradation of poor communities. Other ways of using these concepts in an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist manner should also be considered part of their semantic content. Perhaps these anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist uses of »religion« and »religions« can be interpreted as more fitting and adequate applications of these concepts in a postcolonial world than the earlier imperialist and colonialist uses. Furthermore, these anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist applications of these concepts have been part of them from their inception, but people could not figure out how to make these applications explicit until relatively recently.29 This might mean that people who used the term »religion« in the early seventeenth century English sense were implicitly committed to the idea that there is more than one legitimate way to live religiously. Seventeenth century English thinkers just were not quite ready to explicitly state that implicit commitment associated with the concept »religion«. Owing to westerners’ subsequent encounters with nonwestern peoples and religious minorities in the west, it became imaginable for scholars of religion to believe that there is more than just one legitimate way for people to be religious. At first, scholars who recognized that there could be legitimate non-Christian ways of being religious interpreted those ways of being religious in familiar theistic terms. For example, these non-Christian ways of being religious still required people to worship some kind of generic supreme deity.30 This approach to studying religions was the one that was »imbued with theological principles of the liberal ecumenical kind [dominate from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth centuries«.31 It also was founded on and rooted in western Christian presuppositions about the nature of religious worship and salvation, as though all religions are salvific in a recognizably Christian sense.32 Then, scholars gradually began classifying rituals, ceremonies, and belief systems that are obviously nontheistic and definitely non-Christian as being legitimate ways of being religious. Eventually, this view was expanded to include any way of being religious that involves people worshipping some agency or agencies, whether they This paragraph could be read as a non-technical appropriation of Robert Brandom’s understanding of concepts, as articulated in chapters 3–4 of R. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 30 For a brief summary of this stage of developing a substantive definition of religion, see K. Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 130–132. 31 Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies, 33. 32 Ibid., 34. 29

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be personal-like actors or non-personal powers, that are believed to exist in »an ›order of reality beyond or behind the apparent, given [empirical] order.‹«33 This more inclusive concept of religion is the result of scholars of religion realizing that religious pluralism is our species’ current condition. This is so despite the fact that most living human beings adhere to one of several major religions – Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and folk religions (including African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, and indigenous peoples’ religions in the Americas and Australia).34 One can claim that religious pluralism is our condition given that, even within these major religions, there are often notable differences in regards to celebrated ceremonies, rituals, interpretations of sacred scripture, and belief systems. Rather than simply contend that there might be, at most, family resemblances between the various religious traditions that humans practice, one can take the reality of religious pluralism as an opportunity to investigate what, if anything, these different traditions have in common. One could rediscover and reclaim religious pluralism after the domination of much of the world by monotheistic traditions and the attempts to erase or marginalize nontheistic and polytheistic traditions in colonized nonwestern places during the modern period. This is possible because one now lives during a time when one is free to investigate the religions practiced by people on their own terms.That in turn can provide scholars with opportunities to investigate the shared characteristics of religions, without presuming that Christianity is the paradigmatic religion.35 We are now in a position to formulate a concept of religion that was implicit in the seventeenth century English idea of religion, but is a much more inclusive category than anything imaginable at that time or even in Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 133. See Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010 (Washington, DC, December 2012), available online as a PDF at http://www.pewforum. org/files/2014/01/global-religion-full.pdf; online version of report available at http:// www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec/. 35 The essentialism advanced in this paragraph owes a lot to Arthur C. Danto’s formulation of a historically sensitive essentialist concept of art: A.C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 95, 194–196. I also drew from his brief statement about his essentialism: »The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense«, History and Theory 37, no. 4 (December 1998), 128. There he writes with respect to constructing a single, universal concept of art that »only when these extreme differences [between different forms of art and artworks] were available could one see the possibility of a single, universal concept«. 33 34

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the twentieth century. Maybe »religion« can be tentatively defined as a constellation of »social practices authorized by reference to a superempirical [i.e., non-empirical] reality«.36 Religious communities are those human communities in which people perform rituals and ceremonies, hold beliefs, and identify themselves as adherents of a tradition whose authority derives from a superempirical source, whether that source be a nonphysical Supreme Intelligence, a pantheon of divinities, the intelligible moral order, etc.37 This tentative definition of religion could disclose other implicit commitments associated with using the concept of religion. For example, rituals, ceremonies, beliefs systems, and institutions that many people would currently classify as nonreligious (e.g., a nationalist devotion to one’s state or someone’s fanatic devotion to market ideology) are actually sometimes religious phenomena, but our current distinction between religious and nonreligious phenomena hides that fact. One can imagine Fitzgerald and other theorists of critical religion criticizing a historically sensitive yet essentialist concept of religion like the one briefly described above for being another mythical concept of religion. In this myth, one tells the familiar but mistaken progressive story about how the domains of religion and the state »have sometimes become confused at different periods of history, but now that we have arrived at a nonreligious scientific understanding of the world, we can step aside from religion’s powerful hold as committed faith or as outmoded belief and look at it from a methodically neutral standpoint.«38 Fitzgerald rightly identifies this view as a Hegelian narrative applied to the study of religion. Unlike Fitzgerald, though, one should not consider such a view to be a bad one. One can hold that view while acknowledging that the concept of religion has been used sometimes to justify colonialism and imperialist projects, if one is committed to vigilantly guarding against formulating it in a manner that unwittingly perpetuates its imperialist and (neo)colonialist uses. Critical religion theory is a good means of keeping scholars of religion, including philosophers of religion, alert to the problematic history of the concept of religion as they go about formulating concepts of religion today.

Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 135. This concept of religious community is the one proposed by Schilbrack: ibid.,

36 37

135. Fitzgerald, Civility and Barbarity, 11.

38

Vagueness and Its Virtues: A Proposal for Renewing Philosophy of Religion J. Aaron Simmons I. Introduction What follows is an experiment in charitable appropriation of critical theory of religion in order to facilitate a possible engagement between it and contemporary philosophy of religion.1 Some recent work in religious studies suggests that »religion« is best understood as an invention of scholars who end up legitimating their own discourse by »imagining« a stable object of study.2 Accordingly, some scholars contend that »religion« (always with implied quotation marks) is better understood as simply another mode of, or at least indistinguishable from, cultural expression and ideologically nested production.3 Though there is much in such work that philosophers of religion would do well to take very seriously, there is also quite a bit that philosophers of religion can contribute to these debates in critical theories of religion. In particular, despite the common philosophical assumption that more precision is always a good thing when it comes to definitions, concepts, and terms, recent work on »vagueness« in contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language has demonstrated that sometimes an object, or at least the tools for making sense of an object, unavoidably require that some degree of vagueness remain in place in order best to understand the object under What I mean by this prefatory comment is that in this essay I will draw on thinkers with whom I disagree quite deeply, but that disagreement will be initially bracketed for the purposes of trying to articulate possible interpretations of their thought that make for productive dialogue between the philosophy of religion and the critical theory of religion. Such a dialogue is mutually beneficial and, hopefully, if enacted will then open spaces for working through the disagreements that have been bracketed, but now from within a hermeneutics of charity rather than suspicion. 2 See J.Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 3 See, for example, T. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also, C. Martin, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 1

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consideration. In this chapter, I will propose that »religion« is a category that is best understood as requiring conceptual vagueness. Such vagueness is not only required because of the necessity of linguistic inadequacy or the constructed nature of hermeneutic contexts. It might also be due to the object to which the category »religion« itself attempts to refer. If such a »vague« definition is embraced by philosophers of religion, then contemporary philosophy of religion might be »renewed« in that it is not only more likely to draw upon religious studies in its research, but also that its research will be more open to the variation that attends what we call »religion«. When philosophers talk about »religion« perhaps they are, to some degree »fabricating« the category, but the category is not, therefore, either empty or simply reducible to some other discourse. I will proceed as follows. First, I will consider what I take to be three key ideas in the critical theory of religion, as laid out by Jonathan Z. Smith and plausibly interpreted in the work of Russell McCutcheon and Donald Wiebe. This dialogical engagement will serve as a general framework for exploring how contemporary work in critical theories of religion can be a valuable resource for the philosophy of religion. In particular, such work can help to challenge ways in which much of contemporary philosophy of religion elides the differences between »religion« and »Christian theism«, and it can also stand as an important reminder of the hermeneutic requirements that attend all scholarship regarding »religion«. Further, it can help philosophers to take seriously the importance of evidential ideals that are as inclusive as possible. Second, I will suggest that there are problematic non-sequiturs that persistently threaten in light of the resources provided by McCutcheon and Wiebe. Namely, it is easy to think that just because there is no objectivist »view from nowhere« from which one can engage in discourse about »religion«, then there must be nothing beyond the social histories of that questioning. In other words, it is easy to move, on the one hand, from an awareness of the important constructivist dimensions of scholarly discourse regarding »religion« to the conclusion that there really is no »thing« that religion names and, on the other hand, from a commitment to naturalistic methodology to a reductive conception of »religion« itself. In the attempt to resist such non-sequiturs, I will propose what I take to be a productive alternative. I will suggest that the category of »religion« itself is perhaps something that requires vagueness in order for philosophy of religion to avoid the non-sequiturs while allowing for the important insights of such critical theory of religion. My view is that although there is probably no algorithmic criterion by which necessary and sufficient conditions could be specified such that discrete particulars could be said to stand as tokens of the general type of »religion«, this very fact might indicate an important dimension of »religion«

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as a distinctive category.Vagueness might be, however ironically, »essential« to our social conceptions and constructions of »religion«. Ultimately, »religion« probably should be understood as »manufactured«, as McCutcheon suggests, but that does not entail a strict anti-realism regarding the category of »religion« and the phenomena that are sometimes said to be »religious«.4 When thinking about »philosophy of religion after religion«, then, as this book sets out to do, my suggestion is that philosophers of religion and critical theorists of religion are both better off when they appreciate and affirm the essential vagueness inherent in the category in relation to which their discourses operate.

II. Theorizing Critical Theories of Religion Let me begin with a move that repeats a very commonly cited beginning. In the preface to Imagining Religion, Jonathan Z. Smith famously writes: While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.5

In this passage, which Russell McCutcheon claims that »everyone feels the need to quote«,6 we find some of the key tenets underwriting much of the work in critical theories of religion.7 Indeed, I think this is why »eve See R.T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5 Smith, Imagining Religion, xi. 6 See R.T. McCutcheon, »Introducing Smith«, Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (London and Oakville, Equinox, 2008), 1–17. 7 I stress the »critical« here because there are certainly scholars doing work concerning the method and theory of religion, but who defend essentialist conceptions of »religion«. As just one example of such work, see C.S. de Muckadell, »On Essentialism and Real Definitions of Religion«, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no.2 (June, 2014): 495–520. Reflecting the fact that it might be that some variety of such realism (or, perhaps, idealism) continues to remain prominent in the academic study of religion, consider that Russell McCutcheon suggests that »the problem of the transcendent one still lurking within the historical many is the overwhelmingly dominant preoccupation of scholarship on religion« (McCutcheon, A Modest Proposal on Method, 15). So, when I refer to »critical theories of religion«, I am indicating those thinkers 4

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ryone feels the need to quote« this passage in the first place. For ease of reference, those ideas might be summarized and expressed as follows: 1. The appropriate »object« of the academic study of religion may not be religion, but the acts that are complicit in the construction of »religion« as an object of study.8 2. »Religion« is nothing more than this scholarly construction. 3. The study of what is thus called »religion« is, itself, what yields the relevant »data« for those working in religious studies. In other words, the discourse of religious studies produces the data that it, then, considers relevant. These three ideas, respectively, articulate some commonly endorsed methodological, ontological, and epistemological dimensions of this subfield. Now, importantly, not every scholar in the area understands these three ideas in precisely the same way. Moreover, some working in the field would challenge one or more as even being required. That said, I do not mean for these to be necessary conditions for critical theory of religion. Instead, I take them as central claims that are reflective of many significant voices within the debates and so well worth considering in relation to contemporary philosophy of religion. In order to work through these key ideas a bit, let’s consider how they might be understood and appropriated/challenged by two thinkers working in this area: Donald Wiebe and Russell McCutcheon. In sum, we might say that, for Wiebe, the study of religion may indeed study some »religious« object, but only ever according to naturalistic premises and »scientific« methodology.9 As a result of a broader appreciation of what we might who are worried about such essentialist approaches in light of a general »hermeneutics of suspicion« (see C. Martin, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, 8–17). For a helpful topology of the contemporary landscape of religious studies, see D. Wiebe, »Religious Studies«, in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, 2nd ed., ed. J.R. Hinnells (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 125–144. 8 This first claim might be closer to McCutcheon’s perspective than to Smith’s, but I think that it is at least suggested by the passage above so I will explore it in what follows. Again, my point here is not to offer a robust engagement with Smith, himself, but to explore possible views within critical theory of religion that might occur in light of these general ideas that are at least invited by this particular passage. 9 See D. Wiebe, »The Scientific Study of Religion and Its Cultural Despisers«, in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (London and Oakville, Equinox, 2008), 467–479; see also, D. Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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call »postmodern« or »deconstructive« critique, however, McCutcheon is much closer to Smith, I believe, in his approach to »religion« as exclusively a scholarly construction.10 Accordingly, for Wiebe these three claims might best be viewed as primarily methodological (as implying and requiring scientific criteria and the plausible outcomes thereof) and for McCutcheon they might best be viewed as primarily epistemological (understood according to a contextualist hermeneutics by which all inquiry operates).11 So, even if both were read as agreeing with Smith that »religion has no independent existence apart from the academy«, their reasons for doing so would likely be quite different. Wiebe’s naturalistic and objectivist orientation would necessitate that this claim is only legitimate if resulting from »a scientific study that is wholly emancipated from religio-theological, humanistic, moral, and socio-political agendas«.12 Alternatively, as Kevin Schilbrack notes, for McCutcheon »no academic work is pure of normative commitments. All scholarship is perspectival, politically implicated, and valueladen.«13 As such, Wiebe might push back on (1) as already too hermeneutically oriented, and McCutcheon might contend that (2) misses the point if understood as immediately reflecting an ontological claim, regardless of the methodological approach one deploys to claim it.14 Similarly, Wiebe might suggest that (3) is self-defeating if it means that »data« results from inquiry, rather than being that which is initially objectively available for the scholar engaging in such inquiry. For McCutcheon, however, »data«, not »religion«, is more appropriately the concern for the scholar of religion, not because such data gives insight into some sui generis essence of what »religion« really is, but instead because it reveals the interests and orientations of the inquirers themselves. Only by understanding such orientations could one make sense of what we call »religion«, since it is nothing more than what we have called it. See McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, 73. As Kevin Schilbrack notes, such appropriation of »deconstructive« terminology is also deployed by Timothy Fitzgerald and William Arnal (Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions: A Manifesto (Malden and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 106–107). See Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies; W. Arnal, »Definition«, in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (London: Continuum, 2000). 11 For more on the relationship between Wiebe and McCutcheon, see R.T. McCutcheon, A Modest Proposal on Method: Essaying the Study of Religion (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), chapters 1 and 7. 12 Wiebe, »The Scientific Study of Religion«, 477. 13 Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 193. 14 We will see shortly, however, that there might indeed be unacknowledged ontological implications of McCutcheon’s hermeneutics. 10

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The implications of these three commitments are significant and the ambiguity that attends their meaning can yield important differences in which implications one faces. To explore such ambiguity, let’s pursue a bit further some possible interpretations of the three ideas that might be invited, alternatively, in light of McCutcheon and Wiebe. To begin, if (2) is merely taken as an epistemological claim, as McCutcheon’s work might occasionally seem to indicate, then it is certainly possible that there is still something that »religion« names, but it is (probably) not understandable through inquiry due to the existential limitations of human perspectives resulting from finitude and embodiment.15 The idea would be that there very well might be something that is essentially, or genuinely, or really »religion«, but it is (probably) unknowable by human inquirers. On this reading, the scholar’s task is not to focus on religion, for there is nothing to say about that, but instead on the ways the discourse on »religion« gives rise to a variety of real effects (as implied by (1) and (3)).16 This interpretation seems consistent with McCutcheon’s general idea that scholars of religion are to be »critics« of the uses and abuses of disciplinary concepts, not »caretakers« of the truths of confessional theology that might be said to underlie such concepts.17 For McCutcheon, caretaking occurs whenever one allows a sui generis transcendentalism to reemerge regarding the concepts and categories in play in one’s discourse. So, on his account, »theological« or »phenomenological« approaches to religion fail to be self-reflexive about the constructed status of their own inquiry – and the »data« available for such inquiry (or resulting from it, as the case might be).18 As Schilbrack suggests, »when one follows this line, the ideological critique of religion blocks the ontological question about what kind of thing religion ›is‹.«19 Now, I am not suggesting that this is McCutcheon’s view. I am simply saying that this is a reading that is consistent with the hermeneutic awareness that he recommends. That said, I do think that this is the most coherent position for him to occupy, even if he problematically moves beyond it, as I will explain below. 16 Such effects may or may not be limited to the realities attending to scholarly discourse. The point is simply that, minimally, how we engage in the discourse about »religion« will shape what »religion«, thereby, can mean for us. 17 See R.T. McCutcheon, Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). 18 The use of the term »phenomenology« within religious studies bears almost no resemblance to what it means in philosophy. Although I am unable to explore such differences here, I have addressed this topic elsewhere in the context of recent French phenomenology (see, J.A. Simmons and B.E. Benson, The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)). 19 Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 103. 15

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Although I think that this epistemological interpretation of (2) is possible, McCutcheon’s overall authorship serves to challenge the idea that his work effectively »blocks the ontological question«, as Schilbrack says. Perhaps most famously, McCutcheon suggests early in his authorship that »the category of religion is a conceptual tool and ought not to be confused with an ontological category actually existing in reality.«20 On McCutcheon’s own terms, it would follow that there are always philosophical assumptions about religion implied when speaking about »religion« – even if that speech aims to avoid speaking about religion itself. Accordingly, in this passage, it certainly seems difficult not to read McCutcheon as saying that there is no »there« there when it comes to »religion«.21 Accordingly, on this reading (2) would seem to stand as some sort of an ontological claim – namely, the claim there is no objective referent that the term ›religion’ picks out in the first place. On the one hand, then, (2) might simply be a thin claim about the hermeneutic limits of human inquiry. On the other hand, (2) might, instead, be a thick claim about the (nonexistence of the) supposed object of such inquiry. We face an ambiguity, then, regarding whether claims about »religion« being a scholarly construction require merely ideological awareness or a deflationary ontology. A similar ambiguity, with equally significant results, can be seen to accompany Wiebe’s defense of the naturalistic/scientific assumptions of the study of religion. »By ›science,’ then«, Wiebe claims, »I mean a naturalistic approach to understanding the world, and the things, events, and processes in it ... Scientific explanation ... cannot take for granted the existence of nonmaterial – that is, supernatural or spiritual – entities or beings, processes, or powers for which there is no publicly available evidence.«22 It is unclear exactly how to interpret Wiebe’s demands regarding scientific neutrality. On the one hand, he might simply be calling for a general methodological atheism for all scholarship in order that academic discourse operate according to a broadly Rawlsian approach to the requirements of reasonableness and rationality. The scholar would, on this model, serve something of the same role for the academy that the Supreme Court Justice does in public discourse for Rawls. Namely, the scholar cannot be beholden to any particular epistemic or hermeneutic perspective, but instead must weigh and McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, viii. Though, even here, it is possible to understand McCutcheon as simply saying that »religion« is not the same thing as religion. Scholarly discourse about X »ought not to be confused« with X. I do not intend to settle the matter on how to read McCutcheon, but simply to note the ambiguities in interpretations that are possible from the texts available. 22 Wiebe, »The Scientific Study of Religion«, 475. 20 21

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consider that evidence which is available to all (reasonable) perspectives.23 Here the reference to »publicaly available evidence« can be read, I believe, as a stand in for what Rawls would term »public reason«, which is evidentiary appeals that have been freed of commitments to any particular »comprehensive doctrine«.24 Let’s term this, broadly Rawlsian, interpretation of Wiebe’s account as a proceduralist conception of the academic study of religion. On the other hand, however, it can seem like Wiebe desires significantly more than such a proceduralist conception. In particular, it might be that he does not simply stipulate the methodology that should guide inquiry, but requires that the only legitimate outcomes of inquiry are those that are consistent with naturalism itself (as an ontological thesis). In this way, we could say that Wiebe’s account might slide from a methodological atheism to an atheistic assumption about reality. Let’s term this, specifically naturalist, interpretation as a substantive conception of the academic study of religion. The stakes of the difference between the proceduralist and substantive conceptions are significant. According to the proceduralist conception, Wiebe’s approach might plausibly also be understood as in line with the epistemic reading of (2). However, when read according to the substantive conception, his account might plausibly be read as in line with the ontological reading of (2). Importantly, though, such an ontological reading would now not simply amount to a denial of an ontological referent for ›religion’ (as might be the case for McCutcheon), but instead to a denial of (supernaturalist) theism more specifically. To distinguish between these two alternatives, let’s term the ontological approach to (2) that is made possible in light of McCutcheon as a weak ontological account of »religion« and the ontological approach to (2) that is made possible in light of Wiebe as a strong ontological account of »religion«. Whereas the weak ontological ac As will be mentioned below, but should be overlooked at this point as well, stipulating that only »reasonable« persons get to participate in a discourse can serve to minimize those voices that the power-structure operative in the discourse consider problematic. Labeling someone »unreasonable« is an effective way to appear to appeal to objective criteria while actually appealing to one’s own interests. For explorations of how such a critique of political liberalism might play out in relation to contemporary issues concerning religion in the public square, see J.C. Clanton, Religion and Democratic Citizenship: Inquiry and Conviction in the American Public Square (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008); Ch.J. Eberle, Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); R. Audi and N. Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square:The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). 24 See J. Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 23

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count would suggest that the category of »religion« is empty, the strong ontological account would suggest that the category must be reduced only to options consistent with naturalism. Ultimately, despite the title of Wiebe’s book, The Politics of Religious Studies, we might say that Wiebe hopes to engage in religious studies without any politics affecting the inquiry. Alternatively, McCutcheon asserts that religious studies is always already a »political« discourse – complete with its own power structures, authorities, and orthodoxies operative therein. Subsequently, depending on how one reads (2), (3) can be variously understood. Most consistently, (3) seems to be a matter of requiring that inquirers attend to the appropriate evidence, for Wiebe, while it seems to be a matter of attending to the decisions made by inquirers regarding what will be considered »appropriate«, for McCutcheon. Before moving on, I should note that it is also possible to read McCutcheon as endorsing the strong ontological account of »religion« if the idea of »critic« is distinguished from the »caretaker« according to objectivist criteria, understood specifically as a generally naturalist commitment underwritten by appeals to public rationality. If this were the case, then McCutcheon would seem also to face the ambiguity about how »naturalism« functions in the inquiry itself (as merely a stipulative procedure or a necessary substantive outcome). Although such a reading of McCutcheon is plausible, I think that it is ultimately inadvisable because it would put McCutcheon at odds with his own claims regarding the unavoidability of perspective and ideology.25 The point of the foregoing is not to decide between McCutcheon and Wiebe, though I certainly lean closer to McCutcheon in some key respects when it comes to the generally »deconstructive« approach that he recommends, but simply to situate one possible way of thinking about philosophy of religion after »religion«. If philosophers of religion are going to take seriously the challenges that accompany easy assumptions regarding the category of »religion«, then the possible interpretations of Smith’s general framework in light of McCutcheon and Wiebe are good places to start for considering some of the various options that are available.Though many other thinkers could be considered and many other points of access to critical theory of religion offered, when read maximally charitably, McCutcheon and Wiebe offer important, though alternative, resources to Importantly, though, Schilbrack suggests that just such self-referential incoherence might threaten McCutcheon’s authorship when he appears to call for the exclusion of philosophy of religion and theology from the academic study of religion (see Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 196). I will return to this possible incoherence below. 25

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philosophers of religion. McCutcheon’s primary contribution, I believe, is the reminder that the epistemological reading of (2) is probably necessary for all understandings of »religion«.Wiebe’s primary contribution, I believe, is the reminder that the standards of academic discourse are something for which we must contend. In the next section, I will consider each of these contributions in turn. In the process, we will see how each can help to expose potentially problematic tendencies in contemporary philosophy of religion.

III. Critical Theory of Religion as a Corrective Even if one rejects both the weak and strong ontological interpretations of (2), such that one does affirm that there is possibly something that »religion« essentially names, the epistemological reading of (2) reminds us that we are always the ones articulating and deploying such naming as appropriate and veridical. McCutcheon is correct to suggest that hermeneutics is inescapable. Or as Merold Westphal suggests, »we are all postmodernists now«. 26 And yet, even though such a realization is fairly standard fare in some contemporary philosophy of religion, there are reasons to think that McCutcheon’s reminders about the constructed status of academic discourse are much needed nonetheless.27 In particular, this need is displayed when, all too often, philosophers of religion assume that »religion« is just another way of saying »theism«, and specifically »Christian theism«. McCutcheon helps us to see that such an understanding is not obvious, but actually serves very particular interests operative in the philosophical communities themselves. As evidence of such interests, a survey of standard textbooks in philosophy of religion28 will quickly demonstrate that traditional philosophy of M.Westphal, »Must Phenomenology and Theology Make Two? A Response to Trakakis and Simmons«, Heythrop Journal LV (2014): 711–717. 27 Importantly, by »postmodern philosophy of religion« I do not mean specifically that philosophy of religion occurring within a »continental« perspective. Indeed, such »analytic« philosophers of religion as Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga also appreciate the fundamentally contextual perspectives from which all inquiry begins. As Wolterstorff says, »we are profoundly historical creatures«, and so, not surprisingly, philosophy of religion will necessarily bear the traces of those histories (N.Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids:William B. Eerdmans, 1984), 97). 28 I appreciate Nathan R. B. Loewen’s work for helping me better to see this hegemony in philosophy of religion textbooks. See N.R.B. Loewen, »Prolegomena to 26

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religion has largely been concerned with four things: Arguments for the existence of God (understood as the omni-God of classical theism), challenges to such arguments (such as the problem of evil), the attributes and characteristics of the God for which such arguments are given (impassible, eternal, immutable, etc.), and the relationship of faith and reason (and especially considerations in religious epistemology).29 There is nothing wrong with the existence of such debates. Indeed, I have contributed to some of the scholarship in such areas (and will continue to do so), and I am quite public about my own Christian (specifically Pentecostal) religious identity. Yet, it is problematic to understand the »religion« involved in contemporary »philosophy of religion« as obviously a matter of Christian theism in the way that is so decidedly prominent in the literature. Such a limited perspective gives rise to other potential problems in the field’s approach to its primary theme. For example, Kevin Schilbrack has argued that traditional philosophy of religion ends up being nearly exclusively focused on the cognitive aspects of »religion« to the exclusion of the practical aspects.30 Such »narrow« (theistic) and »intellectualist« (cognitive) characteristics lead Schilbrack to argue that traditional philosophy of religion is also »insular« in that it only engages voices in its own discipline and, primarily, those any Future Mashups with the Philosophy of Religion«, Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory (April 2014). 29 As just a few representative examples, consider the following. In S.M. Cahn, Exploring Philosophy of Religion: An Introductory Anthology (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Cahn opens with a section on »The Concept of God« and then follows it with a section on »The Existence of God«. In both of these sections, however, theism is assumed as the only real option on the table for thinking about what »God« might mean. Edited collections such as P. Helm, ed., Faith and Reason (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and L.P. Pojman and M. Rea, eds., Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008) likewise operate within an assumption that (Christian) theism is what the »religion« in »philosophy of religion« really means. Moreover, even though Linda Zagzebski and Timothy D. Miller’s collection, L. Zagzebski and T.D. Miller, eds., Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to Contemporary (Malden and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), does a very nice job of approaching philosophy of religion with a profound historical awareness, it does little to interrupt the theistic assumptions regarding »religion« itself. Finally, although Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro’s edited collection, Ph.L. Quinn and Ch. Taliaferro, eds., A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Malden and Oxford, 1999), does engage a variety of world religions in the first section of the book, »Philosophical Issues in the Religions of the World«, only 10 of the 78 chapters are explicitly engaged with non-Christian topics. 30 Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, chapters 2 and 3.

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already committed to cognitivist conceptions of Christian theism as the dominant concern of the field.31 While I have questions about some of the specifics of Schilbrack’s critique,32 I do think that he is right to raise these three worries about a discourse that may not be as self-reflective regarding its own practices as it should be. So how should we proceed in light of these three criticisms? Let me suggest that philosophy of religion must address the charge of insularity first in order to open productive spaces for rethinking the intellectualist assumptions and, thereby, providing opportunities for a broader and more inclusive consideration of »religion« itself. Overcoming insularity is not something that occurs at a single instant. Instead, it must be a long-term strategy for what I view as the renewal of philosophy of religion needed in the 21st century. It may be that we must address insularity first because many philosophers of religion simply do not have the ability to do cross-cultural work on »world religions« with any sophistication (as seems required for addressing the narrowness objection, say). Crucially, »world religions« is itself a category that reinforces the very power structures benefited from the narrowness of traditional philosophy of religion.33 To think that because one has studied classical theism and its more recent alternatives, one is then able to generalize across various »religious« traditions comes close to a dangerous philosophical form of imperialism. Overcoming insularity, hence, must occur in numerous and often understated ways. For my own part, I am invested in thinking about how Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 3. For example, although Schilbrack is probably right in broad strokes, there are certainly counterexamples available. As a few counterexamples, consider the following. In reference to the idea that philosophy of religion tends to be largely concerned with the cognitive dimensions of religion, consider Robert Audi’s suggestion that »religious commitment of a full-blooded kind is never just cognitive, but also behavioral and attitudinal« (R. Audi, »Rationality and Religious Commitment«, in Faith, Reason, and Skepticism, ed. M. Hester (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 50–97). For a more thorough engagement with the various ways of approaching religion as not simply a matter of reason and propositional expression, see also Ch.M. Gschwandtner, »Faith: Belief or Practice?« Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory (April, 2014). In reference to the idea that philosophy of religion is »narrow«, consider R. Kearney and J. Taylor, eds., Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). 33 See T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); see also, R. Amesbury, »›Religion‹ as a Philosophical Problem: Historical and Conceptual Dilemmas in Contemporary Pluralistic Philosophy of Religion«, Sophia 53 (2014): 479–496. 31 32

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different philosophical traditions can work together in order to engage in constructive philosophy of religion. In particular, I think that it is crucial to be done with the divisiveness and dismissiveness that can sometimes accompany the act of mentioning Derrida among one’s analytic colleagues, or mentioning Plantinga among one’s continental colleagues. Thinking across philosophical approaches is likely easier than thinking across religious traditions, so starting to address the insularity within the philosophical community itself is probably a good first step toward such larger goals.34 Hence, I have been encouraging the idea of »mashup philosophy of religion« as an alternative to the rigidity of »analytic« or »continental« approaches to the philosophy of religion.35 Although Schilbrack is probably right to suggest that both analytic and continental philosophy of religion are appropriately understood as falling prey to the narrowness, intellectualism, and insularity of »traditional philosophy of religion«, that way of presenting things can miss the importantly distinctive qualities that both of these »traditional« traditions bring to the table. Further, rather than calling for the »end of philosophy of religion« understood as an analytic exercise, as does Nick Trakakis,36 I think much more is gained when we allow the It might seem that »analytic theology« would be a step in the right direction since it attempts to bring philosophy and theology together in productive ways, thus also helping to overcome the insularity of philosophy of religion. Although there is quite a bit in analytic theology that is promising in such directions, it also faces two problems coordinate with what we are considering here. First, the »theology« under discussion is exclusively Christian theism, and second, the potential benefits of bringing philosophy and theology together seem potentially undermined by the exclusivity of philosophical approach (as only »analytic«) and also the potential imperialism toward theology itself (such that analytic philosophers can seem to be presented as really being the best theologians). See, O.D. Crisp and M.C. Rea, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I have offered more sustained critical engagement with analytic theology on these topics elsewhere (see J.A. Simmons, »Postmodern Kataphaticism: A Constructive Proposal«, Analecta Hermeneutica 4 (2012); »Philosophy and Theology… ›Analytic‹ or Not«, The Other Journal:The Church and Postmodern Culture (June, 2013), available online at http:// theotherjournal.com/churchandpomo/2013/06/17/philosophy-and-theology-analytic-or-not/, accessed January 10, 2015). 35 See J.A. Simmons, »On Shared Hopes for (Mashup) Philosophy of Religion: A Reply to Trakakis«, Heythrop Journal LV (2014): 691–710. 36 N. Trakakis, The End of Philosophy of Religion (London: Continuum, 2008). Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, Trakakis has been critical of some of my work such that he encourages more engagement with analytic philosophy of religion (see N. Trakakis, »The New Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy of Religion«, Heyth34

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traditions to open onto each other in ways that overcome insularity without the subsequent fear of eradicating one’s own history. The goal is not to transcend one’s history, but consciously to live within its contingency and yet very real influence. Such mashups of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, on their own, are unlikely to yield immediate results at the level of crosscultural engagement. They might go a long way, however, toward fostering hermeneutic awareness of the assumptions that are too often taken as obvious within philosophy of religion.37 When what was formerly »obvious« is now understood as a matter of decision, then it seems like we are better able to realize that such decisions are products not only of institutional and academic histories, but also of cultural inheritance as well. Returning to McCutcheon, then, I take his work, when understood as endorsing an epistemological reading of (2), to be an important resource for the task of overcoming the insularity in philosophy of religion. If philosophers of religion begin to appreciate that »religion« is, indeed, a scholarly construction, then we can become self-reflexive about how such constructions have traditionally been formed and deployed – often according to the interests of the dominant voices in the discourse already underway. It can be illuminative to contrast textbooks in introductory religious studies, which often begin by asking the question »what is religion?«, to most textbooks in philosophy of religion, which (as stated previously) tend to assume that »religion« just means (Christian) »theism«, or at least operates within a theistic orbit.Though McCutcheon himself seems uninterested in the definitional question of »what is religion?« his work is an important resource for situating this question as a first step if the philosophy of religion is to be critically aware of its own practice. The task of such beginnings is not to settle the issue on »religion« as a matter of definition before moving on, but instead to start by recognizing that the very idea of philosophy of religion depends upon a contested and constructed category. In light of such a realization, we must be careful not to go too far, however. Hermeneutic awareness and critical self-reflection are not identical to an »anything goes« sort of naïve, and self-defeating, epistemic relativism. Indeed, the very point of such awareness and reflection is to say that some rop Journal LV (2014): 679–690). For my reply to Trakakis, see Simmons, »On Shared Hopes«. 37 That said, I do think that such »mashups« can be expanded beyond merely analytic/continental dichotomies. Indeed, I take the present essay to be an example of mashup philosophy of religion that attempts productively to think constructively while drawing on both philosophy of religion and critical religious studies. Hence, I see no reason to think that mashup work could not move in a cross-cultural direction.

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things simply do not »go«, as it were, for academic discourse – whether concerning »religion« or not. We all start from somewhere, but whether those starting points are acceptable or problematic is a matter of how we decide to construct the discourse itself. We are all heading somewhere, but whether our goals are legitimate is a matter of what we decide about the scope of our inquiry. With that said, one does not have to be a classical foundationalist or subscribe to modernist metaphysics to think that epistemology is of key importance to all academic discourse insofar as it is that area of inquiry that asks into the conditions under which such inquiry will be allowed to operate.38 In this way, Smith’s articulations of (1) and (3) might be said to be important contributions to epistemological work in the philosophy of religion, even if rejected when read as ontological claims about that to which »religion« is said to refer (or not). With the danger of sliding from necessary epistemological awareness to problematic ontological commitments in mind, let’s turn briefly to Wiebe’s possible contribution to the renewal of philosophy of religion since it bears on the importance of getting clear about what epistemic criteria will guide scholarly discourse. Although Wiebe and McCutcheon are at odds regarding the inescapability of hermeneutics, they both stress the importance of articulating standards/criteria for academic discourse. When read merely as a proceduralist conception, I think that there is no simple rejection of Wiebe’s call for publicaly accessible evidence when engaging in academic discourse. Even if one is deeply sympathetic with broadly communitarian criticisms of liberal notions of »public reason«,39 as I am, it is facile to assume that one can do without some sort of a distinction between reasons that strive to be inclusive of as many comprehensive doctrines as possible and those that abandon all such attempts and engage in foot-stomping as not only a mode of argumentation (what C.S. Pierce calls »tenacity«), but also as a form of collective identity (consider the dynamics that allow for and encourage group polarization).40 While rejecting Wiebe’s unsustainable appeals to neutrality and objectivity, in both democratic deliberation and academic inquiry, we find ourselves in a situation that requires us to say something like: »Public reason is a fiction, and yet we must strive toward it as an ideal This does not mean that epistemology is necessarily »first philosophy«, but simply that it might be already at stake in the very idea of declaring something to be »first«. 39 For a survey of such objections, see R.B. Talisse, Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 40 For more on the relationship between reason-giving and group polarization, see S.F. Aikin and R.B. Talisse, Why We Argue (and How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement (New York and London: Routledge, 2014). 38

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for discourse.« Although this seems like a discursive version of Moore’s Paradox, it might not have to be understood that way. My point is simply that even if the scholar is always speaking to some particular audience and the standards of discourse are relative to that audience (consider the difference when a scholar writes an essay for an academic journal and when she writes for an op/ed piece, say), that does not mean that some standards are not better than others given a particular audience and specific goals. That said, I could agree with Wiebe regarding the importance of »scientific« methodology if »scientific« simply indicated the general idea that academic work requires a commitment to evidence-supported argumentation as the primary mode of engagement.41 As such, Wiebe’s work can help philosophers of religion to remember that overtly confessional (or what Kierkegaard might term »edifying«42) work, although not inappropriate due to some supposed neutrality condition of an objectivist criterion, still might sometimes be bad strategy when it comes to the sort of things that philosophers often aim to achieve within the academy.43 I am fine allowing for a very broad conception of such argumentation here. So, those working in the arts might not be engaging in academic discourse while playing a piece of music or painting a picture, but instead when they discuss that music or teaching painting techniques, etc. This would not exclude musicians or artists from the academy at all, but simply expect that the discourse about the cultural productions of such individuals be driven by argument and supported by evidence. Part of what is distinctive about the arts in this sense, is exactly the inverse of what is distinctive about »theory« work in the humanities. While the arts produce first-order artifacts that are then the objects of second-order academic discourse, theorists produce the second-order frames by which such discourse operates, but are largely uninterested in the production of theory itself as a first-order artifact in the same way that a painting or musical score might be. Compare both of these alternatives with the vast majority of work in the academy, which is a first order instance of cultural production that already operates according to the standards of second-order reflection about it. In this general vein, then, I am sympathetic with McCutcheon’s worries about the slippage between poetics and analysis (see McCutcheon, A Modest Proposal on Method, chapter 8). 42 See S. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. and trans. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 43 I argued this point at length concerning the idea of »Christian philosophy« in a presentation that I gave at a joint meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Society of Continental Philosophy and Theology in March, 2014. A video of that presentation is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkkpLF9KwmE (accessed January 4, 2015). Importantly, I am not at all opposed to such work occurring as part of what academics (and philosophers, in particular) do, but think that we should be careful to attend to the aims toward which such work might be striving. 41

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Notice that I am not saying that such edifying work is necessarily bad strategy in all cases, but simply that it might be depending on the individual case and the relevant context. But, the ability to engage in such distinctions is, as McCutcheon would say, already a matter of disciplinary inheritance. The guiding aims for philosophy of religion are, thus, decidedly constructed, but that does not mean that they are simply arbitrary. History is such that we are always already depending on assumed premises and directed toward assumed goals in our questioning. But, whether we remain directed in such ways or decide to pursue different trajectories requires that we, as a community of inquiry, think carefully about what would warrant such maintenance or such transition. Hence, whether or not one agrees with Wiebe regarding the naturalistic specifics of his own proceduralist conception of the academic study of religion, some sort of procedure is necessary and the encouragement to do our best to appeal to evidence that is maximally accessible to a wide range of interlocutors seems to be a sensible guiding aim when deciding about procedures. Wiebe thus offers an important reminder for contemporary debates in philosophy of religion in light of trends in »analytic theology« that have, in recent years, been increasingly moving philosophy of religion in the direction of confessional philosophical theology. Despite standing as important resources to philosophy of religion, it is worth noting that if McCutcheon and Wiebe are read as encouraging an exclusion of theology and philosophy of religion from the academy, then problems arise for both. 44 For I do hope that my scholarship is »edifying« to its readers in some generally existential sense, but I think that philosophers should be careful to distinguish work that attempts to speak primarily to an audience with similar theological commitments and work that attempts to speak to something like an »academic« or »learned« audience more broadly. I do not think that the former has no place in the academy, but simply that it might not be the best strategy for enacting one’s philosophical identity within the community of philosophy as currently understood. The basic problem, again, is not that there is some neutral epistemic standard that guides academic discourse, but that we should strive (as far as possible) to avoid the insularity and narrowness of which Schilbrack speaks – such vices are not limited to the philosophy of religion, but are dangers that attend all academic discourse. 44 Wiebe is a bit more ambiguous on this point than McCutcheon (or so it seems to me). Calling for a scientific enterprise that would consider the »natural and social sciences« as the »only legitimate mode[l]« for religious studies, Wiebe nonetheless and just a few sentences later says that alternative approaches that might appeal to »religious commitments or theological assumptions« are »nevertheless ›academic enterprises‹, because they are pursued by scholars in the context of the university« (Wiebe, »Religious Studies«, 139–140, emphasis added).

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McCutcheon, such an exclusion would either yield self-referential inconsistency given his proclamations of the value-laden realities of all discourse, or he would have to admit that such exclusion is itself another instance of power-play within the political realities of the academy. On McCutcheon’s own terms, the academic study of religion is not somehow less value-laden than confessional theology; the two discourses just often operate according to different values. While one might suggest that only those discourses prizing the values operative in religious studies, say, as opposed to those operative in theology, are legitimate in the academy, such a move would subsequently face charges of question-begging regarding the criteria used for such judgment. Alternatively, for Weibe, if we seek to claim that only scientific inquiry is objective, then justifying the objectivity of that inquiry would itself either be an instance of foot-stomping or question-begging. As I see it, the best we can do is admit that we cannot escape a frame of reference in order to justify particular frames, while rejecting the idea that, therefore, one frame is as good or as bad as another. As Nicholas Wolterstorff demonstrates, what one takes to be »evidence« or »data« depends on the »control beliefs« already operative in the community of inquiry.45 Nonetheless, the data that one gathers in the course of inquiry can then lead to revisions in the control beliefs by which one proceeds. Such a relationship between control beliefs and data is an important asset in scholarship and we should not allow this tension to be finally settled in favor of either relativistic hermeneutic play or assumed scientific objectivity. These two poles pull and push against each other and may yield productive scholarship that is truthtracking and yet aware of its own situatedness within power-structures and political dynamics. Ultimately, if one abandons the idea that there are some methodologies that are objective and neutral and others that are not, then the difference between philosophy and theology, say, or between science and philosophy, is not that one is objective (and thereby appropriate for academic discourse), while the other is not, but instead a matter of different authority structures to which each discourse legitimately appeals.46 By attempting a maximally charitable reading of McCutcheon and Wiebe, philosophers of religion are able jointly to attend to the construction of the idea of »legitimacy« on the one hand, while still striving toward giving as »public« a reason as possible for what is deemed »legitimate«. Wolterstorff, Reason within the Bounds of Religion. I work this idea out in chapter 7 of A. Simmons, God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011). 45 46

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Although I have tried to offer possible interpretations of McCutcheon and Wiebe in light of the basic commitments of much of critical theory of religion (as outlined by Smith), I am not suggesting that these interpretations are the only ones available. The epistemological reading of (2) that gives rise to the important hermeneutic reminders regarding the equation of »religion« and (Christian) »theism« might indeed slide into ontological claims about the emptiness of »religion« as a category. Moreover, the productive dimensions of inclusive attempts at methodological proceduralism might give way to a strong ontological reading regarding the truth of naturalism itself.These worries are serious because they are both non-sequiturs. The specific non-sequitur that threatens McCutcheon’s very sensible hermeneutic awareness is the idea that because there is no value-neutral approach to »religion« as a category, there is nothing that »religion« names other than the specific interests and agendas of those engaged in the inquiry itself. Alternatively, the non-sequitur that threatens Wiebe’s sensible idea regarding the importance of epistemic standards for academic discourse is the idea that because we strive toward a »naturalistic« procedure for religious studies, »religion« is thus only able to be understood according to a substantive naturalism. In both cases, the problem amounts to an inappropriate move from methodology to ontology, or, alternatively, from epistemology to metaphysics.47 These two non-sequiturs are what result in the weak ontological reading of (2) with respect to McCutcheon and the strong ontological reading of (2) with respect to Wiebe. Again, in the first case, the category of »religion« is empty and, in the second, it is reductive. Contemporary work in philosophy of religion can go a long way toward demonstrating that these two moves are indeed unnecessary. But what prospects remain for the category of »religion« then? By looking specifically at the idea of »vagueness«, I will suggest that a promising approach to the category of »religion« is made available that might be of value to both critical theory of religion and philosophy of religion.

For an example of how a similar non-sequitur might occur in continental philosophy of religion, see J.A. Simmons, »Apologetics after Objectivity«, in Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion:Toward a Religion with Religion, ed. J.A. Simmons and S. Minister (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 23–59. 47

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IV. Defending Vague Definitions vs. Defending Definitions,Vaguely In the introduction to the more than 1000 page volume, Religion: Beyond a Concept, Hent de Vries asks the following pressing question: Is it too late in the game, then, still to attempt to distill the necessary and sufficient conditions or essential features of this phenomenon or, rather, set(s) of phenomena called »religion«, while paying minute attention to (without being buried under) the wealth of historical, empirical, and anthropological data that have been gathered over the centuries, and especially in the modern academic study of this »field«?48

It might seem that for anyone working in critical theory of religion it is impossible to specify such necessary and sufficient conditions. As such, de Vries’s question might seem out of bounds in light of any of the interpretations of Smith’s three claims that we have considered. However, if I am right about the need for philosophers of religion to be more reflective about what »religion« means in their discourse, then even if specifying such conditions is impossible, engaging in the task itself might be worthwhile minimally because it encourages awareness about one’s own professional practice. But is such a heuristic approach to the question »What is religion?« all that remains possible? Even if we avoid the non-sequiturs discussed above, if we grant that articulating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions is supremely unlikely, what options remain for »religion« as a foundational category for both religious studies and also for philosophy of religion? Moreover, is there an interpretation available that allows scholars variously (and perhaps simultaneously) to draw upon different sets of »data« opened by critical theory of religion, philosophy of religion, and the social and natural sciences? In other words, can »religion« be understood in such a way as to allow not only for »the wealth of historical, empirical, and anthropological data«, as de Vries mentions, but also for the data provided by critical discourse analysis, ideology critique, hermeneutics, epistemology, and logic, etc.? I think that there is such an option, and although I am unable to work it out in detail here, I want merely to sketch an outline of it. My proposal is that »religion« should be understood as essentially vague. While it is largely uncontroversial to say that »religion« is not a category bounded by clear and rigid markers, it is worth revisiting why this is the case. For example, and quite famously, although Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are often H. de Vries, »Introduction: Why Still ›Religion‹?« in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. H. de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1–98, 2. 48

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suggested as prototypical instances of »religion«, what about non-theistic traditions such as some forms of Buddhism, or the commonly heard idea of »spiritual but not religious«? Is the latter of these itself a new »religion«? Even more complicated, what about the fan who is devoted passionately to University of Alabama football in McCutcheon’s own city of Tuscaloosa? Is she appropriately considered »religious«? Further, even if we think that »religion« seems to pick out some clear instances, such as Christianity or Islam, then what aspects of these traditions are the »religious« aspects as opposed to the social or cultural or political aspects?49 Such questions are notoriously difficult, but here I think that there are at least two especially promising resources that aid in formulating a notion of »religion« that is neither potentially empty nor reductive. The first is contemporary work in cognitive linguistics and prototype theory. But, since Schilbrack, in particular, has already explored this avenue to some degree and many others are doing excellent work on this front,50 I want to look at another option: philosophical work on vagueness. Kees van Deemter claims that »a concept or word« can be understood as »vague if it allows borderline cases«.51 As opposed to such »vague« notions, van Deemter offers the idea of »crisp« terms or concepts. It is important to differentiate between vagueness and a mere lack of specificity.52 Whereas it might be the case that an account of something could be more specific – e.g., »more than half of the people in this room are Florida State Seminoles fans«, is not as specific as »95% of the people in this room are Florida State Seminoles fans« – vagueness does not seem to admit of degrees in the same way. Either there are borderline cases or not. And, if there are borderline For Smith’s own consideration of the problems that accompany any attempt to classify »religion«, see J.Z. Smith, Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); see also Idem, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially chapter 7. For an alternative approach to the same general question, see K. Schilbrack, »Religions: Are There Any?«, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no.4 (2010): 1112–1138. 50 See Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 36–40. As just a few examples of work exploring the possible intersections between religious studies and cognitive linguistics, see work by such thinkers as Eve E. Sweetser, John Sanders, Michael Spezio, and George Lakoff. For ways in which work on vagueness and prototype theory intersect, see K. van Deemter, Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 117–120. 51 Van Deemter, Not Exactly, 8. 52 Van Deemter, Not Exactly, 115–116. 49

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cases, then all sorts of problems seem to follow in light of such vagueness. The most famous of such problems are known as sorites paradoxes. Sorites paradoxes all involve a situation where some small degree of change is not sufficient to transform how something is defined and yet an accumulation of such small degrees facilitates transformation. So, to use an ancient example discussed in Rosanna Keefe and Peter Smith’s edited collection on vagueness, if we have a »heap« of sand (drawing on the fact that soros is Greek for heap), removing one grain will not be sufficient to change it from a heap to a non-heap.53 Yet, at some point we will have removed enough grains that a non-heap remains. But, this is impossible since there would seem to have to be some point at which removing one more grain of sand will enact such a transition. Drawing on this very basic account of vagueness, then, I think it is valuable to follow Keefe and Smith in concluding that typically vagueness displays three characteristics. A vague concept or term will (a) have borderline cases, (b) not have sharp boundaries, (c) be susceptible to sorites paradoxes.54 The vast majority of philosophical work regarding vagueness concerns predication. For example, such descriptions as »tall«, »short«, »heavy«, »old«, etc., are all rather easily designated »vague«. However, things are a bit more complicated when it comes to vague objects – what is often termed »ontological« or »ontic« vagueness as opposed to »linguistic« vagueness. For some philosophers, such ontic vagueness is impossible.55 Yet, for others, ontic vagueness is required for the very possibility of linguistic vagueness such that predicates are vague because the objects that are being described are themselves vague.56 How can such philosophical work on vagueness help to think about »religion?« Well, it is possible to cash out the idea of »religion« as vague in regard to language and also in regard to the object »religion« might attempt to name. That »religion« is linguistically vague is a fairly straightforward R. Keefe and P. Smith, eds., Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1997), 3. 54 Keefe and Smith, Vagueness, 2–3. 55 See for example, G. Evans, »Can there be Vague Objects?«, Analysis 38 (1978); reprinted in Keefe and Smith, Vagueness, 317. 56 M. Tye, »Sorites Paradoxes and the Semantics of Vagueness«, in Philosophical Perspectives 8: Logic and Language, ed. J.E. Tomberlin (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1994), 189–206; reprinted in Keefe and Smith, Vagueness, 281–293. 53

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case to make. As a predicate applied to phenomena, it is easy to see that we do have borderline cases (again, consider the football fan), but also that we have no sharp boundaries (again, even if Christianity is accepted as religious, the question remains regarding what makes it clearly an instance of »religion« as distinguished from some other borderline case?), and we can admit of sorites paradoxes in that if we consider all the specific dimensions of a »religion« it does not seem like any individual practice, or any specific belief, is sufficient for »religion« and yet somehow we do appear to cross a threshold at some point (at least relative to our common understanding of the category). So, as linguistic description (consistent with versions of prototype theory), »religion« seems more easily classified as vague than as crisp. But, what about »religion« as ontically vague? Assuming that ontic vagueness is possible, would »religion« count as a plausible contender for indicating a vague object? With awareness of the problematic non-sequiturs discussed above, it is important not to conclude that linguistic vagueness would automatically mean that there is nothing being picked out by the term or concept that is said to be vague in such ways. It might be, as Michael Tye at least hints at, that the linguistic vagueness is, in some cases, motivated by the ontic vagueness that accompanies the object itself.57 Difficulty in description might be due to the difficulty inherent in the object, not simply the inadequacies of the linguistic abilities of those attempting to describe it. Accordingly, when it comes to »religion«, I want to resist, here, any stipulative requirements such as a set of ritual practices, a belief in the supernatural, etc., and instead suggest that all such stipulations are plausibly understood as each getting at something about »religion« that is worth considering. If one is committed to accounting for the variety of »data« made available by different disciplinary inquiries into »religion«, then this idea seems warranted. Many of the aspects of what we call »religion« seem to resist definite description because what we are trying to describe is (a) often put forth as outstripping such determinacy (consider the widespread history of generally apophatic dimensions of religious discourse), and (b) as frequently expecting participant engagement – what Kierkegaard might term »passion« – such that some degree of first-personal investment is required. Merold Westphal nicely addresses both points when he notes that »the question is not whether scientific method can be applied legitimately to the question of God’s existence but whether the scientific ideal is appropriate in

M. Tye, »Sorites Paradoxes and the Semantics of Vagueness«.

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this context.«58 Speaking of commonplace conceptions of religion, then, Westphal concludes: It appears that the notion of scientific objectivity, even without the ideals of mathematical precision and general laws, when torn from its natural habitat and transferred to the religious realm reveals the fundamental incongruity between itself and its newly assigned subject matter.59

Although there are probably ways of interpreting »religion« without these aspects that Westphal addresses, to do so would threaten to exclude as »religion« some of the prototypical or clear historical cases. For example, if one starts with the scientific, naturalistic, and objectivist methodology that Wiebe recommends, much of what »religion« seems to name will never be made available for such research – as a problematic, though helpful example, we might say that it would be like trying to understand the game of soccer without ever having kicked a ball, etc. Alternatively, and here I may diverge from Westphal to some degree, if we stipulate that »religion« is essentially unavailable in all respects to scientific consideration, then we risk epistemic arrogance such that we forget our value-laden, contextual situation as inquirers. Somehow we have to maintain both the »scientific« and the »personal« approaches and dimensions while admitting that neither is probably going to be adequate to the object of the inquiry itself. Understanding »religion« as essentially vague (in both the linguistic and ontic senses) makes such a task possible. It is worth asking whether affirming such essential vagueness regarding »religion«, requires that one be a realist (maybe even a theist) regarding religion itself. If so, then one might object, on Wiebe’s behalf, perhaps, that I have engaged in the same fallacy with which I charged him – namely, that I am sliding from a methodological assumption to a conclusion about the actuality of some state of affairs that would motivate such assumptions. I do not think this is the case, but I am willing to admit that since all conclusions are made possible by the premises from which they are drawn, careful attention is required to ensure that the strong ontological reading in line with the substantive conception of religion is not simply inverted such that an unrecognized theism, say, is inadvertently assumed from the outset in a theory of ontic vagueness. Such a risk is something that should demand the critical attention of all philosophers of religion in light of the »narrowness« about which Schilbrack cautions.

M.Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1991), 5. 59 Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, 5. 58

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It might be objected that according to my account, practically anything can count as »religious«.Well, remember that vagueness requires borderline cases. As such, affirming the essential vagueness of »religion« does not mean that we have to affirm everything as »religious«. Indeed, if everything is »religious«, then it is not vague, because it is crisply inclusive of all phenomena. So, only if we can say that some phenomena are not »religious«, while some other phenomena do count as »religious« within a particular discourse, can we operate with such an essentially vague notion. Hence, understanding »religion« as essentially vague, rather than simply linguistically, or hermeneutically, vague allows us to maintain the awareness of the deeply contextual and constructed aspects of our discourse without, thereby, falling prey to the assumption that there is nothing about which our discourse speaks.

V. Conclusion: Renewing Philosophy of Religion I have not spent much time arguing that contemporary philosophy of religion needs renewing, but instead I have merely assumed this as a premise by drawing upon Kevin Schilbrack’s suggestion that traditional philosophy of religion has been narrow, intellectualist, and insular. Schilbrack rightly realizes, however, that in light of such criticisms philosophers of religion do not need holistically to abandon what they have been doing and the questions that they have been asking. Nonetheless, there are criticisms worth taking seriously regarding the assumptions underlying the traditional practice of philosophy of religion. Important resources for responding to these critiques are most likely gained if philosophy of religion and critical theory of religion are put into dialogue. In order to facilitate such dialogue, I have proposed that rethinking the category of »religion« in light of philosophical work on vagueness can open important opportunities for both discourses to proceed forward in ways that might be mutually productive. My proposal for a renewal in philosophy of religion is, thus, not at all grand, but rather quite modest. The potential results of my proposal, though, are important enough to warrant serious consideration. Namely, if we understand »religion« as essentially vague, as I have suggested, then: a. The slippage between »religion« and (Christian) »theism« is put into question within philosophy of religion due to the vagueness of religion itself. b. When proposed in the name of »objectivity«, »naturalist« assumptions regarding »religion« are problematic since religion already outstrips the adequacy of any particular methodology.

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c. Debates regarding realism/anti-realism are left open, rather than being decided at the outset by a particular discourse. Hence, confessional truth is not excluded from academic consideration, but it is unlikely the best starting point for philosophical work. d. Philosophy of religion should take seriously and incorporate »data« from work being done in the history of religion, critical theory of religion, sociology of religion, etc., because »religion« suggests more than what philosophy can countenance on its own. Conversely, and for the same reason, the academic study of religion should take seriously and incorporate »data« from work being done in philosophy. Ultimately, it very well may be that Smith is right to claim that »religion has no independent existence apart from the academy«, but that does not mean that what »religion« attempts to name does not exist. Envisioning philosophy of religion after »religion«, such that the question »What is religion?« is of profound importance for philosophers, thus offers prospects for renewing philosophy of religion insofar as philosophers are not only more likely to be aware of problematic narrowness, intellectualism, and isolation, but more likely to find resources for overcoming such traits moving forward.60

I want to thank Kevin Schilbrack, Kevin Carnahan, and John Sanders for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. 60

Race and the Philosophy of Religion Vincent Lloyd The concept of religion is now being historicized and contextualized. The concept of race was historicized and contextualized a generation earlier. Recent scholarship has argued that the genealogies of religion and race are linked, that they emerged at the same historical moments in the same places due to some of the same forces. If this is the case, then the philosophy of religion is always the philosophy of religion and race. Ignoring discussions of race in the philosophy of religion distorts the philosophy of religion as much as ignoring, say, religious practice in favor of an exclusive focus on religious belief. What is the philosophy of religion? It is often defined by a set of questions: Does God exist? What is evil? Is faith in God justified? Can we be good without God? But philosophy of religion could also be understood as a tradition of inquiry, defined by certain conversations, institutions, values, and authoritative texts. While much of a tradition of inquiry does involve grappling with certain questions, the two perspectives on the philosophy of religion are important to keep distinct. Exploring the entangled genealogies of religion and race may add qualifying clauses to those questions that make up the first definition of the philosophy of religion, transforming philosophy into intellectual history. Instead of asking, what is evil?, it may now be necessary to ask, what is evil for white European Christians? Or, what is evil for African American women who are spiritual but not religious? The philosophy of religion would then cease to be an exchange of arguments and instead track the arguments of others, in a particular place, at a particular time. If the philosophy of religion is considered in the second way, as a tradition of inquiry, the entangled genealogies of religion and race open new sorts of questions; philosophy is not reduced to intellectual history. As a tradition of inquiry, the philosophy of religion is already understood to be a predominantly white, European and American enterprise. Its authoritative texts – Plato,Voltaire, Hume, Nietzsche, Plantinga – were written by white men, it flourishes in predominantly white institutions, and it is informed by concerns of its predominantly white practitioners. The qualification – for white men – is built into the definition of the tradition. So is Christianity, or something like it: the tradition of inquiry is implicitly informed by

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specifically Christian concerns, even when Plato is being read in a secular classroom. That is the lesson taught by genealogies of the category of religion. Whiteness and Christianity do not only make the philosophy of religion provincial. They also imply that the enterprise itself is implicated in naturalizing whiteness and Christianity, and these concepts are implicated in naturalizing the enterprise of philosophy of religion. In light of the imperial legacy of Christianity and the racist legacy of whiteness, the philosophy of religion appears deeply political. As a tradition of inquiry, the values, institutions, authorities, and conversations that constitute this tradition have the potential to perpetuate white supremacy and to sanctify imperial hegemony. Indeed, this is the default effect of participation in the tradition. Very careful, strategic maneuvering within the tradition is necessary to have any other effect. To get such strategic maneuvering right, confronting either the legacy of white supremacy or the legacy of Christian imperialism is not enough. They must be deliberately confronted together. Before such a confrontation – really a redemption of the philosophy of religion – is possible, it is necessary to fully and clearly understand how religion and race are entangled. In the pages that follow, I will examine how they are entangled historically, then conceptually. Next, I will consider two figures prominent in recent philosophy of religion, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, attending to how religion and race are entwined in their work. Then I will consider some worries about Derrida and Agamben’s projects based on recent cultural and economic changes. Finally, I will take Sylvia Wynter as offering an example of an approach to the philosophy of religion that takes race seriously but also takes account of late capitalism. Her work, I suggest, points to new directions this tradition of inquiry may take in the future.

I. »Race« and »Religion« Recent efforts to denaturalize the concept »religion« have suggested that this concept emerges only with the confrontation of an »other«. It is usually implied that this »other« is another culture, but in fact this »other« could also be understood as another race.While an earlier generation of critics of religion, led by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, located the concept’s emergence in rifts between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, a more recent generation of scholars has pointed to evidence suggesting that it was the surprise of encountering those with dramatically foreign views of God that gave

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rise to the concept.1 There is no consensus, however, among these more recent scholars about which particular foreign encounter consolidated the concept. Three candidates have been proposed: the encounter between Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity, sixteenth century encounters with indigenous communities in the Americas, and nineteenth century colonial encounters. According to Daniel Boyarin, Jewishness in the ancient world was an ethnic identity.2 While projecting either race or ethnicity onto the ancient world brings with it risks, it also brings with it rewards, adding important dimensions to how we view race.3 You could be a Greek or you could be a Jew, not both. Judaism only became a religion after Christianity had established itself. Christianity created »religion« as a concept where there was no religion before. The components of religion existed, of course, but they only congealed into the category »religion« with Christianity. Previously, religious beliefs and practices were simply characteristics of an ethnic group, along with laws and land. Christianity extracted religious beliefs and practices from this broader mix of beliefs and practices, placing them in the category »religion« that existed independent of ethnic identity: one could have both an ethnic identity and a religious identity – a Greek Christian or a Jewish Christian, for example.Then, in the third century, Jews also adopted the category of religion for their own identity, following the Christian example and identifying specific religious beliefs and practices that constituted Judaism separate from ethnic identity. Boyarin and other scholars have tracked the discourses of heresy that helped to consolidate these religious identities over and above ethnic identities as the conceptual space for »Jewish Christians« slipped away. In this genealogy of »religion«, religion supersedes race, offering a new way to identify what may be considered the most important aspect of human identity. The »Jewish Christian« example W.C. Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1963). For the influential accounts of religion emerging from within Christianity, see J.Z. Smith, »Religion, Religions, Religious«, in M.C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms in Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–284; T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 2 D. Boyarin, »Semantic Differences; or, ›Judaism‹/›Christianity‹«, in The Ways that Never Parted, A.H. Becker and A.Y. Reed, eds. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 65–85; Idem, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 3 This point is made persuasively by Denise Buell in her introduction to D. Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 1

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illustrates the contest over whether race and religion operate in the same domain or separate domains – in other words, whether religion is really separable from race. It is a contingent fact of history that this separation succeeded and that few »Jewish Christians« remain. Boyarin’s discovery of the origins of »religion« in late antiquity is unusual; more often, the moment of origin is an encounter with a previously unknown community.4 Before this encounter, there was a continuum of difference between us, those a little different than us, those a bit more different from us, and those quite a bit different from us. Crossing the Atlantic introduced radical discontinuity. Native Americans were extraordinarily different in many ways than Europeans. Making sense of this difference required the invention of new ways of understanding self and other, and it resulted in two: race and religion. Both concepts were invented on both sides of the encounter, by Europeans and by Native Americans, at the same time. Jared Hickman makes this point compellingly, finding it allegorized in the encounter between Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Daniel Defoe’s novel. When he was home, Crusoe never had to defend his religious beliefs and practices or even to conceive of them as a religion. On an island, confronted with drastic difference represented by the indigenous Friday, Crusoe realizes that what he has is a religion and that he must be able to articulate it as such. As a religion, Crusoe can share his beliefs and practices, argue about them, and refine them. As Hickman concludes, »Crusoe’s previously unself-conscious Christianity thus becomes a self-conscious philosophy of religion in which Christianity is, to some extent, a subordinate point of reference.«5 Now that religion exists, Crusoe can see Christianity as one token of this type – and so engage in second-order inquiry, in the philosophy of religion. At the same time, Crusoe understands his racial distinctiveness: race and philosophy of religion arrive together. Hickman also shows how the same transformation is happening on the indigenous side of the encounter, with Native American groups transforming their mythologies to include different peoples with distinctive, disconnected ancestors. Other scholars locate the invention of religion not in the European encounter with radical difference but in the European conquest and management of radical difference – that is, in colonialism.6 Before colonialism, in the soon-to-be-colonized context, religious practices and beliefs ran See especially J.Z. Smith, »Religion, Religions, Religious«, and J. Hickman, »Globalization and the Gods, or the Political Theology of ›Race‹«, Early American Literature 45:1 (2010), 145–182. 5 Hickman, »Globalization and the Gods«, 155. 6 For example, D. Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville,VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996); R. King, Orien4

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together in a cultural stew, together with all other cultural practices and beliefs. Creating a category of religion and removing a ladleful of cultural stew to be placed under this heading had several advantages for colonial administrators. Religion could become an apolitical, so unthreatening, category. Religious experts could be selected so as to leverage the persuasive force of religious idioms for the interests of the colonizers. Fractures could be named and managed within a previously relatively unified community by naming sects. Christian missionaries could present a clear alternative to what was now classed as native religion. That native religion could be molded into the safe, manageable form of Protestantism (or Catholicism) even if it would never achieve Christian greatness – adjudicated by a discourse of comparative theology or philosophy of religion.7 All aspects of this process of religion-making essentially depend on another element of colonial logic: a racial distinction between the colonizer and the colonized. The concept of religion may come about through encounters with racial others, but the concept of race also leaned heavily on religion to be seen as plausible and, in some cases, as sacred.The concept of race, like the concept of religion, has a specific history and gained legitimacy for specific reasons. In the most famous case of North America, it has been thoroughly demonstrated that the transformation of »black« from a color to a subordinate class of people was aided by Christian ideas. For example, the Biblical story of Noah’s curse of Canaan was interpreted in racial terms. Ham, who was Noah’s son and Canaan’s father, peered at the drunk Noah’s naked body. In response, Noah decreed that Canaan would be a »servant of servants« (the reason that the curse, as depicted in Genesis, skips a generation remains obscure). Ham was seen as Black, the ancestor of present-day Blacks, so they were justly condemned to servitude – according to defenders of slavery.8 This is but one of many examples in which religious texts, images, and authorities were invoked to naturalize racial categories: Colin Kidd goes so far as to describe race as »primarily a theological problem«.9

talism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and »the Mystical East« (London: Routledge, 1999). 7 See T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 8 S.R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse:The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and, more generally, C. Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 9 Kidd, Forging of Races, 25, italics in original.

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Race and religion are connected historically, but they are also connected conceptually.10 In other words, independent of their origins and development, the concepts of religion and race that we have now, that circulate in the contemporary social imagination, have deep affinities with each other. This is not obvious. Race would seem to name groups of people based on external characteristics, such as skin color, while religion would seem to refer to an internal disposition – to the heart rather than to the skin. Recent scholarship has challenged both of these approaches, with the result that race and religion no longer seem so distinct. If race was once thought a feature of biology, and then thought a harmful fiction to be eliminated, now race is seen as a social construction with very real effects. Those effects include not only stigma and marginalization but also senses of belonging, shared values, and distinctive practices. In other words, rather than approaching race as a claim about individuals that may be proven or disproven, it is more helpful to examine what race does in the world. People act as if there is race and that is what matters, not whether they are right or wrong. Similarly, if religion was once thought a feature of the heart or soul – its attunement to the divine, for instance – or to be a certain set of beliefs, now the practical, material, and communal dimensions of religion are seen as crucial as well. When race and religion are cut loose from their anchors in biology and God, respectively, they begin to look quite similar. Both involve sets of practices, values, and beliefs shared by a community and that help define a community in opposition to other communities. Both can over-determine how minority communities are viewed, perpetuating the domination of those wielding power. Blacks and Muslims, in the contemporary Western context, are obvious examples, and examples that illustrate the fuzzy boundaries between these two categories when we consider darker-skinned French Muslims and darker-skinned Muslims in Israel. Both religion and race are also lived realities, to some extent imposed on the individual and to some extent resisted or creatively appropriated by the individual who is understood to be of a certain race or of a certain religion.There are clearly significant differences between religion and race that remain – religion usually involves formalized authorities and institutions more often than race, for example – but the similarities of form remain striking. Furthermore, the similarities go beyond isomorphism. Race and religion both shape a world: how we see ourselves, others, and everything around us. They are not just one more aspect of our complex identities; they can each be seen as the definitive aspect of our subjectivity. This is obvious in I develop this point more fully in V. Lloyd, »Race and Religion«, Critical Research on Religion 1:1 (2013): 80–86. 10

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the case of religion, as there are robust second-order discourses, theologies, that allow us to describe ourselves and our worlds in religious terms. That this is also the case for race has only recently become clear, at least in the scholarly literature. It is easiest to see in minority communities. Continually derogatory treatment clearly distorts an individual’s self-image and perceptive capacity. This derogatory treatment varies depending on the specific racial dynamics at play, but it also results in various sorts of responses. Racial communities manage to survive sustained derogation through a variety of techniques which allow for resilience in the face of seemingly unbearable circumstances. These techniques involve modes of understanding self and world that counter the distortions inflicted by the racial majority. But it is not only racial minorities that are deeply shaped by race. Majority races – paradigmatically, whites – also suffer from distorted senses of self and perceptions of the world because of race. As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, »hate distorts the personality of the hater«; James Baldwin adds, »[T]he white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.«11 Continually treating a class of humans as less than human inevitably disfigures the humanity of the racist herself. Racists in this sense are determined not so much by specific acts but rather by the racist (e.g., white) culture they participate in, a culture that includes not only the subordination of other races but also its own practices, values, and institutions. Race and religion can both be viewed as constitutive of our subjectivity, a conclusion which suggests but does not explain a strong relationship between the two. In sum, recent scholarship has shown not only that religion and race are concepts that were adopted at specific points in time, due to various contingent factors, but also that the genealogies of these two concepts are intertwined. This is a stronger claim than that religion and race are co-constituted, which would suggest only a close relationship at various points in time.12 To study one without the other, or, more specifically, to participate in a tradition of reflection on one but not the other therefore naturalizes both. Even beneath the concepts, in the sets of practices that constitute both, there are deep resonances that confirm the need to study  

M.L. King, Jr., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vol. 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 321; J. Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 375. 12 H. Goldschmidt, »Introduction: Race, Nation, and Religion« in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, ed. H. Goldschmidt and E. McAlister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–31; See also Hickman’s criticism of Goldschmidt in »Globalization and the Gods«, 161. 11

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both together – that confirm the need for the philosophy of religion to take race seriously. In the sections to follow, I will track how two prominent figures in the philosophy of religion succeed in treating religion and race similarly, but I will also show how they do not fully grapple with the shared genealogies of these concepts limned above.

II. Example I: Jacques Derrida In his later years, Jacques Derrida was fond of calling attention to his identity as an Algerian Jew, a label that blends the racial and the religious.13 In the French context of his youth, to be Algerian was to be the quintessential racial other and to be Jewish was to be the quintessential religious other. Derrida explicitly racializes his Algerianness, describing himself as »a little black and very Arab Jew«.14 Indeed, this description comes as Derrida recounts his expulsion from school, under the Vichy regime in 1942. He does not just happen to be a racial minority; he experiences the pinnacle of racial violence in Europe, the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Derrida’s claim to black, Arab, and Jewish identity also comes within his »Circumfession«, a text offering a Jewish inflection on Augustine’s Confessions. Derrida’s text takes a religious form, and it also discusses religious topics. This text is the first place where Derrida extensively discusses his own identity, and Derrida comes out, as it were, as both a racial and a religious minority at the same time, in the same place. He does so in a text composed as a challenge: he was to write something that could not be fit into a systematic exposition of Derrida’s thought. Derrida’s oeuvre was expansive; to meet the challenge, Derrida turned to himself, to his own life. Race and religion are presented as aspects of that life; as such, they also do not fit with the systematized Derrida. Indeed, they are not just components of that life. Derrida’s choice of Augustine as his model puts race and religion at the center of the text and of his life. Augustine was not only religious but also non-European, in fact also Algerian.

For discussion of Derrida’s reflections on race, see for example Ch.Wise, Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); G. Farred, »›Nostalgeria‹: Derrida, Before and After Fanon«, South Atlantic Quarterly 112:1 (2013), 145– 162; P. Ahluwalia, »Origins and Displacement: Working Through Derrida’s African Connections«, Social Identities 13:3 (2007), 325–336; A. Czajka and B. Isyar, eds., Europe after Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 14 G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58. 13

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One of Derrida’s primary philosophical arguments is that the attempt to distinguish form and content is always futile, a special case of his central philosophical argument, that every attempt to make rigorous distinctions or systems falls short, leaving an excess that threatens to undermine the distinction or system entirely. In »Circumfession« there is yet another level of recursion. The purpose of the text is to demonstrate that Derrida’s philosophical point holds for his own philosophy: that any attempt to systematize it falls short. In this light, Derrida is claiming that race and religion have a particularly privileged function in marking that which exceeds system. Derrida provides many names for this role of destabilizing force; among the most famous are supplement and différance. When this role is named by words we use in ordinary language, Derrida is careful to mark the two distinct senses in which they might be used, the ordinary sense and the destabilizing sense: justice beyond justice, the gift beyond the gift, and so on. Such terms both refer to something within a system (i.e., ordinary language) but also point beyond it.This, then, is how we should understand Derrida’s references to race and religion, in »Circumfession« and elsewhere. By religion, he does not only mean a religious community, tradition, or belief, but also that which cannot fit in the well-ordered, essentially secular world – that which marks the precariousness of the secular world and which threatens to scramble its well-ordered categories. By race, Derrida does not only mean skin color or marginalized community, but also that which cannot fit in the well-ordered, essentially white world, marking the precariousness of whiteness and the possibility of a non-white future. While both race and religion threaten »the system«, as it might loosely be called, each term highlights a different aspect of »the system«: its whiteness or its secularism. Understood in this way, with race and religion playing the same role in Derrida’s critical project, we are implicitly invited to reflect on the ways in which whiteness and secularism are entwined, and the ways race and religion are entwined. Before Derrida turned to religion, and before he reflected on his own »black« identity, he already hinted at the entanglement of race and religion that he would later more fully explore. In his 1971 article »White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy«, philosophy is »the system« that imagines itself to be well-ordered and rational, and mythology is the loose thread on which Derrida pulls to unravel the system.15 »What is metaphysics? A white mythology which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos – that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that B. Hesse very productively develops this point in his »Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies«, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30:4 (2007), 643–663. 15

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which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason.«16 At the end of the day, all philosophy is mythology: narrative, flexible, unsystematic, fictional, and reflecting the interests of those who circulate it, specifically, whites. But this is not just any story, it is mythology, a fundamentally religious story – concealed as its opposite, as entirely secular, rational, as philosophy. In this way, it is not just that race and religion (as two of Derrida’s loose threads) can disturb »the system«, but that race and religion can secure »the system«, making what is a historically and geographically specific way of understanding the world seem natural, timeless, and universal: colorblind philosophy is actually white mythology. Derrida famously embraces this sort of equivocal significance of his key concepts, pointing to the model of the pharmakon, the Greek term both for a poison and for a cure.17 Given this equivocation, so fundamental to Derrida’s critical project, it is tempting to suggest that Derrida actually has nothing at all substantial to say about race and religion as lived experiences or social practices; he is, rather, concerned with them as concepts, part of the constellation of concepts that make up the ruling ideas of our day.The political implication of his project, on this reading, would be a challenge to the powers that be through a challenge to the purported stability of their ideas – their ideas that are sold to us as inevitable but which Derrida shows are deeply precarious.Yet Derrida also intervenes on concrete social issues involving racism in a way that takes sides rather than confines itself to the indirect political work of destabilizing ideas. He supported the anti-apartheid struggle, mobilizing fellow intellectuals in support of Nelson Mandela through conferences and publications. In an essay on Mandela, Derrida explores how Mandela was loyal to the law and how Mandela demonstrated that whites themselves, despite their claims to lawfulness, were the ones unfaithful to the law.18 Here, as in Derrida’s writings that more directly focused on the topic of law, what is commended is a higher law, a law beyond the law of the land, and Derrida holds up moments when we catch a glimpse of such a law – such as when Mandela at his own trial exposes the limits of the law.19 In a sense, Derrida embraces a natural law theory, a commitment to J. Derrida, »White Mythology«, New Literary History 6:1 (1974), 11. J. Derrida, »Plato’s Pharmacy«, in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–119. 18 J. Derrida, »Admiration of Nelson Mandela, or The Laws of Reflection«, Law and Literature 26:1 (2014), 9–30. See also J. Derrida, »Racism’s Last Word«, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 290–299. 19 See also J. Derrida, »The Force of Law: The ›Mystical Foundation of Authority‹«, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and D. Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. 16 17

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a law whose provenance is beyond the secular world, whose provenance might even be called divine.20 A religious idea is suggested to overthrow the racist regime.Yet even in a concrete political context defined by racism, it seems as though Derrida, using religion, wants to be rid of the idea of race, wants the post-racial, rather than offering an account of racial justice. In the conceptual realm, emphasizing the play of concepts like religion and race might have a powerful intellectual effect, but it remains unclear whether the post-racial, post-secular society Derrida would seem to commend is a just society, as he seems to assume. This tension between Derrida’s intellectual aspirations for philosophical work concerning religion and race and concrete social realities was even more acute in his early years. Edward Baring has recently pointed out that Derrida’s embrace of an Algerian Jewish identity came quite late in his life.21 As a young man, Derrida aligned himself with the French colonists in Algeria, the Pieds-Noir. While he did embrace liberal politics, he was certainly not a radical, and he became defensive when Leftist intellectuals attacked the colonists. Like other colonists, Derrida’s education during his Algerian childhood was entirely French, following the French curriculum and taught by Paris-educated instructors. He transitioned seamlessly to the center of the French intellectual world, to the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, and remained there for his entire career, even while he was loudly advertising his purported marginality. In other words, in practice, Derrida was very much aligned with white, European Catholic or post-Catholic culture and politics, and he was appreciative of the Algerian resistance just as he was appreciative of Mandela – as challenging the purported closure of the »the system«, not as bringing structural transformation that would result in racial justice.

III. Example II: Giorgio Agamben Race and religion are front and center in Agamben’s writings, but he rarely dwells on the connection between them.22 Indeed, one way of reading M. Westphal, »Derrida as Natural Law Theorist«, in Overcoming Onto-Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 219–228. 21 E. Baring, »Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques Derrida«, Critical Inquiry 36:2 (2010), 239–261; Idem, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 22 For discussion of race in Agamben’s writings, see especially E.P. Ziarek, »Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender«, South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1 (2008), 89–105 and A. Benjamin, »Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and 20

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Agamben’s most influential work, Homo Sacer, is as tracking a certain social logic that has existed in the West for more than two millennia, a social logic on which race and religion supervene.23 What is foundational for Agamben is this logic; concepts like race and religion fill the content in a pre-existing form. While Agamben offers myriad historical examples, he is not concerned with historical causation. His historical examples, for the most part not given chronologically, simply exemplify the underlying social logic and bring into view further features of this social logic. Indeed, Agamben does not straightforwardly describe the social logic; it comes into view one glimpse at a time, each glimpse from a different angle, offered by a different historical example. For Agamben, race and religion are features of specific historical circumstances, so they enter into his writing here and there, in some of the historical vignettes he provides but not in others. At the end of the day, however, race and religion are essentially connected for Agamben because both race and religion play the same role in the social logic of the West. They have no philosophical significance outside of this social logic, even though race and religion may have historical significance. In short, Agamben is not concerned about God or evil or the good life; he is concerned about how claims about these religious concepts consistently show up in the same configuration at quite different moments in the history of the West, and racist concepts show up in exactly the same configuration. What is the social logic that Agamben argues is so fundamental? Where Derrida valorizes concepts that are both included in »the system« and undermine »the system«, Agamben explores what this would mean in terms of society. What would it mean for a part of society, or an individual member of a society, to be both inside and outside at once? The social logic that Agamben identifies holds that for any society to function it must have certain elements in this special position, both inside and outside. In a sense, Homo Sacer is a catalog of such elements with suggestive remarks about how they are necessary for the very existence of the societies where they are found. One such element, which is neither explicitly religious nor explicitly racialized, is the sovereign: »The paradox of sovereignty consists in Animals«, South Atlantic Quarterly 107:1 (2008), 71–87. Achille Mbembe very productively uses Agamben as a starting point to theorize race in A. Mbembe, »Necropolitics«, Public Culture 15:1 (2003): 11–40. Mark Rifkin presents a fascinating assessment and development of Agamben’s thought from an indigenous perspective in »Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ›Peculiar‹ Status of Native Peoples«, Culture Critique 73 (2009): 88–124. 23 G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). For Agamben’s own reflections on his method, see Idem, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

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the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.«24 In other words, the sovereign is a member of a society, subject to the laws of that society, but the sovereign also stands above that society, capable of suspending those very laws (recall Carl Schmitt’s infamous definition of the sovereign as he who decides on the exception). Agamben cleverly shows how the sovereign has a mirror image in the person or people subject to the sovereign’s extra-legal will. Whether they are given mercy or arbitrarily detained, these figures are also inside and outside the law at once. Indeed, as touched, in a sense, by sovereignty, such figures themselves acquire an aura of sovereign power – and the sovereign himself always brings with him some of the abjection of his mirror image. This dynamic, Agamben shows, is often associated with the language of religion. Sacred man, homo sacer, labels this equivocal figure, abject and in a way sovereign. Among the various approaches Agamben takes to describing the social logic of which homo sacer serves as the paradigm is an extended discussion of taboo in the history of religions. Marshalling the theories of William Robertson Smith, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Mauss, Emile Durkheim, and others, Agamben notes a »mix of veneration and horror« at certain people or objects – those that are essential to a community but also rejected from that community.25 In other historical vignettes, Agamben describes how homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed: sacrifice would imply that such figures are members of the society they have been excluded from, but that very exclusion entails their membership in the sense that the society still can make decrees concerning them, even if those decrees authorize their death. Such individuals are treated not as political subjects but as »bare life«, stripped of social relations and exposed to death. Concerning the flip side of the logic of exception, Agamben develops Ernst Kantorowicz’s reflections on the strangely dual figure of the sovereign. Like Christ’s simultaneously divine and human nature, the medieval king is thought to have both a human body, subject to illness and death, and a political or mystical body that stands above the limitations of the human body. In this way, the sovereign is also inside and outside the law, both part of human society and above human society. This is made possible by the »mystical« body, by the Christian theological imagination, although such religious elements are contingent rather than necessary features of the logic in question. While Agamben’s many examples come from varied historical moments, and while he does not make any claims about historical causation,Agamben does make one crucial periodization. While the social logic that Agamben describes persists with the advent of modernity, modernity brings changes Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15. Ibid, 77.

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in social conditions that have important effects. Sovereign power is no longer exercised on individuals in unusual circumstances. In the modern world, life is politicized in two senses, both of which involve race. In the first sense, sovereign power is no longer confined to political life but also extends to bare life. Following Michel Foucault, Agamben sees modern nations concerned with the health of their population, with birth control and euthanasia, with census figures, and with issues that previously would have been considered outside of the political sphere. Among these issues, notably, is race: nations become concerned with classifying and organizing the races of their populations.Yet the social logic that Agamben considers foundational persists, and this is the second way in which life is politicized in modernity.There are still those who are both inside and outside political society, but now their number has grown and their condition has worsened. They are found, most notably, in concentration camps but also, more recently, in Guantanamo Bay.26 Those in the camp are defined by a political regime but stripped of their political rights, reduced to bare life. An important but ultimately contingent feature of those interned in camps is their race: Jews or Arabs, for example, or, in today’s US immigration detention camps, Latinos. The ultimate worry of Homo Sacer is that the exceptional space of the camp will become the model for all state management of life: we will all become Jews, we will all be racialized. Put another way, the social logic that once produced the sacred now, in modernity, produces race, and this has potentially dire consequences. There is another thread that runs through Agamben’s work linking race and religion. One of the features of the pre-modern sovereign and his inverse is the blurred line between human and animal. The bandit, excluded from political community and exposed to death, was once considered a wolf-man, Agamben asserts. Inversely, Agamben points to myths that associate the werewolf and the sovereign, featuring kings transforming into wolves and back into kings – again, blurring the line between the animal and the human. This is a theme to which Agamben devotes another book, The Open: Man and Animal, where he argues that the division between the human and the animal is essential: It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way – within man – has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values. And

The latter is explored in G. Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 26

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perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relations with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal.27

Agamben shows how the distinction he is interested in has been a perpetual concern of Jewish and Christian thought and the concern persists in secular form today with the expansion of the camp, that space which blurs the boundary between animal and human. This boundary is, in an important sense, about race: defining the human race and deciding who is excluded. Racialization, after all, is about exclusion from the human race. Agamben urges us to think explicitly about this question of race and to make use of religious traditions in doing so – otherwise, with secular questions drawing on secular resources, we all become Jews. In sum, for Agamben, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of race are both gateways to something deeper, to the questions that really matter – to the philosophy of the social and, perhaps, to justice.

Secularism, Multiculturalism, and the Philosophy of Religion Derrida and Agamben both reject the timelessness and universality of the concept of religion.They both, in different ways, demonstrate how religion and race are deeply entwined. And they both offer models for how philosophy that is concerned with religion can investigate religion and race together, cognizant of their entwined genealogy.Yet the issues addressed by these two authors are quickly being superseded by a new set of concerns motivated by rapidly changing social and especially economic conditions. One need not believe that religion is part of a superstructure that rests on an economic base to recognize that the dramatic shifts in production and consumption in recent years have affected culture, including race and religion. Specifically, the individual is no longer a consumer only in the grocery store; the consumer mentality, privileging individual choice based on personal desire, extends to romantic relationships, schools, hometown, job, and identity, including racial and religious identity. While this consumer mentality is certainly at odds with the realities of many who lack the financial or cultural capital to acquire what they desire, it is widely disseminated through media, government and cultural institutions, and social networks. The result is that race and religion, as identities to be chosen, must compete in the marketplace of identities and activities – yoga classes, charity

G. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 16. 27

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runs, Facebook games, Caribbean cruises – and so are themselves directly or indirectly shaped into the form of their competitors.28 Closely related to the pressures of the identity marketplace is the now regnant ideology of diversity. According to this set of ideas, we are all different, and that is beautiful. It is to be celebrated. Culture was imagined as monolithic for too long, repressing valuable (in both moral and economic senses) differences; today we can be ourselves. Of course this is not difference unlimited: there are discrete differences from which we are to choose, different tokens of the same type, different responses to the same question on the government questionnaire – male / female / transgender; white / black / Asian / Latino; Christian / Jew / Muslim / Buddhist / Hindu / atheist; and so on. This cultural embrace of diversity creates another set of pressures on religious and racial groups to conform to an ostensibly neutral model so as to fit comfortably next to a box on a government questionnaire.29 Of course no such neutrality exists: such standpoints simply mask the interests of the dominant group – whites, Protestants, etc. – allowing them to subtly exert pressure on minority or marginalized groups that stray too far from comfortable beliefs or practices. Or, from a more Marxist perspective, it is a neoliberal economic system which uses the language of diversity to manage unruly subjects, subjects who take their identities so seriously that it prevents them from laboring or consuming properly. In this social and economic landscape, secularism and multiculturalism are the ideologies that come to manage religion and race. They implicitly offer a set of standards by which to judge which religious or racial expressions are proper and which are improper, all under the label of ostensible neutrality. In so doing they shape religion and race with the result that any study of religion and race today will go wrong if it presumes to access its objects directly. Studies of religion and race must thoroughly account for the way that their objects are not autonomous but are deeply and thoroughly shaped by these ideological pressures. Moreover, these same pressures shape the perspective of the academy at the present: so, for example, historiography and ethnography are naturally disposed to find religions and races in the far corners of the world and the far reaches of history that look curiously similar to the religion and race licit under our present secularism and multiculturalism. For a similar worry, see L. Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Chapter 1. 29 V. Lloyd, »Introduction: Managing Race, Managing Religion«, in J. Kahn and V. Lloyd, eds., Race and Secularism in America (Columbia Universiaty Press, 2016). 28

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The philosophy of religion has so far had little to say about secularism and multiculturalism. In fact, there are ways in which Derrida and Agamben, as exemplars of recent philosophy of religion, fit perfectly with the secularist and multiculturalist ideological program.30 Derrida embraces difference and delights in undermining monolithic »systems«. Certainly Derrida would resist any fixed set of differences, for example on a government questionnaire, but the critical practice that Derrida performs and commends functions not at the level of social practice but at the level of ideology. At the level of ideology, secularism says: show us how your tradition complicates the historically dominant Christian assumptions. Multiculturalism says: show us how your Latino or indigenous or Filipino identity complicates historically dominant white culture. But those intellectual questions result, when implemented by institutions, in questionnaires with boxes to check. Moreover, for both Derrida and Agamben, religion and race have only contingent roles to play in their philosophical projects. They are two differences among many. Derrida is also deeply interested in gender, sexuality, nationality, immigration, ghosts, and much else as threads that can be pulled to undermine »the system«; Agamben explicates many other details of the historical and social snapshots he presents in order to develop the underlying social logic in which he is centrally interested. For both Derrida and Agamben, then, religion and race are two among many categories of difference. They are features of the world that point to what is really significant. Religion and race do not offer ways of seeing the world, or traditions. What would it look like to approach the philosophy of religion in a manner that is cognizant of the entwined genealogies of religion and race but that is also cognizant of the way that religion and race are carefully managed in the present? Such an approach would explore the aspects of religion that are the most difficult to translate into a secularist idiom and the aspects of race that are most difficult to translate into a multiculturalist idiom.31 Such an approach would also explore the dialectical struggle between an unmanageable knot of religion and race and the attempts to individuate and manage these categories.The philosophy of religion would be a deeply political project because it would recover something especially threatening to today’s hegemonic ideology, and it would expose the workings of that ideology. In a sense, the philosophy of religion would do in the For a related concern, see W.B. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 31 For a related point in postcolonial theory, see D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 30

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world of social practices what Derrida attempts to do in the world of ideas: locating a knot of practices that is never smoothed over by ideology and asking what it might mean for this knot to thwart »the system«. This does not mean that theology must displace the philosophy of religion; theology itself is subject to internalized secularism, and to multiculturalism.32 The philosophy of religion has a distinctive role as second order reflection on the always vexed process of translation between religious-racial ideas contaminated by secularism-multiculturalism and a non-religious community of inquiry also contaminated by secularism-multiculturalism.

IV. Example III: Sylvia Wynter To explore what this style of philosophy of religion responsive to recent social and economic developments might look like, I turn in conclusion to the example of Jamaican writer and feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter. While not trained as a philosopher, Wynter has become a central figure in Black feminist philosophy. She writes extensively about religion, but she has not as yet been embraced by the religious studies academy, and she remains marginal, at most, to conversations in the philosophy of religion. Wynter is part of a group of Black studies scholars who unapologetically embrace the uniqueness of Black experience and the unique evil of anti-Black racism. For this group, often referred to as Afro-pessimists, Blacks do not just happen to be suffering violence at various points in time.33 Rather, anti-Blackness is central to the metaphysics of the West, and anti-Blackness will not go away until that metaphysics is overturned. Ameliorative social programs and even reparations are not enough. Wynter carefully examines how antiBlackness became so fundamental to the West, and in her investigations she shows how anti-Blackness and religion have a deep, shared history. Wynter describes the colonial encounter as coinciding with a shift in how Western man (the masculine gender is particularly significant for her) viewed himself. Once, in the feudal world, society was ordered hierarchically. God guaranteed this order. Then, with the rise of the nation state and its intellectual champions, God’s role was to guarantee the rationality of Theological efforts to address these issues, along with the entangled genealogies of race and religion, include J.K. Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and W.J. Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2010). 33 Frank Wilderson offers a compelling description and synthesis of such theory in the introduction to F. Wilderson, Red,White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 32

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each citizen (rational nature displacing noble blood), and in so doing God secured the position of humans as distinct from the natural world. When Columbus landed in 1492, he was acting according to this logic in claiming the newly found land for Spain and the newly found goods to repay his financial backers.34 Most significantly, with the colonial encounter, »The construct of Nigger as well as that of the non-European native now came to serve as the inversion of the divinely instituted realm of the supernatural and therefore as the extrasocietal source.«35 Instead of humanity and social order defined by a God above, they came to be defined by sub-humans below, by Blacks and indigenous people whose non-humanity secured the humanity of Europeans and whose exclusion from the social structure secured that structure. Wynter goes on to argue that this shift also involved the replacement of religious language with scientific language. Instead of theologically defined divine superiority there now was biologically defined Black and indigenous inferiority. Wynter tracks the consequences of this linked process of secularization and racialization, including its psychic effects. In Christian Europe, subjects defined themselves against nonChristians, and that included their pre-Baptismal selves. Each individual was split against herself, saved but still the same person who was once damned. This earlier self represents »the embodiment of ›fallen natural humanity‹ enslaved to Original Sin«; with the colonial encounter, it is now the Black or indigenous who fill this role.36 The result, post-secularization and post-colonialism, is that Black and indigenous people who aspire to respectability must despise their Blackness or indigeneity. The thread that runs through this transformation, as Wynter describes it, is the figure of Man. Today, Man is not humanity but rather the Western bourgeoisie; this identification is part of a racial and theological history of exclusion. Wynter charges scholars who wish to be genuinely critical with the task of envisioning what comes after Man. In one formulation, she suggests that the category of the human has been contaminated by its association with the category of Man, given the latter’s racial-theological origins, and she opens the question of how an uncontaminated category of the human might be recovered. Wynter acknowledges that this cannot happen by simply adding minority voices to the conversation that would purport to show more dimensions of our humanity. It is the »order of S. Wynter, »1492: A New World View« in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed.V.L. Hyatt and R. Nettleford (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5–57. 35 S. Wynter, »Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles«, World Literature Today 63:4 (1989), 642. 36 Ibid, 643. 34

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discourse« itself that must be overturned because the current (anti-Black, anti-indigenous) discourse can accommodate and even be strengthened by incorporating minority voices.37 Wynter labels the critical practice she commends »disenchanting discourse«, a critique of explicitly or implicitly religious concepts that also functions as a critique of racism. Such disenchantment should proceed from multiple directions, for the exclusions created by the category of Man are many.The multiple lines of protest that flourished in the 1960s started this critical task, but they did not end it; ultimately 1960s critique was incorporated into the order of discourse itself, further enchanting it and further strengthening its hold.38 It might seem as though Wynter uses religion and race instrumentally, like Derrida and Agamben, as two differences among many that point towards a deeper, philosophical problem. But for Wynter there is no philosophical problem deeper than the construction of Man as the hero of our order of discourse – that is, of our way of seeing the world.This construction grows out of a religious, specifically Christian, way of seeing the world in terms of the damned and the saved, and this construction takes on new meaning with the colonial encounter, as Blacks and indigenous people play the role of the damned. For Wynter, the philosophy of religion must investigate religious and racial concepts together because of their shared genealogy and because it is the powers that be today, not the truth, that would separate them. Considered as a model,Wynter’s work suggests the value of engaging with philosophy of religion as a tradition because of the continuing power of this tradition. But her work also suggests the importance of investigating religion and race together in new, unexpected, extra-canonical sites that might provide new ways of envisioning the human beyond Man. For example, she points to the fundamental Aztec theological commitment to a »flow of life« both on earth and in the heavens. According to Aztec belief, the world was created through gods’ self-sacrifice, creating a sacred debt for humans. This debt could be repaid by the Aztecs’ performance of sacrifice, including human sacrifice, which would then restore the flow of life. Wynter notes: Columbus’s behaviors were not unlike the ritual acts of sacrifice of the Aztecs. Their behaviors, too, were impelled by an ethico-behavioral system based on securing what seemed to them to be the imperative goal of »ensuring the good of the Commonwealth«, and to do this by maintaining, as their founding supra­ See, for example, S. Wynter, »On Disenchanting Discourse: ›Minority‹ Literary Criticism and Beyond«, Cultural Critique 7 (1987), 207–244. 38 Wynter, »Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument«, CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3 (2003), 257–337. 37

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ordinate goal prescribed that they should do, »the flow of life«. Columbus’s equally Janus-faced behaviors were to be no less prescribed by the emergent religio-secular political and mercantile goal of the state, which Columbus would come to see as the vehicle both for the spread of the faith and for the advancement of his own status. So the Aztecs’ »flow of life« imperative would become for Columbus and the Spaniards (to the Aztecs’ horror and astonishment) the imperative of maintaining a »flow of gold«.39

Through such analysis, a pluralized philosophy of religion can complicate and destabilize the narrative of the colonizer, of the European, of the white – and of the Christian. Before they were Man, the Aztecs were human and Columbus was human, grappling with the religious ideas of their communities and their own self-interests. This is what philosophy of religion at its best can discern, but this can only be discerned once the conceptual and physical violence of religion and race, twinned, is fully appreciated.

Wynter, »1492«, 16.

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Nothingness and Self Transformation: Kim Iryŏp, Tanabe Hajime, and Jacques Derrida on Relgious Practice Jin Y. Park I. Introduction What does a religious practice entail? How is it related to our understanding of the absolute being, the religious agent, and the role of religion in life? I hope to address these questions by examining the religious thoughts of two modern East Asian thinkers – Kim Iryŏp (金一葉 1896–1971) and Tanabe Hajime (田辺 元 1885–1962) – and also engage their philosophy with Jacques Derrida’s discussion on religion. In that context, I will pay attention to the role of nothingness as religious practice.1 Nothingness is a major concept in the religious and philosophical discourse of East Asia. Twentieth-century East Asian religious thinkers fully utilized the tradition of nothingness in their discussion of religious practice, asking questions related to what it means to think about nothing and even practice it. Furthermore, nothingness is one of the most contentious philosophical topics in both the East and the West.Why are there such differences in approaching the idea of nothingness between the East and the West? By exploring Iryŏp’s and Tanabe’s use of nothingness and further engaging with Jacques Derrida’s discussion of religion in that context, I will consider the different faces of nothingness that appear in the act of religion.

II. Nothingness as Root of Existence and Religious Practice How does the self overcome the identity imposed on it by society? How does the self become reconciled with the identity prescribed by the conditions of human existence? A search for one’s true self is one of the motivations for religious practice. Self-identity, however, is neither fixed nor one-dimensional; if we are willing to open up ourselves to the various possibilities that contribute to the construction of self-identity, we come A portion of this paper will appear in J.Y. Park, »Religion beyond the Limits of Reason: Inoue Enryo, Kim Iryŏp, and Tanabe Hajime on Philosophy of Religion«, in Reconfiguring the Philosophy of Religion, ed. J. Kanaris (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). 1

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to realize that the self is rather more unstable than stable, more changeable than fixed. Admitting the changeable nature of the self inevitably generates insecurity and anxiety, but it does not necessarily have to lead to a pessimistic view of life. One contribution of Buddhist teaching to our understanding of the self and life is the idea that opening up the boundaries of the seemingly permanent self and the firm ground of existence can lead us to a broader and more positive view of life and the self.What is not frequently emphasized is that this is sometimes a counterintuitive argument, and actually practicing the teaching requires a constant and consistent effort on the part of the practitioner. Religion has been framed as an antidote to a negative power introduced through the uncertainty of the self. East Asian forms of religion do not deny religion’s contribution to the betterment of the self. What distinguishes East Asian forms of religious practice from their Western counterparts, however, is the way that East Asian religions see the self as managing itself. One question in this context is whether the self submits to the existing identity or refuses it in the effort to overcome its imposed limits. One example of this is related to gender identity. For many people, gender plays a significant role in the construction of the self ’s identity, and gender is also frequently considered to be an element that a woman needs to go beyond in order to discover her true self. As a woman living in Confucian Korean society, Kim Iryŏp took her gendered identity as a paradigmatic condition that constrained her existence as a free being.2 After several years of engagement with the Korean women’s movement in the 1920s, Iryŏp realized that gendered identity was a social construction, but that challenging the social norms of her patriarchal society was not sufficient for her to secure her freedom. Iryŏp came to consider societal systems and socially constructed identities as revealing only a part of the conundrum that human beings face in searching for their true identities and freedom. She argued that, in order to achieve absolute freedom (which she claimed to be an inborn right of all beings), one needed to look deeper into the existential condition. Iryŏp’s engagement with Buddhism occurred exactly at this juncture. Through Buddhist practice, Iryŏp’s social self gave way to a religious worldview in which she explored the existential dimensions of Buddhism. The nonsubstantialist mode of thinking in Buddhism enabled Iryŏp to reconfigure her identity beyond the one given to her by society based on her gender. Her journey, moreover, offers us an occasion For discussions of Kim Iryŏp’s life and thought, see J.Y. Park, trans. Reflections of a Zen Buddhist Nun: Essays by Zen Master Kim Iryp (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai`i Press, 2014); Idem, Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryŏp (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017). 2

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to uncover different interpretations of some of the perennial issues in the traditional philosophy of religion, including God, Buddha, and the meaning of religion. At the core of Iryŏp’s vision of the self lies her idea of »nothingness« or the »root of nothingness« as the ground of existence.Though not explicitly articulated in her writings, her criticism of patriarchal society and gendered identity based itself on the same reasoning as her critique of Christianity. Iryŏp argued that dualism sustained Christianity, since the creator and created, good and evil, and Heaven and Hell are irreconcilable opposites in the Christian worldview. However, Iryŏp held that binary opposites and the accompanying value judgments arise when the oneness of life is understood in fragments. In this argument, the oneness of the world appears in the phenomenal world through various binary formats, of which examples like birth and death, arising and ceasing, and day and night are all too familiar to us. However, from Iryŏp’s Buddhist perspective, they are not mutually exclusive, as they appear to be in the phenomenal world. Their existence is made possible through mutual influence. Light and darkness are different, but darkness cannot exist without light. Black and white are not the same, but they mutually contribute to each other’s existence. Presence and absence are opposite concepts, but without presence, the idea of absence cannot exist. Nominal existence and their names are understood here as functional, and so are the independent identities of each being. Buddhist non-dualism explains that each being exists independently on the phenomenal level, but when one looks into how that independence is achieved, one should realize that innumerable elements that contribute to the construction of one’s identity lie behind phenomenal independence. Hence, one’s claim for self-sufficiency has only limited meaning. Because the contributions of the others are innumerable and occur through infinite chain relationships, Buddhism identifies the nature of things as »emptiness« (śūnyatā 空), and another name for this indefinable nature of the true identity of the self is nothingness. From a common-sense perspective, nothingness is the opposite of being. And from a modern continental European perspective, nothingness is the lack of being and thus cannot have positive implications. The first generation of European Buddhist scholars understood Buddhist nothingness as a symptom of the Buddhist negation of being and therefore evaluated Buddhism as a pessimistic religion. Nietzsche took the same position and thought that Buddhist nothingness negated life. Hegel understood Buddhist nothingness as evidence that the religion denied the freedom of its

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practitioners and therefore belonged to a primitive stage in the evolution of religion. 3 Buddhism takes a position opposite to the European understanding of the relationship between being and nothingness. From a Buddhist perspective, being by nature is bound. Both physically and conceptually, a being cannot distinguish itself from others without boundaries. An individual’s physical shape, which is separate from the physical realities of others, constructs his or her identity. The color of my hair (black) is recognized as my color, in distinction from silver, brown, red, or blonde. My ethnicity as Asian is a concept that is bound by its difference from other ethnicities like African or Caucasian. Since my existence is a combination of all of these factors – my physical shape, colors, ethnicity, history, memories, the oxygen I breath, the coffee I drank this morning, and the sandwich I had for lunch – my being is in fact empty or nothing. In this context, nothingness does not entail a lack of being, but instead an openness of being.When nothingness is understood as a lack of being, as the Western philosophical tradition has held for long time, being and nothing are actually just two sides of one coin. Just as Heidegger examined in his answer to the Parmenidean question, »Why are there beings and not nothing?«, however, nothingness is not any thing or being. A being that is understood through binary logic is an isolated and fragmented entity, one whose capacity is limited because of the boundaries created in constructing an independent identity. Iryŏp understood this viewpoint as the fundamental source of constraints on an individual’s freedom. Gender identity and the accompanying discrimination that she was subject to as a woman in a Confucian patriarchal society are a good example of the limitations of a dualistic worldview. Men, women, and transgender people all constitute a society. No gender has privilege over another if we are to look at each individual from the foundation of existence, which Iryŏp calls nothingness. Being men, women, or transgender are markers that distinguish one person from another and not markers for hierarchical values or privilege. The importance of nothingness for religious practice lies here. Nothingness is a name for non-foundation. Without a foundation, the self ’s assertion of self-sufficiency and justification of self-righteousness lose their grounds. Without justification for the rightness of its actions, the self cannot claim infallibility. Iryŏp argued that being aware of the vulnerability of the self ’s judgments should lead the self to a constant self-deconstruction. Traditional Zen Buddhism calls this awareness of a being’s fallibility For a discussion of Hegel’s take on Buddhism in his philosophy of religions, for example, see J.Y. Park, Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan, and the Possibility of Postmodern Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 31–46. 3

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the moment of great doubt. The doubt, in this case, is not a pessimistic withdrawal from the self ’s certitude as an existential agent. Rather, the doubt that occurs through the self ’s embracing of nothingness as the root of existence is a force that enables the self to constantly reflect upon the possibility of authentic existence. The religious function of nothingness is more practical than mysterious or metaphysical, as some might assume. Rejecting a fixed identity incurs insecurity within the religious practitioner, and existential insecurity is a starting point for religious practice. In the traditional understanding of religious practice, the practitioner’s existential anxiety leads said practitioner to search for a greater power to which to submit this anxiety and thus earn security. The greater power, in this case, is usually identified as a being whose ontological standing is absolutely distinguished from that of the religious practitioner, as in the case of the creator and the created. Iryŏp located »nothingness« in the place that is traditionally occupied by the being of higher ontological status. Nothing is not any being, and it thus cannot be understood by any level of ontological standing. Nothingness as the ground of being releases the division between the religious practitioner and the object of religion from their ontological bindings and gives the practitioner the responsibility to regain his or her own real identity. Contrary to the nihilistic Western understanding of nothingness as the absence of being, nothingness in this case charges the religious practitioner with the power to move forward in search of an authentic self. Iryŏp called the self that is rediscovered through the practice of nothingness the great self (taea 大我) as opposed to the small self (soa, 小我), i.e., the self that is constrained by the fixed identity of daily existence. The small self sees the developments of events from a limited perspective and through the momentary benefits or losses that are incurred; therefore, it understands each event as final. Since the subject has only limited or no power to change the direction of the event that is currently developing, the state of one’s current affairs can create unbearable suffering for the subject, who feels helpless to handle his or her own life. The capacity to avoid fully submitting oneself to the current state of one’s life and to maintain the dignity of existence comes from a realization that things do not exist in isolation. That is, what we experience at the moment is not a whole picture of our lives, but rather just a fragment. This is so because, from the Buddhist worldview, existence is always a combination of different factors that have diverse effects on upcoming events. Sensitivity to the multi-layered implication of each event should caution the subject’s every movement. Happy events are not occasions to be arrogant to others who are less fortunate, and painful events should not cause one to succumb to a feeling of helplessness and lack of control. Taken to

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its extremes, this view supports the teaching that the good does not have a fixed form as goodness, nor does evil exist as external reality. For Iryŏp, Buddhist practice – and in that sense, religious practice in general – was a way to embrace this totality of existence so that a subject could recover full capacity and freedom.The recovery of one’s full capacity requires re-envisioning the value structure that we are familiar with in our society. For Iryŏp, the individual who had fully recovered total capacity was called the Buddha.The Buddha, for Iryŏp, was not the exemplification of pure goodness; instead, it was the source of both good and evil. After questioning the notion of God during her childhood years as a Christian, she re-envisioned God as the being who, like the Buddha, had completely and freely exercised a being’s full capacity. For Iryŏp, the gap between God or the Buddha and individual people or unenlightened, sentient beings did not lie in their ontological differences; instead, she construed God or the Buddha as the one who was fully aware of and fully exercising their capacity, which Iryŏp identified as »creativity«. For Iryŏp, nothingness was the root of existence, and creativity was its function. God was not a being completely separated from humans, nor did Iryŏp think that God should be the object of worship. Instead, she framed God or the Buddha as evidence that beings are whole in their ultimate sense. She also purported that the purpose of religion was to teach the wholeness of each being so that all individuals could see their entire capacities instead of viewing themselves through fragments.The idea that God is a creator means that God embodies the creativity with which each one of us is born.The great self is a free being, refusing to limit its existence, which is the self constrained by the desires of daily existence. Iryŏp also identified nothingness as the root of existence (無的뿌리) as »one (하나)«, not in the context of the numbers one, two, three, and so on, but in the sense that no other numbers exist but this »one«. Iryŏp explained that the »one« should be one without two, three, and so on because once we begin to say »one« as part of a series of numbering, we begin to make distinctions between »me« and »you«, and further divisions will occur. Understanding the division between »me« and others cannot be a problem as is, but this division also comes with a hierarchical value judgment, and value judgments postulate the foundation of the values upon which those judgments are made. Nothingness is not any single thing or being; instead, it only has a nominal function that deconstructs an effort to ground the being. Jay Garfield explains this through the concept of the paradox and Graham Priest contradiction.4 See J. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); G. Priest, One: Being an Investigation into the Unity 4

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The functions of nothingness in self-reflection as part of religious practice take a more radical form in Tanabe Hajime’s interpretation of nothingness.

III. Nothingness, Self-Negation, and Religious Practice At the core of Tanabe’s philosophy of religion lies a question about the limits of reason. The philosophy of religion as a distinctive field in the Western philosophical tradition began with the confirmation of the function of reason. In the context of the East Asian intellectual tradition, the genres of »philosophy« and »religion« emerged only through the translations of Western-language documents in the mid-nineteenth century. This does not mean that what is represented by philosophy and religion did not exist in East Asia before the introduction of these vocabularies. The problems of transplanting Western expressions to the East Asian intellectual world through translated words are not insignificant. In this context, Korean scholar Yi Pyŏngt’ae asks why Nishi Amane (西周 1829–1897) created a new vocabulary for philosophy instead of using existing expressions such as »the study of principle« (Kor. ihak, 理學), »the study of the investigation of principles« (Kor. kungnijihak, 窮理之學), or »the investigation of things and the refining of knowledge« (Kor. kyŏngmul ch’iji, 格物致知).5 These expressions have their own problems, since they exclusively represent the neo-Confucian tradition out of the diverse Asian thought traditions, but the spirit of the question remains valid: the East Asian intellectual tradition should be visible and take a deserved role in the adaptation of the Western genre of philosophy and the creation of that genre’s name. Once the notions of philosophy and religion were introduced, East Asian thinkers began to struggle over how to define and categorize East Asian traditions according to the new categories. Inoue Enryō (井上円了1858– 1919), one of the first philosophers to deal with the definition of philosophy and religion in Japan, said that the question of whether Buddhism is a philosophy or a religion was a major issue that the Japanese thinkers faced at the time. Paek Sŏnguk (白性郁 1897–1981), a Korean Buddhist of Reality and of its Parts, Including the Singular Object which is Nothingness (NY: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5 Yi Pyŏngt’ae 이병태, »Han’guk ŭi ch’ŏlhak kwa Han’guk ch’ŏlhak ŭi hyŏndae« 한국의 ›철학‹ 과 한국철학의 ›현대‹ (Korean ›philosophy‹ and the ›modern‹ in Korean philosophy), in Han’uk ch’ŏlhak sasan yŏn’guhoe, ed. Ch’ŏŭm ingnŭn Han’guk hyŏndae ch’ŏlhak 처음 읽는 한국 현대 철학 (The first time reader of modern Korean philosophy) (Kyŏnggi, Korea: Tongnyŏk, 2015).

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philosopher, also took up the issue of identifying the nature of Buddhism in the context of the Western notions of philosophy and religion as one of his major tasks early in his career. This phenomenon tells us that the division of philosophy and religion is not natural in East Asian traditions or to East Asian thinkers. In engaging with the characteristics of philosophy and religion and their differences, Enryō wondered how philosophy, which is based on reason, can say anything about religion, which is about the unknowable.The skepticism that Enryō demonstrated in the enterprise of the philosophy of religion shows the limits of this project. The assertion that a certain human faculty can deal with issues related to religion was a motivation for the emergence of the field. Descartes claimed that it is a philosopher’s job, not a theologian’s, to prove the existence of God; and Hegel, in his vast work of lectures on the philosophy of religions, tried to outline the evolution of religions from Asian and primitive forms to what he considered to be the most mature form of religion, represented by Christianity. In these figures’ discussion of religion, religious phenomena were understood as being »homogeneous«, and no serious consideration was given to the idea that there might be different ways of envisioning the ultimate being, the individual’s relation to that ultimate being, and the very meaning of a religious agent. Hegel might have wanted to consider religious traditions other than the Christian one, but his lectures on the philosophy of religions fall far short of acknowledging different possibilities of understanding the features of religious phenomena in different religious traditions. When the classical topics in the philosophy of religion are considered by Asian thinkers in the context of Asian religious and philosophical traditions, the nature of the discussion changes. Doing philosophy in post-WWII Japan, Tanabe Hajime asks whether philosophers can do anything to remedy the failure to see through historical reality. Tanabe himself supported Japanese imperialism and militarism during the war years and painfully realized in the post-war era that he was wrong. Since Tanabe was not the only modern Japanese philosopher who supported militarism and imperialism, the issue is not limited to Tanabe’s personal failure. Philosophers were supposed to pursue truth, but many philosophers (including Tanabe himself) were blinded by historical reality during the war.6 For Tanabe, the historical reality was not only a problematic moment in Japanese history, but also evidence of the limits of human reason. Is philosophy possible after the failure of reason to see through Nationalism, militarism and imperialism that the Kyoto School thinkers were involved with have been explored by American scholars. See for example, J.W. Heisig and J.C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakening: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1996). 6

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reality? Tanabe found the answer to this question by creating what might be called a philosophy of religion or a philosophy that is informed by religious practice. Tanabe’s main philosophical training was in Western philosophy. He studied under Husserl and was tutored by Heidegger. Later in his life, however, he went through a form of conversion (tenkan 転換), during which time he became familiar with Shin Buddhism, a type of Pure Land Buddhism founded by Shinran (親鸞,1173–1263), which had unequivocal influence on his Philosophy as Metanoetics (懺悔道としての哲学 Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku). The religious scholar Jean Higgins characterizes Tanabe’s conversion experience as the realization of the following two aspects: »(1) the limits of the philosophical knowing; (2) the unlimitedness of the Absolute.«7 A conventional interpretation of Tanabe’s conversion could be as a movement from philosophical reasoning to religious faith. Tanabe, however, did not fully reject reason, nor is his Absolute related to the ultimate Being with a capital »B«. By incorporating Shin Buddhism’s notions of »self-power« (jiriki 自力), »Other-power« (tariki 他力), and »actionfaith-witness« (gyō-shin-shō 行真証) as well as the concept of repentance (zange 懺悔), among others, Tanabe re-conceptualizes his philosophy. Tanabe’s philosophy of metanoetics is not a conversion from philosophy to Shin Buddhism, but a rethinking of the act of religion through the mediation of Buddhism and his own experience and vice versa. Even though Tanabe employed Shin Buddhist ideas in his discussion in Philosophy as Metanoetics, he did not merely graft Pure Land Buddhist ideas onto his philosophy. Ueda Yoshifumi compares Tanabe’s and Shinran’s Pure Land Buddhist notions of repentance and points out that, in Tanabe’s works, repentance has a strong meaning of change, whereas for Shinran, the concept had more to do with »the sense of being humbled or being ashamed«.8 For Tanabe, transformation occurring as a result of repentance was important, since it renewed life; additionally, he argued that such renewal and transformation should be consistent efforts that the subject needs to uphold if reason is to function in the process of our philosophizing. It is important to note the role of nothingness in this context, since the above mentioned transformation takes place through the mediation of J. Higgins, »Conversion in Shinran and Tanabe: Undergone or Undertaken?« in Taitetsu Unno and J.W. Heisig, eds. The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1990), 150–160, 150. 8 Ueda Yoshifumi, »Tanabe’s Metanoetics and Shinran’s Thought«, in Taitetsu Unno and J.W. Heisig, eds. The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1990), 134–149, 135. 7

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nothingness. Nothingness, however, is no thing; how, then, does nothingness mediate anything? Shin Buddhism’s notion of Other-power fills this gap. For Tanabe, both philosophy and religion should be grounded within the realization that an individual is fallible and that the only way to save individuals from their fallible realities is through the »Other-power«. Tanabe argued that philosophy based on reason is a »philosophy of self-power«, and this philosophy of self-power inevitably faces its limitations because »the reason it presupposes as its basis is bound to fall into antinomies in the encounter with actual reality.«9 By completely submitting oneself to this Other-power, an individual will be reborn as a being whose limitations are constantly being tested by the Other-power. Philosophy is an activity of reason, but the claim of reason, for Tanabe, »amounts to no more than an ideal that can never be fulfilled completely so long as we maintain the position of self-power«.10 Only by completely submitting oneself to the Other-power, Tanabe argued, will philosophy overcome this impotence of reason and fulfill its role of exploring the absolute. Philosophy as an act of rational investigation cannot help but have limitations; after all, when reason performs a critical evaluation of the world, this activity is still performed within the domain of the subject. In other words, in order for reason to function as a human capacity that critically assesses reality, reason itself needs to be critically renewed. The critique of reason launched by Kant, for Tanabe, was not critical enough because it was performed within the realm of reason itself. Its logic was circular – reason assessing its own capacity. Tanabe argued that the only way for reason to perform its assigned function of critiquing reality was through the mediation of the Other-power. One might wonder how this submission to the Other-power can be qualified as the subject’s rational activity.The subject, in this case, must give itself up to the power of the other, and the act of philosophizing will become nothing more than being a servant to the Other-power. Tanabe describes this process of the self ’s submission to the Other-power as the »Great Nay« (大非). Nothingness, by definition, does not exist; it cannot have its own power other than negating the limits of beings. Absolute nothingness (zettai mu 絶対 無), therefore, is simply negation and cannot have an ontological status. By submitting oneself to this constant negation, the subject’s

H.Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, trans.Takeuchi Yoshinori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), lvi. 10 Ibid., 26. 9

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subjective position is constantly being reformulated. Nothingness is a name for the non-existence of foundation. In relation to this, Tanabe writes: Philosophy begins from a consciousness of the self in conformity with the autonomy of reason and from there extends, through the limitations and determinations of the world, to an awareness of the fact that the self exists through the mediation of absolute nothingness, which sets up a relationship of mutual transformation between world and self. Therefore, philosophy must be carried out in the faithwitness that the self is being-qua-nothingness, that is, being (rupa) as a manifestation of emptiness (sunyata) or absolute nothingness.11

Tanabe explained this process of the subject’s self-negation through its submission to the Other-power and its rebirth through the submission and reconstitution of the self with the notion of »metanoetics« (»repentance« or, in Japanese, zangedō 懺悔道). Metanoetics, by definition, is that which goes beyond the noetic experience. The cognitive process (noesis) through which one perceives the external object (noema) is, from Tanabe’s perspective, always undermined by human fallibility because the subject is a limited being. Rationality as a faculty of the subject cannot save the subject if that rationality remains within the realm of the subject’s consciousness and subjectivity. For Tanabe, therefore, making an absolute critique was only possible, not through consciousness or intellectual activities, but by going beyond reason and conscious, rational thinking. Challenging Kant’s position on religion and reason, Tanabe argued that, »Kant proposed a ›religion within the limits of reason alone‹, but in truth there can be no such religion. … ›rational religion‹ does not signify a faith based on reason but a faith mediated by reason. … ›rational faith‹ is a concept to be defined not by means of self-identical determination but by means of negative dialectical mediation. A rational faith must be transrational; it must be the negation of reason.«12 How does this subjugation of the self to the Other-power prevent the subject from being limited by inherent frailty? One way that traditional Zen Buddhism facilitates this complete emptying out of subjectivity is known as hwadu (話頭) meditation, in which Iryŏp was trained.13 Pure Land Buddhism, which Tanabe followed, takes an opposite approach in that it relies on the Other-power of Amita Buddha. By

H. Tanabe, Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku 懺悔道としての哲学 (Tōkyō : Iwanami Shoten, 2010), 22; Idem, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 17–18. 12 Tanabe, Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku, 55; Idem, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 50–51, emphasis original. 13 For a discussion of the mental revolution of Hwadu meditation, see J.Y. Park, »Zen Language in Our Time«. 11

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chanting the name »Amita Buddha«, practitioners go through the process of relieving their subjectivity. However, relying on the Other-power means that there is a risk of becoming dependent on it. In dealing with the apparent pitfall of the subject’s dependence on and idolization of the Other-power,Tanabe emphasizes the importance of »self-reflection«. Tanabe’s definition of »self-reflection« was different from his definition of rational thinking, which he criticized. Selfreflection, in this case, is based not on »construction«, but on the power of »nay«, which is the negation that deconstructs the self ’s constructive power. In Tanabe’s paradigm, reason must break down in order to function, and that breakdown should happen due to the absolute transformative power of absolute nothingness.14 Here, we can note the importance of thinking through »nothing« instead of »being« in the East Asian religiophilosophical tradition. Iryŏp postulated the grounds of being as nothingness; for her, moreover, becoming awakened to this root called nothingness was a path to freedom. Tanabe claimed that the subject’s submission to nothingness enables him or her to overcome the subject’s fallibility and be reborn as a rational being. Tanabe claimed that Heidegger’s discussion of nothing was actually a discussion of being, since nothing is not something that can be discussed either through »ontic« or »ontological« means. For that reason, nothing cannot have its own boundaries, as a being does.The identity with which a being is defined is that being’s way of declaring what distinguishes it from other beings. However, for precisely that reason, the price of having an identity is the subject’s freedom because it creates boundaries to distinguish that subject from others. The subject as a non-being or as nothingness is an »emptied being« (kū-u 空有).15 Tanabe calls this emptied-out-subject »existence as upāya« (skillful means; hōben teki sonzai, 方便的存在).16 Upāya (方便), or skillful means, is a Buddhist concept that explains phenomena and their relation to noumena.17 The idea of a being as upāya is an absolute demand for self-surrender, which Tanabe believed was the only way that the subject could overcome the limits of being; he construed its most dangerous

Tanabe, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 39. Ibid., 42. 16 Ibid., 24. 17 For a discussion of the upāya in the Lotus Sūtra, chapters 2. I have discussed in other place the issue of whether upāya is truth as it is or is a means to know truth. See J.Y. Park, »A Huayanist Reading of the Lotus Sūtra: The Case of Li Tongxuan«. 14 15

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activation, furthermore, as the »radical evil«, that is, »the self-assertion and rebellion of the relative vis-à-vis the absolute«.18 Upāya or skillful means indicates that a being is not a fixed entity, but is instead capable of constantly transforming itself. Nothingness makes the transformation of the subject possible, and Tanabe calls this an act of metanoetics. Tanabe also calls this »grace« and »compassion«. Nothingness, which the subject experiences through »repentance« or »metanoesis«, means that the subject completely surrenders itself obediently to the Other-power. Through this self-negation, the subject rejects the pitfalls of subjectivity and the limits of reason that arise from individuality. Tanabe explains the entire process of metanoetics through the three stages of »action-faith-witness« (gyōshinshō 行信證), and he defines action as follows: When I speak of ›action‹, I do not mean that the being (or substratum) of the self changes its qualities, but that being is converted into nonbeing and nonbeing into being, that the very character of being itself is transformed in the process. In other words, action means that absolute nothingness emerges to work in such a way that being is converted into nothingness and nothingness into being.19

For Tanabe, action means a process of the relative encountering the absolute, and this absolute is characterized as nothingness. The relative transforms itself through the process of encountering nothingness. In this sense, Tanabe’s notion of action shows the dimension in which philosophical ideas are actively realized through what we conventionally called religious practice. This religio-philosophical practice is further paired with faith in the sense that one needs to believe in the efficacy of the process, and this action-faith should be confirmed through the individual’s own experience; in other words, the embodiment of this process is one’s life, which Tanabe calls »witness«. Witnessing, in this case, means viewing the transformation of the self without confirming the identity of the transcendental. Jacques Derrida’s discussion of prayer and religious practice shares the spirit of Tanabe’s vision of nothingness as the absolute and the meaning of religious practice.

IV. Deconstruction and religious practice: To whom do I pray? In discussing the act of religion, Jacques Derrida once asked, »To whom am I praying? Whom am I addressing? Who is God?«20 Prayer is a basic Tanabe, Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku, 27; Idem, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 23. Tanabe, Zangedō to shite no tetsugaku, 82; Idem, Philosophy as Metanoetics, 74 20 J. Derrida, »Epochē and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida«, in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, ed.Y. Sherwood and K. Hart (Routledge, 2004), 27–50, 18 19

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activity of a religious life, and we assume, when we pray, that we know the object of our prayers. If not, why would we pray? The object of prayer has been identified with the absolute being, be that God, the Buddha, Allah, or another. Against such an assumption, Derrida states that, in order for a prayer to be a prayer, we should hold exactly the opposite of such certainty toward the object of our prayer. Derrida further says that prayer requires epoché, that is, »suspension of certainty, not of belief«.21 When we pray, who do we expect to answer our prayers? Derrida states: »If I knew or were simply expecting answer [to my prayer], that would be the end of prayer.«22 A prayer works as a prayer only when any calculations or expectations of the results of that prayer are completely suspended. If we can calculate the results of our prayer, it is not a prayer: it is a transaction. This is so because, by knowing exactly to whom we pray and how our prayer will be answered, we put ourselves on equal footing with the object of our prayer. The point, for Derrida, is not so much that God or a transcendent being is something beyond human capacity. Instead, Derrida is claiming that the act of religion is not something that we can perform with certitude. Religion and spirituality are a form of engagement with existence and life, but that engagement remains a story, not a part of logos. In his seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign (La bête et le souverain, 2003), Derrida offers another incident that inspires us to think about the meaning of prayer. Doing a close reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) in this seminar, Derrida submits that we can read Robinson Crusoe as a book on prayer or about »an experience of learning how to pray«.23 Derrida leads us to ask, what is a prayer? Is the existence of God a necessary condition for prayer? Does the existence of God precede the concept of God? When Robinson Crusoe arrives on a deserted island after a shipwreck, he finds himself all alone, and all he sees is the ocean. After he experiences an earthquake, Robinson Crusoe’s worst fear, Derrida tells us, is to be »swallowed alive« or »buried alive«. There is a lot to be said existentially, socially, and politically about this fear, but for our discussion, let us skip to the point where Derrida pays attention to Robinson Crusoe’s prayer. Horrified with the idea of being buried alive, Robinson Crusoe shouts and cries out loud. According to Derrida, this cry, which comes from terror at the possibility of being swallowed alive by beasts or the earth or the ocean, represents the moment when a human or a finite being tries to 30. Derrida, »Epochē and Faith«, 30. Ibid., 31. 23 Derrida, La bête et le souverain, vol. II (2002–2003) (Paris: Édition Galiée, 2010), 123. 21 22

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reach out beyond its own existence. Robinson murmurs, »Lord ha’ mercy upon me«, but this statement is not related to any transcendental being; it is instead the cry of a finite being in facing its own demise. Derrida calls this »a prayer before prayer«. He states: It is . . . the terror of being buried alive that inspires his first prayer, in truth a still irreligious prayer, a prayer before prayer, the precursory plaintive breath of a distress call which, during the earthquake that threatens to bury him alive, is not yet truly and religiously addressed to God, to the Other as God: It is a cry that is almost automatic, irrepressible, machinelike, mechanical, like a mainspring calling for help from the depths of panic and absolute terror.24

Two months later, Robinson Crusoe becomes ill and tries to pray again. By this time, he has realized that his previous prayers were not done properly and attempts a prayer as described in the Bible; this, Derrida tells us, is Robinson Crusoe’s first real prayer. In this manner, Robinson Crusoe learns or re-learns how to pray. Derrida’s point, however, is not that Robinson finally finds the proper way of praying as written in the scripture. Instead, I want to follow Derrida’s argument by bringing our attention to the prayer before prayer that Robinson offers at the moment of his deepest existential crisis. The existential foundation of prayer gives way to the institutionalized form once Robinson gradually begins to remember the type of prayer that he practiced during his pre-desert island religious life. Derrida compares Robinson’s island to a monastery or a place for a religious retreat, in which the social and textual influence of formalized religion on one’s religious practice is suspended. On this secluded island, Robinson learns and relearns how to practice religion without relying on the institutionalized form of religion, whose foundation Derrida locates in the fundamental terror of human existence. God, for Derrida, »could not be the omnipotent first cause, the prime mover, absolute being, or absolute presence. God is not something or some being to which I could refer by using the word ›God‹.«25 So what/who is God? God, as Derrida states, is a name, a word. When we call God »God«, what does this name – this word – stand for? Derrida says, »To mention the word ›God‹ is in a certain way, already an act of faith.«26 But this act of faith, or belief in God, is not necessarily and should not be the same as having certitude about God’s form. For Derrida, then, God is another name for nothingness or an openness of being. This is a natural result of Derrida’s Ibid., 123; Idem, The Beast & the Sovereign, volume II., trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 77–78. 25 Derrida, »Epochē and Faith«, 37. 26 Ibid., 38. 24

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deconstructive thinking. Derrida performed his deconstruction by identifying binary opposites in our thinking while simultaneously revealing the inseparability of the two poles in those opposites. The traditional dualism of God the creator and the created becomes dogmatized in institutionalized religion. To deconstruct the position of God in the dualist paradigm does not have to amount to negating the existence of God, nor to claiming that the two occupy the same position, as in the case of Iryŏp’s Buddhism. Instead, the deconstruction of God opens up the reified version of God so that God, or the absolute being, can regain its original form beyond the limitations of linguistic and conceptual reification. Understanding the absolute or God occurs in the context of the subject’s perceptual boundaries. Caputo puts this well in his discussion of how Derrida deals with Levinas’ tout autre (wholly other): »What Derrida shows then is that the tout autre comes but it comes relative to a horizon of expectation which it shocks and sets back on its heels, instead of confirming and reinforcing this horizon in its complacency.«27 If the other is to be the absolute other, for Derrida, this other will be the impossible, in the sense that the other cannot exist beyond perceptual and linguistic boundaries. Derrida’s impossible, in this sense, functions in the same manner as »nothing« does in Iryŏp and Tanabe’s religious thoughts.28 Derrida’s discussion of prayer and God is also relevant to his discussion of messianism. Challenging the dogmatic understanding of messianism as religious eschatology, Derrida suggests that messianism is possible only as »messianicity without messianism« or messianism without messiah.29 The idea of messianism without messiah or of messianicity without messianism sustains the human belief in a certain form of the future without taming that future with the human desire for certainty. Caputo describes Derrida’s philosophy of religion as »religion without religion«,30 in the sense that the ideology and dogma that provide a secure domain for religious discourse are deconstructed in Derrida’s approach to religion and spirituality while the human need to explore the religious domain remains, but without any J.D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). 28 Brian Schroeder discusses the other power in Levinas and Tanabe in B. Schroeder, »Other-Power and Absolute Passivity in Tanabe and Levinas«, in Japanese and Continental Philosophy : Conversations with the Kyoto School, Studies in Continental Thought, ed. B.W. Davis et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 193–211. 29 J. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge), 1994. 30 See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. 27

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confirmation through a transcendental reality or final resolution.31 In this sense, Derrida ultimately shares the spirit of Iryŏp’s idea of nothingness as the root of existence and Tanabe’s nothingness as the foundationless foundation for self-transformation.

V. Nothingness and Religious Practice From its inception, the philosophy of religion attempted, as a discipline, to offer a rational and philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon of religion. The thinkers that we examined in this chapter add different dimensions to the philosophy of religion and the relationship between philosophy and religion. The Western philosophical tradition has a history of dividing philosophy and religion, with the former seen as based on reason and logic and the latter believed to be based on faith. The thinkers whom we discussed in this article show that philosophizing itself also contains a religious dimension, when we consider religion as the human act of directly engaging with daily practice while making an effort to go beyond the limits of the finite, which is the existential condition of human beings. The philosophy of nothingness challenges the reified vision of the Absolute and revives the Absolute as constantly engaging with reality and thus having the ability to help a subject transcend the limits of subjectivity. Questions remain. Would nothingness be sufficient to induce individuals to channel their negative intentions and further remedy existing problems? Are there specific social and historical conditions in which the nothingness approach can be more effective than at other times in history? The scholar of political philosophy Fred Dallmayr claimed that nothingness should be the foundation of democracy.32 Democracy, by definition, means a political system that is ruled by the people. The people, however, are not a fixed entity. In order for democracy to represent the diverse demographic realities, its ground should not be the fixed concept of being/Being; instead, it should be nothingness, which is open to all of the diverse possibilities that constitute our existence. Dallmayr’s application of nothingness to democracy reflects Iryŏp’s vision that nothingness is the There also exist criticism and worries that the religious turn in Derrida’s deconstruction risks bringing in the transcendental dimension to his philosophy against the original promise of deconstruction. (Bradley 2006) 32 F. Dallmayr, »Democracy as Creatio Continua: Whitehead, Tillich, Panikkar«, unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, November 20, 2015. 31

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groundless ground of being and also Tanabe’s view of nothingness as the Absolute, through which both Iryŏp and Tanabe envisioned a way to attain freedom. And this nothingness is comparable to the Derridean notion of democracy-to-come (démocratie-à-venir), in which democracy is understood through its constant and consistent transformation to meet the demands of the times and the people instead of being reified and stagnating. Seen from this perspective, nothingness is another name for practice through transformation; it demands the primacy of religion as living reality and challenges religion as an institution, ideology, or authority. Kim Iryŏp explained the transformation that takes place through nothingness as that from the »small I« to the »great I«. Tanabe emphasized death and rebirth through the mediation of nothingness. The self that is constantly being reborn through self-reflection facilitated by the other, nothingness, is the self that constantly tries to overcome the limits of being finite, its self-centered worldview, and understanding the world through its context. Both Iryŏp and Tanabe emphasized that this transformation should take place not through rational thinking, but through the individual’s capacity to release him or herself from self-imposed limitations. In order for nothingness to function as indicated by Iryŏp or Tanabe, a new understanding of nothingness is a first step. The antagonistic division between being and nothingness in the Western philosophical and religious tradition has a long history. The binary structure of being and nothingness with attached hierarchical values is a paradigmatic example of how dualistic postulation has promoted binary morality that damages rather than enriches the ecology of human existence.The dualisms of black and white, men and women, the West and the non-West, good and evil, and inside and outside all make contributions to creating a worldview that divides the self and others in a negative way.The logic of exclusion that is at the bottom of this dualistic vision contributes to a hierarchical worldview. A fresh look at nothingness, then, offers us a different way to conceive religious practice: as a practice that is not based on exclusion and fixed rules, but instead constantly deconstructs the self ’s tendency to close itself up. The ultimate being, then, is not one who champions any specific quality, whether it be considered positive or negative in the world of rational moral deliberation, but one who is aware of the inevitable polarization of things and beings at the phenomenal level and the ultimate emptiness and lack of substance behind this phenomenon. Religion is the very act of being awakened to this reality of existence. Likewise, Derrida discusses religion by deconstructing the established concepts of prayer, God, and the eschatological worldview. In this context, Derrida’s philosophy of religion takes a similar form to Iryŏp’s and Tanabe’s use of nothingness.

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East Asian thinkers’ challenge to rational thinking and reason, especially in connection with the »act« of religion, proposes that both philosophy and religion need to go beyond the limits of reason. This »beyond«, however, does not indicate a return to the power of a transcendental being; rather, it is envisioned as a way to reach a state in which the subject can be released from the limits of subjectivity via constant self-renewal through nothingness, which facilitates the self ’s experience of releasing subjective perspectives.

Whether Religion Is a Proper Subject of Study Robert Cummings Neville I. Introduction The question whether religion is a proper subject of study, raised by some postmodern scholars, needs to be asked in an honest and helpful way. To bemoan the fact that the category »religion« has been misconceived and is the product of bias is not particularly helpful because one can always improve the conception and control for the bias. If we know what is wrong with some conception or other of religion, we already know something about how to fix it. What would be helpful is to ask whether there is some subject matter plausibly going by the name »religion« that is worth studying. I believe there is and will argue the case here. The subject matter helpfully labeled »religion« is human symbolic engagements of ultimate realities in cognitive, existential, and practical ways. There have been astonishingly diverse ways of symbolizing ultimate realities, in many cultures, and through thousands of years of human history. The ways of engagement have involved many kinds of conditions: traditions, institutions, social arrangements, as well as interior personal journeys of many sorts. Conditions such as these that have gone into human symbolic engagements of ultimate realities are varied, and when they come together to achieve real engagements of ultimacy, they are religious. When those conditions do not come together in real engagements of ultimacy, they are not religious. Many such conditions have lives of their own that might not be related always to engaging ultimacy. The study of religion is the study of these factors insofar as they are involved in the human engagement of ultimacy. Everything in the previous paragraph is problematic, and part of the business of philosophy of religion is to address the problems. The primary meaning of »philosophy of religion«, I think, is having a philosophy with something important to say about religion (among other things). In this sense, Kant, Hume, Hegel, James, and Whitehead are paradigmatic philosophers of religion, although religion is not their only or even primary topic. It is a good thing to have a whole philosophy in dealing with religion. Obviously, one needs a metaphysics of ultimate reality. Also one needs an epistemology that makes sense of symbolic engagement. Given the diver-

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sity of ways people have engaged ultimate realities, one needs a philosophy that is erudite in and accountable to a cross-cultural comparative public for philosophy and religion. I have such a philosophy and will indicate some of its elements here.1 Many of the postmodern critics of the idea of religion, however, are also critical of philosophy in this systematic sense, and that criticism needs to be addressed briefly.2 I confess that if I limited myself to the philosophical tools of most »postmodern discourse«, namely, reacting to an ongoing Eurocentric »conversation«, supplemented by »genealogical« studies of concepts filtered through somewhat narrow lenses of »theory«, I too would be tempted to give up on the concept of »religion«. So the main part of my dialogue with the critics of the concept of religion as a subject for study will be to argue that their philosophical outlook is too narrow and that there are more fruitful alternatives.

II. Postmodernism and Real Reference: A Pragmatic Alternative A very important limitation to the philosophical resources of the postmodern critique of the concept of religion is its difficulty with reference. The Kant-Heidegger line of thinking responded to Cartesian dualism and the problems of representative knowledge by saying that the key to understanding the world (including religion) lies in the ways the human subject experiences the world.We do not know things in themselves, as Kant would say, but only our experiences of things. This philosophical line is immensely complicated but it leads naturally to the claim that what we know are our subjective constructions. Ideas in experience do not refer to what they seem to refer to but to other ideas in experiences. This develops strongly The entire bibliography can be found on my website, robertcummingsneville.com. The most relevant systematic presentations of the philosophy for the question whether »religion« is a proper subject of study are the Axiology of Thinking trilogy: R.C. Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981); Idem, Recovery of the Measure (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989); and Idem, Normative Cultures (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); and the Philosophical Theology trilogy: Idem, Ultimates (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013); Idem, Existence (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014); and Idem, Religion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015). 2 A much more detailed study of the critical limits of postmodern thought is in R.C. Neville, The Highroad around Modernism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), especially chapters five and six; chapter six extensively defends largescale metaphysical philosophy against postmodern criticisms. 1

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in postmodernism to the view that there is no »transcendental signified«, as Derrida would say, only more signs, a tissue of signifieds and signifiers.3 Moreover, the general postmodern attack on metaphysics as necessarily a »metaphysics of presence« stems from its assumption that metaphysical categories have meaning only as referring to what is present to consciousness. One result of this is that many postmodernists would say that my phrase, »human symbolic engagement of ultimate realities«, can only mean the engagement of more humanly constructed symbols for the realities, not the realities themselves. This settles postmodernism in the camp of the social sciences that for reasons of Kantian-style objectivity want to bracket out all inquiries into the real references of symbols of ultimacy and deal only with social constructions, a point to which I shall return below. Thus most postmodernists would understand the proposition, that the subject of religion is human symbolic engagement of ultimate realities, to mean only that people engage with their symbols of ultimate reality, not with ultimate realities themselves. In fact, it would be hard for many postmodernists to believe that I could possibly mean ultimate realities instead of symbols of ultimate realities in my delineation of a subject matter for religion. They assume that the symbols are all we could possibly be talking about. But this certainly is not what religious people think when they think they are engaging something ultimate. When an Advaita Vedantin seeks release or moksha in the realization of identity with Brahman, when a Confucian seeks Principle (li) in the heart and the Ten Thousand Things in order to act morally, when a Muslim prays submission to Allah, they think they are engaging the real thing. Moreover, because those engagements are often difficult and experience shows one can get them wrong, these people think there is the relevant ultimate reality to be wrong about. Spiritual frustration and a bitter sense of failure or misappropriation are common testimonies to the reality of ultimate realities that are hard to engage well. Religious people do not think they are merely playing with symbols but that the symbolic »play« is the activity of attempting to engage something ultimately real. Of course, all engagement is mediated by socially constructed signs. In 1868, long before Heidegger and Derrida, Charles Sanders Peirce showed J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.Ch. Spivak (Baltimore, MD:The Johns Hopkins Press, 1974), Part I, »Writing before the Letter«. See especially Derrida’s discussion of Charles S. Peirce on 48–52. Eric Perl has a superb discussion of Derrida’s notion of the transcendental signified in reference to Neoplatonic negative theology in E. Perl, »Signifying Nothing: Being as Sign in Neoplatonism and Derrida«, in Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought: Part Two, ed. R.B. Harris, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 125–151. 3

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that there are no intuitions in the Cartesian consciousness sense, only interpretations mediated by signs.4 Part of the study of religion is to understand how the signs and networks of symbols work. Schleiermacher showed how imperative it is to interpret ancient texts about religious experience in the terms of the mixed ancient cultures. Gadamer has thematized the complexities of hermeneutical circles bringing together different life-worlds. Eliade has shown that many important religious symbols mean things quite different from what they appear to mean on the surface. With all these complexities borne in mind, and willingly accepted by generally sophisticated religious people, religious people still take those signs to be mediating guides for engaging their ultimate objects. And they would expect the study of religion to include inquiry into whether their symbols of the ultimate, used in the liturgical, existential, and reflective ways they do, get it right about what’s ultimate and how to live in face of ultimacy. The common postmodern avoidance of discussions of ultimate realities does not come from any philosophical, metaphysical, moral, scientific or other empirical inquiry into whether there are ultimate realities and what they might be. It comes rather from a philosophical epistemology that denies real reference in favor of an infinite play of signs. As Derrida would put it, there is no »transcendental signified«, not because none can be found, but because that is not the way signs work. The signifier-signified relation allows only for the interpretation of other signs. This is an impoverished conception of semiotics and extremely counter-intuitive.The fact that »father« is a socially constructed sign, the meaning of which can be expressed in other signs within the semiotic code, does not mean that reference is only to those other signs within the code. There are real fathers and they are often what is referred to when people speak of their fathers. There is, of course, a philosophical alternative even within the Western tradition to the epistemology that has such difficulty with reference, namely, the tradition of American pragmatism invented by Peirce and developed by William James and John Dewey. This tradition has been richly fleshed out in reference to religion by scholars such as Michael Raposa, Nancy Frankenberry, Donald Crosby, Wesley Wildman, Robert Corrington, and Nathaniel Barrett. Here is not the place to explain pragmatism.5 The basic See Peirce’s two essays, Ch.S. Peirce, »Questions concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man«, and Idem, »Some Consequences of Four Incapacities«, frequently anthologized, but see The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings:Volume I (18671893), ed. N. Houser and Ch. Kloesel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), chapters 2 and 3. 5 On why postmodernism and pragmatism seem to pass like ships in the night, see R.C. Neville, »Self-Reliance and the Portability of Pragmatism«, in American Journal of 4

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point regarding reference can be stated easily, however. All experience is to be understood as interpretive and thus to involve signs. But the model is not using the signs of one culture to interpret those of another, as in the European tradition of hermeneutics. The model is that of the interpreter engaging a natural environment by means of the signs in the whole semiotic system at hand. When it comes to engaging ultimate realities, those ultimate realities are parts of the environment, its ultimate conditions and the boundary conditions for human life.They include the ontological contingency of the environment and the ultimacy of obligation, of the quest for wholeness, of otherness in the field of life, and of questions of existential meaning.6 As Dewey would put it, the root metaphor for interpretive experience is an organism interacting with its environment. Nathanial Barrett has rephrased this in terms of the recent cognitive science.7 With a pragmatic theory of interpretation in hand, it is quite natural to ask about ultimate realities and how they are best referred to in various purposes of engagement. If postmodernists want to reassert their resistance to real reference to ultimate realities, they need to deal seriously with the pragmatic alternative to their theory of signification. One difficulty with the postmodern criticism of the category of »religion« is that it stems from too narrow a public of senses of philosophy, as I have argued. Another difficulty is that it is uncomfortable with the direct albeit symbolically mediated reference to ultimate realities that seems so common in religions; that kind of reference can be handled with sophistication by pragmatism, an alternative to the Kant-Heidegger line that sometimes ends up saying all realities are nothing but social constructions. When those difficulties are surmounted, we can look again at the category of religion with more evenhanded curiosity.

III. A Brief History of the Term A first step in surveying the meaning of religion is to look at the history of the category itself. »Religion« derives from the Latin religio. Cicero thought the word came from re-lego, where the lego meant »considering over again«. Lactantius, a third century Christian writer, followed by AuTheology and Philosophy, 35/2 (May 2014), 93–107. 6 See R.C. Neville, Ultimates, chapters 2 and 3, on the problem of reference and the pragmatic solution. 7 See for instance N. Barrett, »Skillful Engagement and the ›Effort after Value‹: An Axiological Theory of the Origins of Religion«, in The Evolution of Religion: Critical Perspective and New Direction, ed. F. Watts and L. Turner (2012).

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gustine, thought it came from re-ligo, where the ligo meant »binding together«. Its main meaning in the ancient Roman world was the scrupulous, conscientious, strict observance of the services owed to the gods or to God. It meant taking the cults and their observance seriously, or as we might say »religiously«. Thus, the study of religion as the Romans might have practiced it would be the study of the nature of cults worshipping or serving the gods, and how people are or should be deeply invested in that. For Thomas Aquinas, religio is the duty owed to God: »Religio is a virtue because it pays the debt of honor to God.«8 All people, he thought, origin­ ally have a natural knowledge of God and an impulse to worship and love God. But this natural inclination to religio is distorted by original sin, and hence needs to be supplemented by faith, which only Christians have, according to him. Thomas had a strong conception of the entire universe as created by God and as good. As such, the entire universe owes God respect and obedience, each element in its way. For human beings, this means practices of worship that acknowledge God as creator and obedience to the natural laws that can be discerned, in principle, by reason. He viewed the entire human race, with its many cultures, languages, and places, as »fallen«, so as to have only beclouded reason and in some instances misconceptions of the monotheistic God. But God, thought Thomas, had become incarnate in the world in Jesus so as to provide a revelation over and above fallen reason.This revelation allows for true worship and right living; the Church, for Thomas, was the community of people living according to the revelation.The other great religions Thomas knew were Judaism and Islam, both monotheistic and with respectable moral ideals; they did not acknowledge the revelation of the Christian God, however, and were worth debating on that point. His Summa theologiae was directed at the Christian heretics, the Cathars, who had abandoned monotheism for a kind of Manichaean dualism. Roger Johnson has traced the development of the idea of religion in European and American history from the time of Thomas.9 Raymond Lull, a younger contemporary of Thomas, wrote a dialogue between a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim, all representing their religions, or »sects« as he called them. Nicholas of Cusa, responding to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and attempting to understand the violence of one religion against another, developed a theory of world religions that applied not only to the monotheistic sects about which Lull wrote but also the Mongols (Tartars) and Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II 80, 2. See the extraordinarily helpful discussion of Thomas’s understanding of religion in R.A. Johnson, Peacemaking and Religious Violence, (Wipf and Stock, 2009), chapter 2. 9 See Johnson, Peacemaking and Religious Violence. 8

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the Chinese religions of the Yuan Dynasty, including Buddhism, described by Marco Polo. Johnson points out that, whereas it is common to ascribe the invention of »religion« to agnostic Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume, in fact the idea was much older.10 The postmodern thinker, Tomoko Masuzawa, follows the common but erroneous ascription in her The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism.The story she tells of the influence of European colonialism on the concept of religion, especially in the nineteenth century, is helpful for understanding the state of religious scholarship in the twentieth. But it should be understood as an historical development in the much older evolving understanding of religion and religions, not as the invention of the notion itself.

IV. What People Mean by »Religion« Before accepting the postmodern call to abandon the category of »religion«, it is appropriate and respectful to address what our contemporaries, at least those that present their ideas in public, mean by religion. For some people, religion means a spiritual path. For some people, religion means a community of practice and belief within which members live out a spiritual path. For some people, religion means a set of beliefs about ultimate things, whatever ultimacy is construed to be. For some people, religion means a tradition of beliefs and practices with a special vocabulary and a history of development and definition over against other traditions. For some people, religion means a rich evolving culture whose images and institutions prompt great literature, music, dance, architecture, and art. For some people, religions mean in-groups, often ethnically based, with markers of behavior, institutions, beliefs, and gut feelings of propriety and impropriety, distinguishing themselves from outgroups. For some people, religions mean cultural and institutional systems within a larger society that identify themselves in religious terms. For some people, religions mean political forces representing the beliefs, attitudes, and moral programs of such religiously identified social systems. For some people, religion means moral leadership for change in a larger society. For some people, religion means leadership in opposing change that would weaken a prized cultural and institutional system. For some people, especially in the media, religions mean denominationally named social groups that have political agendas and organized activities. Ibid., 113.

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For some people, religion means an interior, individual, search for meaning and fulfillment. Religion means an affair of the heart, whether this involves approaching God, achieving enlightenment, realizing identity with Brahman, entering into harmony with the Dao, or some other orientation to what is of ultimate concern. From this interior perspective, membership in religious groups, participation in religious movements, and cultural conditions and contributions are of secondary importance. For some people, religion means some kind of profound response to the depths of nature that constitutes a special piety. Religious naturalism is a broad category that encompasses different conceptions of nature but most religious naturalists find that their piety can exist without giving institutionalized religion even secondary importance. Many contemporary religious naturalists give great weight to the natural sciences in defining nature.11 For some people, religion is one of the great engines of civilization. The Axial Age religions in their various ways developed conceptions of the cosmos as a whole, of the fundamental sources of things being one or few and hence of the interrelatedness of the world, of the greater importance in certain circumstances of one’s humanity than of one’s tribal or kinship membership, of the recognition of all people as among one’s extended kin, of the need to be just and compassionate to all, not only those within one’s ingroup, and of the greater virtue of achieving peace than victory. The world’s civilizations are still trying to live into these high religious ideals which have been laid down on fractious ingroups of ethnic, tribal, and cultural factions. For some people, religion is a hugely mischievous force in a world struggling to survive with peace and prosperity because religion means loyalty to one’s ingroup. Religion fuels denominational wars among factions in Islam today as it did among Christian denominations in centuries past.The struggles about the effects of European colonialism are fashioned in religious terms pitting Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and African tribal religions against one another. Religious groups that feel threat See M.S. Hogue, The Promise of Religious Naturalism (Rowman and Littlfield Publishers, 2010), for a fine recent study of this movement. Robert S. Corrington’s »ecstatic naturalism« is perhaps the most systematic attempt to date to articulate a profound religious piety in relation to nature; but he does not take his description of nature from the sciences, rather from phenomenology. Wesley J. Wildman is a religious naturalist who does take his conception of nature mainly from the sciences but who also attends appreciatively to the institutional bases of religion; his »naturalism« comes from anti-supernaturalism and anti-supranaturalism; see W.J. Wildman, Science and Religious Anthropology (Rutledge, 2016). 11

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ened become fundamentalistic, exaggerating ingroup-outgroup boundary conflicts. Religions sometimes reject reason, scientific inquiry, and good counsel in favor of some inappropriate authority. Despite the veneer of universal compassion, many self-proclaimed religious people are bigoted, nasty, and profoundly disrespectful of people out of their ingroup, and this is what religion means to some people. For some people, religion is to be identified with popular folk expressions in festivals and local celebrations, in popular scientific views about supernatural beings, magical causal principles, and superstitious interpretations of the circumstances of life. For some people, those popular folk practices really are manifestations of much deeper and more sophisticated religious engagements.12 For some people religion is to be identified with the most sophisticated teachings of the great founders such as Confucius, the Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, and St. Paul, as interpreted in the great commentarial and theological traditions; for many of these people the folk expressions of religion are the compromises made when the great religious traditions are embodied in local folk cultures. »Some people« in the above examples of what religion means usually refers to particular perspectives on some aspect or role of religion, and a given individual can occupy many or perhaps all of the perspectives at some time or other. Religion means many more things than are mentioned above, of course, but all of these mentioned are recognizable meanings in common public and scholarly discourse. Even if we personally reject some of those meanings as illegitimate, mistaken, or reductive, we know what people are talking about when they use the word »religion« in any of these ways. What do the specialists say about religion?

V. Disciplinary Tunnels of Definition Recent attempts to define religion have been closely tied to the development of scientific specialties. Who would be surprised that a sociologist such as Emile Durkheim would define religion in terms of giving sacred legitimation to social structures that enhance group solidarity? Or that other kinds of sociologists would define religion as how people classify themselves as belonging to named religious groups (or »none of the above«)? Or that an anthropologist would define religion as a function of culture? Or that a psychologist would define religion as an illusion disguis See the extraordinary case for this perspective in R.A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth (Princeton, 2006). 12

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ing unacceptable murderous feelings against parents and elders? Or that an evolutionary biologist would define religion as the beliefs and practices that gave one’s ancestral group an adaptive advantage, or as a byproduct of some traits that provided adaptive advantage? Or that a cognitive scientist would define religion in terms of beliefs, such as about supernatural beings, that appear to be nearly universal in human mental development? Or that a social psychologist would define religion in terms of early-evolved attitudes and impulses that strengthen ones ingroup in competition with outgroups? Or that an historian would define religion in terms of the history of beliefs and practices identified with putative historical events such as the teachings of the Buddha, the subsequent division of his teachings into various schools, the dispersion of those schools into different geographical areas and cultures, and the development of all these through time? The list of disciplines and sub-disciplines studying religion and defining it in terms of their methodologies could go on and on. The reason for these disciplinary definitions of religion is that this is the way modern sciences lay claim to objectivity. Immanuel Kant argued that our claims to knowledge do not reach in any innocent way to things in themselves. Rather, our knowledge is about what we experience, as conditioned by or reduced to the structures of human experience. He meant this in a technical way that applied to the way he and his generation understood physics. But his lesson was generalized to mean that a subject matter such as religion could be studied by a discipline’s methods of data collection, theories for explanation, instruments of testing and analysis, and so forth, such that what the discipline says about the subject matter is a construction of that disciplinary study. Kant called these constructions »objective« in the sense that they are objects of knowledge rather than pure representations of the subject matter itself. We now understand that the scientific disciplines have their own histories, each with their own journals, their own apprenticeships in academic study and graduate schools, and their own standards for peer review and good taste, what musicians might call »performance traditions«. The disciplines evolve and subdivide into various schools, such as structuralism and post-structuralism in anthropology, and religion »looks different« to the different schools. Standing back, it seems that all or most of the sciences studying religion have something interesting to say about it. But each is reductive in ways that ignore or distort what the others say. Reductionism is a hot-button word. Reductionism is a good thing, the very stuff of scientific integrity, when the science remembers to say that what it says about the subject matter is only what the subject matter appears to be (»appears« is a good Kantian word) when »reduced« to the discipline’s theories, methods, and traditions of good scientific taste. The disciplines listed above do not say

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anything about religion as such but only about religion as reconstructed through their own disciplinary apparatus. The scientific claims about religion are valid to the extent those disciplines have justifiable methodologies, theories, and communities of good taste, and the claims change when the disciplinary apparatus changes as well as when new evidence appears within the frames of that apparatus. This is a lot to remember, however.The scientists within a discipline easily assume that they are presenting their arguments to others within that discipline and thus do not need always to say »subject to the limitations of our discipline’s apparatus«. Within a discipline it is easy to forget that religion, for instance, looks very different when reconstructed by other disciplines. And the public outside of any given discipline is likely to forget the disciplinary reductions entirely and assume that their favorite discipline is talking about religion as such. This is the bad sense of reductionism. It arouses the ire of people working within other disciplines who discover that what they think is important about religion just never shows up in some discipline’s approach. It arouses the ire of religious people who find that what they think of as their religious lives are reduced to what can be fitted into some discipline’s categories. And it arouses the ire of intellectuals, especially humanists, who know that religion means at least as many things as were listed in a previous section. The scientific studies of religion are like disciplinary tunnels that proceed fruitfully and with integrity, studying religion each with its own apparatus of theories, methods, instruments, and so forth, each with its own cultivated traditions of expertise and taste, and each undergoing internal transformations according to debates and arguments within that science’s community. The tunnels each proceed dynamically, digging along. Sometimes a tunnel branches into several tunnels. Sometimes tunnels intersect so that »interdisciplinary« tunnels get dug. Perhaps some scientific tunnels will turn out to be wholly useless, pseudo-sciences. Surely all the disciplines have internal histories of change and self-criticism. But by and large the scientific disciplinary tunnels get something right about their subject matter and they can correct their own mistakes. Reductively isolated from one another, the tunnels in the scientific study of religion nearly all have something interesting to say about religion. Each defines religion in its own way, and this definition usually has a changing history within that discipline. Let us say, then, that the various scientific disciplines studying religion each get some »components« of religion. It would be tempting to say that each gets some »parts« of religion, but this suggests that there is some »whole« within which we can or would hope to fit the parts together. It is better to say that to the extent a given science does good scientific work, what it studies is a component of religion, however that component relates

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to other components. Is it not fairly obvious that some components of religion legitimate social structures, others consist in identification with membership in groups, others with psychological structures, others with contributions to evolution, others to the history of religiously named traditions, and so forth? The next question for those interested in religion and not just its reductively defined components is how those components fit together.

VI. Religion for Phenomenology A first and historically important strategy is to back away from all the theoretical disciplinary reductions and go to the things themselves in some kind of phenomenology. There are several kinds of phenomenology. Husserlian phenomenology tries to give pure descriptions of the content of experience without regard to explaining what is described (actually, few people try to give such pure descriptions; most talk about the methods of describing). Moreover, pure description has no boundaries, so that you cannot tell whether what you are describing is religion, politics, or mental illness. Also, the descriptive terms come from somewhere, not just from the uninterpreted phenomena within consciousness, and these terms are regarded as arbitrary by everyone other than those for whom they seem obvious. But the strength of Husserlian phenomenology is that it can be a powerful corrective to the scientific tunnels whose disciplinary apparatus distorts what people actually experience. Husserlian phenomenology is a worthwhile tunnel itself for that corrective power. Postmodernists reject the positivism in Husserlian phenomenology but often are reluctant to take up its experientially corrective aspects. Phenomenology also has meant the attempt to understand all the components of religion in terms of a kind of logic in which they unfold from one another, perhaps in historical dialectical ways; this was Hegel’s kind of phenomenology. In retrospect, his logical dialectic for the unfolding of religion through the evolution of religions seems horribly biased by his triumphalist Christianity. On the other hand, he exposed many extraordinarily complicated dialectical relations among components of religion. His phenomenology was not that of the sheer surface of conscious experience but of a deeply implicated depth of experience. This too is a worthwhile tunnel for criticizing the understandings of religion as mere conscious appearance and failing to show depth dimensions. Postmodernists reject the logocentrism of Hegel’s dialectic but often fail as well to appreciate his dialectical intricacy.

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A third kind of phenomenology, associated with Mircea Eliade, is the amassing of vast erudition about religions identified informally and the inductive construction of structural categories such as the distinction between the sacred and the profane that make sense across many religious phenomena. The great weakness for which this kind of phenomenology has been criticized is that the allegedly induced structural categories really are a kind of theology imposed to organize the data. That the categories are theological is not necessarily a bad thing, if »theology« means dealing with first-order questions such as what is really sacred. But it is bad if the theology is represented as leaping out of the vast erudition as generalizations from the data rather than justifying itself as a set of good hypotheses about the first-order issues. Eliade’s phenomenology ultimately is arbitrary in its organizational principles to integrate the components. Its strength, however, is its erudition: it is a steady critic of any bad reductionism because it can always point to this, that, and the other thing that should not be ignored. Even if its interpretations of the data are skewed by an arbitrary theological scheme, it is a very good thing simply to know a lot and not be satisfied with simple reductions. This kind of phenomenology is also a worthwhile tunnel for studying religion, once its own reductive biases are made plain. Instead of finding ways to fit the components of religion together, these phenomenologies have just multiplied tunnels of study with their own favored components. Reflecting on the issues of understanding the various components of religion together has been of interest to many schools of philosophy in the West. Each brings its suppositions, strengths, and limitations. Analytic philosophy is not helpful for defining religion as such or providing a grand theory that integrates many components; but it has been fruitful for the apologetic defense of particular religions. Continental philosophy has been heir to the deep dialectic of German idealism and French social constructivism; but it has been limited by its inability to overcome the subjectivism of transcendental distinctions between representations and things in themselves represented. So it takes experience as its object and cannot deal critically with the things experienced. The evolving discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of these philosophical discourses about religion is itself another worthwhile tunnel with interesting things to say about some components of religion, but another tunnel nevertheless. I have argued above that what I now call the tunnel of Western philosophies needs to be supplemented by tunnels of philosophies in many other traditions, and brought together in the philosophical self-consciousness of philosophy of religion.

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VII. Metaphysics of Ultimate Reality Having surveyed now many ways in which religion has been discussed in popular literature and journalism, in the historical origins of the term, and in the scholarly studies of religion, I want to claim again that what makes all or nearly all of those references »religious« is how they involve symbolic engagement with ultimacy. In the instances where there is no engagement with ultimacy, the matter is just group dynamics, or psychological dynamics, or personal growth or decay, friendship and social bonding, ethnic rivalry, cultural continuities and discontinuities, evolutionary adaptiveness or mal-adaptiveness, and so forth, mistakenly associated with religion in these instances however rightly associated with religion in other instances. Now it is necessary for my argument to legitimate the references to ultimacy, ultimate reality, and such cognates. I understand that many people think that philosophy of the metaphysical sort cannot produce new knowledge and only reports the opinions of metaphysicians with whom one can choose to disagree with one’s own opinions. But metaphysical arguments do make sense; even Kant did not deny that. He only said that they had no real reference or, as he put it, they do not determine objects. The pragmatic approach to metaphysics as hypothetical, however, does not have that problem, as I argued above. Furthermore, all the world’s longstanding literate religious traditions have developed detailed metaphysical conversations amongst their own schools and in debates across traditions; these metaphysical positions can be regarded as pragmatic hypotheses, even if those who first proposed them did not think of them that way. To judge metaphysical arguments it is necessary not only to think about them but also to think them from the inside. Here is the best hypothesis according to my argument, which arises out of a long consideration of many options. The key to metaphysics is the analysis of determinateness.13 No matter what one’s cosmology is with respect to what kinds of things the world contains and how these things work, the cosmology itself says something determinate. That is, one’s cosmology says the world is what it is, or is becoming what it is becoming.To be determinate is to be this rather than that and something rather than nothing. What are the requirements for being determinate? There are three. A determinate thing has to have components relative to the other things with respect to which it is determinate and that are different from it. Call these »conditional components«, because a I first addressed the question of determinateness in R.C. Neville, God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968; 2nd edition, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992). The most recent discussion, which this section summarizes, is in Idem, Ultimates, part 3. 13

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determinate thing is conditioned by those things with respect to which it is determinate. A determinate thing also has to have components that give it its own-being, its integration of the conditional components. Call these »essential components«, because these give the thing its being that is not immediately reduced to the conditional components. The conditional components need the essential components in order to have something to condition. The essential components need the conditional components in order to have something to be different from on their own. The third thing needed is that the conditional and essential components have to fit together as a harmony so that the determinate thing really is what it is and not nothing. Thus, for something to be determinate there must be a plurality of things that are determinate with respect to one another, at least in some respects. The texture of the things is given by the network of ways they condition one another. Call this their »cosmological togetherness«, because it exhibits the patterns of conditioning in the cosmos. Here is a serious issue. For a determinate thing to contain another determinate thing as a condition, that other thing also must have its own essential components that make it other. If the other thing is not in some respects outside the thing it conditions, then it reduces to that thing and the plurality vanishes as does all determinateness. Determinate things need to be internally related to one another in their mutual conditionings but externally related to one another by virtue of each having its own essential components not contained wholly in the other. For the cosmological togetherness to be possible, there must therefore be a deeper ontological context of mutual relevance in which things are together as conditioning one another but also as different and separate regarding their essential components. This is the classical metaphysical problem of the one and the many that arises in all the great reflective traditions.What can be the ontological context of mutual relevance? What can be the one that allows the many to be many and relevant to one another? Whatever the ontological context of mutual relevance is, it cannot be another determinate thing. For if it were determinate, it would need an even deeper ontological context of mutual relevance to allow its essential components to be together with the essential components of the other determinate things for which it is supposed to be the ontological context of mutual relevance. Therefore the ontological context of mutual relevance must itself be indeterminate, and yet capable of doing the job of being the ontological context of the determinate things. I think that the only thing that could be the ontological context of mutual relevance is a creative act that simply makes or creates the determinate things together. This ontological creative act has no determinate nature of its own except what it creates; it gives itself the nature of being the crea-

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tive act of this world by creating this world. The ontological creative act is not in time and does not take place in a place, because time and space, however understood, are determinate and hence created. Western theisms have symbolized the ontological creative act with expanded notions of creative persons, and many such theists imagine the creative act as taking place at a time. But the whole of the temporal spread, whether from a finite initial Big Bang or from Everlasting, is together in the ontological context of mutual relevance. Otherwise the past and future of moments would not be determinately different. The ontological creative act is not »one« in the sense of providing a unity for the determinate things in the world; it only makes them what they are, with whatever de facto unities and disunities they have with one another. How much unity the world has is an empirical question. Yet the ontological creative act is »singular« in the sense that it creates all the determinate things together in their mutual conditionings and their essential own-beings. Here is the first ultimate reality, the ontological creative act creating the world of determinate things, including those things in itself as its terminus, or mutually conditioning termini. The world can be considered as part of the ontological creative act, and the act can be considered as the being of the determinate things together. Many important metaphysical implications follow from this that cannot be detailed here. But when they are detailed, they reinforce the metaphysical hypothesis of the ontological creative act. There would be no ontological creative act unless it acts to produce the determinate things. (This amounts to saying that there is no God without the world created, for those following the argument with a theistic background.) The ontological creative act has to create a determinate world – that is what »creating something« means, whatever that world turns out to be. Therefore the universal traits of determinateness are just as ultimate as the ontological creative act itself. Each entails the others. Because the universal or transcendental traits of determinateness apply to any determinate thing in any cosmos, they can be called »cosmological ultimates«. They are four. As harmonies of essential and conditional components, determinate things have the (1) form of the things harmonized, (2) the components harmonized, (3) existential location in a field with the other determinate things with respect to which it is determinate, and (4) the value-identity of getting these components together in this form in this existential location relative to other things. Although the full argument for this is very complex, any determinate thing relative to others has to have form, components formed, existential location, and value-identity. Now jump from the metaphysical generality of determinateness and ontological creation as such to the human world in which people might be

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religious. The ultimate contingency of determinate things on the ontological creative act is engaged in the ontological problematic of why or how there is something rather than nothing. This problematic has hosts of positive and negative symbols, much debated among themselves, from metaphors of Shiva coming to consciousness to the Dao that cannot be named to God creating ex nihilo. The personal experiences involved in this engagement can include what Tillich called »ontological shock«, awe, gratitude, surprise, anger, love, hate, and a host of other entanglements. The transcendental trait of form in determinateness is engaged primarily in terms of the future that contains alternative possibilities for realization relative to human choice. Future alternatives have different values for actualization, sometimes better and worse but always different. From this it follows that human beings lie under obligation. In choosing what they do, they give themselves the moral characters that come from their choices. The problematic of obligation includes coping with success and failure, handling guilt and rewarding goodness, learning to discern the real differences in the future alternatives, and so forth. The religious problematic of lying under obligation comes from the fact the cosmological ultimate reality of form is simply there to be engaged. The transcendental trait of having components gives rise in the human sphere to the religious problematic of finding wholeness, coping with brokenness and suffering, seeking the dignity of integration, being a self. The reason all religions have some version of the quest for wholeness, with its negative side of coping with suffering, is that dealing with components is an ultimate transcendental trait that is simply there to be engaged. Similarly, the transcendental trait of having existential location relative to others, in the human sphere, gives rise to the religious problematic of dealing with others as others. Other things are not simply components of a person’s self or ingroup. They have realities of their own with their own value. All the Axial Age religions testify to the need to treat other people with compassion for their own positions. Confucians emphasize the importance of attending to institutions as others. We are generally becoming aware that nature is »other« and needs appropriate treatment. The reason all religions have some version of engaging others in our existential field is that this is an ultimate cosmological trait of determinateness. The transcendental trait of having achieved value-identity on the human level is the question of the meaning of life, the value, if any, of personal and corporate life, what the world adds up to. The universal religious problematic symbolized here in the shorthand of the question for »meaning« stems from the necessity to engage the cosmological ultimate of value-identity. The question of value-identity or meaning is simply there to be engaged.

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Now my argument has indicated how the five problematics characteristic of religions really are human ways of engaging ultimate realities. These engagements cannot take place without the pragmatic symbols guiding the engagement, and so the different religious cultures, as well as personal poetic imagination, make the symbols multifarious. A significant part of philosophy of religion has to do with analyzing how the diverse symbol systems variously engage the five ultimates in these religious problematics. I have treated the problematics as if they were separate, but of course they are interdependent and so their engagements involve much crossover. To be sure, my metaphysical argument here might be mistaken. It is only an hypothesis and all hypotheses are fallible. But it cannot be rejected simply because it is metaphysical; the pragmatic approach to metaphysics as hypothetical is not subject to any of the standard criticisms of metaphysical philosophy as such. It can only be rejected because of some specific flaws, which can then be improved upon. I have not given the arguments here in detail so that they can be thought, not just thought about. But they exist to be studied. Part of philosophy of religion is to think the great metaphysical debates about ultimacy.

VIII. An Ecological Model of Philosophy of Religion I claimed at the beginning that religion is a proper subject matter for study because it can be defined as the human symbolic engagement of ultimate realities in cognitive, existential, and practical ways. I’ve now sketched an argument about ultimate realities that shows how the five broad problematics of religions are, in principle, engagements of those ultimate realities. I have also pointed out the wide breadth of usages of the term »religion« and the different things associated with religion. Now let us consider religion, defined as human symbolic engagement of ultimate realities, as itself a harmony. It has or can have many conditional components, for instance, communities, traditions, semiotic systems, historical developments, and personal situations of various sorts. It has or can have many essential components that would put the components together so as to achieve genuine engagements, for instance, spiritual quests, ontological shocks, commitment to religious groups and worldviews, gurudisciple relations, and so forth. When these conditional and essential components fit together so that some or several ultimate realities are actually engaged, then religion is present. But when they do not harmonize so that there is actual engagement of dimensions of ultimacy, those components are not to be understood as religious but rather on their own terms. The discernment of whether ultimates are actually engaged in any act, process,

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or lifetime of engagement is extremely complicated and is recognized in all complicated religions. The positive side of discernment is the specialty of spiritual directors and gurus. The negative side is the specialty of prophets who issue condemnations of false religion. Is there any way for philosophy of religion to get a handle on how the components of religion, conditional and essential, are sometimes rightly called religious and sometimes better called non-religious? I suggest here an ecological model for understanding religion relative to its components and relations to other things in its existential field. The basic model I want to present comes from biology. Consider this analogy. Suppose there is a pond in the woods.The pond is a complex biological ecosystem containing, among other things, the bacteria and other micro-organisms in the water, the plants growing on the bottom and on the shores (that line being variable with the water level), the fish, frogs, leeches and other animals living in and under the water, and the insects of many kinds that live on and about the surface, feeding on things in the water and reproducing on adjacent plant-life. Each one of these species is what I call an ecoharmony. A living ecoharmony has members with lifecycles of their own that reproduce and carry on their various activities in the larger pond ecosystem. Every ecoharmony has two kinds of components in terms of which it needs to be understood. First it has »conditional components« that consist of all that the individuals in the species need and receive from the larger ecosystem. For instance, fish need not only to have food in the larger ecosystem but also the right conditions of temperature and water chemistry, places to breed, and so forth; different species of fish in the pond might need different conditional components. Second, every ecoharmony has »essential components« that make the species what it is; we usually think of DNA in this regard. Many different species can exist in the same pond because, although they have many of the same conditioning components, they have different essential components. Not all the species of fish eat the same things, however, or reproduce in the same places, and so differ with regard to their dietary and reproductive conditions. I call these ecoharmonies because each species is a harmony of its essential and conditional components. Prior to modern biology Aristotelian science was inclined to think of species in terms of their essence alone, making the conditions for them secondary. Now we should reject substance thinking and consider things to be harmonies with their conditional components relating them to their environment being just as important to them as their essential components. I’ve been speaking of the species as an ecoharmony, but each individual within the species in the pond is also an ecoharmony; for the moment we can neglect this distinction. We should note that each component in an

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ecoharmony is itself an ecoharmony. The little fish or the plants eaten by big fish are themselves species with ecoharmonic structures even when they function as conditional components in the big fish. Each species of fish has an internal organic structure with substructures, each of which is an ecoharmony down to the molecular structure of the DNA. Put the other way, each species is a component of the larger ecosystem of the pond. The pond itself is an ecoharmony. It has its own »essential components« of the various species within it, but exists with the conditions of being in the terrain it is, with the chemical and biologic run-offs from the wider environment, depending on the chemistry and wildlife of the forest in many ways, and on the larger geology and climate of the area. The pond itself can be called a complex ecosystem, an ecoharmony with some integrity of its own, containing conditions from beyond the pond but also containing many ecoharmonies within it. The ecoharmonies within the pond are more or less compatible with one another to the degree the pond’s ecosystem is stable. Each ecoharmony is dependent on some other ecoharmonies in the pond but perhaps not all; some ecoharmonies can disappear without all the others disappearing. The asymmetries in the dependence relations are what are of interest when using the biological ecosystem as a model for understanding what religion is in a larger culture. The best way to understand the asymmetries is through the evolutionary dimension of the ecosystem. Imagine that a long time ago the pond was formed when a retreating glacier left it as a pocket of water over mainly bare rocks. Initially the pond water contained only primitive micro-organisms that could have survived under the glacier and also in warmer climate.The micro-organism ecoharmonies that required the cold of the glacier died out. Grasses and grassfeeding animals moved into the surrounding area and their decayed remains and droppings entered the pond. This changed the chemistry of the pond water so that more species of micro-organisms washed into the pond found the conditioning components they needed to survive as ecoharmonies, and their presence provided conditions for yet more things. Spring flooding allowed fish and other marine animals and plants to wash into the pond, insects from neighboring ponds flew in and birds dropped new seeds. The forest developed where there had been only grasses and more species of animals with their droppings and decay surrounded the pond. Most of these adventitious new pond ecosystems did not find the conditions they needed but some did and the pond grew in biological complexity. More particularly, within the pond sports arose with slightly different DNA than typical in their species. Some of these found the conditions they needed to survive and so a new species emerged. This new species provided new conditions for yet other new species to survive and so some species unique

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to the pond evolved. With the new conditions in the pond, some of the ecoharmonies that previously flourished could no longer survive and died out. The other ecoharmonies that depended on them also died out. So the pond was constantly changing its internal ecosystemic complexity with some old ecoharmonies dying out and adventitious or emergent new harmonies coming in. Adopting this model for understanding religion, we can say that human societies and individual life are rooted in nature. At any given time, human life is set within a vast complex ecosystem including the conditions of geography, climate, the flora and fauna local to specific places, some of which are necessary conditions for human nutrition, the kinds of social ecoharmonies necessary for human survival and flourishing, all nested within one another and with the cultural systems, religious traditions, economic conditions for material life, food production systems, educational systems, and systems of the architectural milieu. Supplement this list with your favorite systematic conditions necessary or important for the flourishing of religion as you might think of engagement of ultimacy. But do not think of this religion only on its own terms. What you are likely to bring to mind as religion’s own terms are only its essential components. Its conditional components, all those other ecoharmonies on which it is dependent all the way down to basic biology and climate, are just as necessary to its identity as the essential components.Your religion’s true »own terms« include all those conditions systematically functioning in the complex ecosystem of life as well as the essential features by which you would ordinarily identify it. Now a crucial distinction needs to be made about the ecoharmonies in the complex ecosystems of human life. A given ecoharmony is dependent on certain conditions in its environment and not on others. Some other ecoharmonies can cease to exist and the given ecoharmony can still flourish so long as the conditions on which it is dependent remain. Therefore, relative to other ecoharmonies, a given ecoharmony can be dependent or independent. For instance, human beings evolved in equatorial Africa, dependent among other things on that climate. But without changing their DNA they could migrate to colder climates by inventing warm clothing, snug dwellings, and the like. The colder climatic conditions, however, allowed for the evolution of new balances of DNA, such as reduced melanin in the skin. So we would say that the human species is dependent on a range of climatic conditions but is independent of just about any one of them, given the means to adapt. In matters of religion, the great missionary traditions always need some culture to inhabit but are independent of any one of those cultures in the sense that they can find other inhabitations. Buddhism, for instance, died out in India, its birth-culture, for centuries while flourishing elsewhere. Of course, those other cultures allowed for all

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sorts of new forms of the religion, and in fact required some new forms for the religions to penetrate deeply into the new cultures. It is an interesting question whether the religions changed their »essential components« when migrating from one indigenization to another; many people argue that Confucianism cannot migrate because it is too much defined by its East Asian roots – though I have argued to the contrary in Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late Modern World. As is obvious in the biological examples, ecosystems of ecoharmonies are dynamic and constantly changing, with different forms evolving to take account of changes in their conditional components. The same is true of genuine religious engagements, although we frequently entertain the romantic notion that we are preserving the »ancient« or »pure« or »original« symbolic religious forms. The congeries of components that work in a religious ecoharmony so as to yield genuine engagement with ultimate realities in some dimension or other can be constantly shifting. As the components change, the shape of the religious engagement of ultimates changes. For instance, the symbols for engagement of ultimates usually come through religious communities. Those communities can be intimate, like small congregations of close families. Or they can be large, like denominational organizations. Or they can be acquired through formal academic education, or through travel. For some people, the religious engagements of ultimates contain congregational participation as crucial conditioning components and for others the same symbols come from the study of history of religions or history of art with no personal congregational participation. The experienced engagements are very different for those people, perhaps equally strong and with the same symbols but with very different social contexts. The example of communities as mediators of traditions exhibits issues of conditional components. The example of commitment or what Tillich called »ultimate concern« is a matter of a kind of essential component. A small child picks up the religious symbols and practices of the parental culture. At a certain point in adolescence, however, the maturational stage of the brain is ready and open for a deep, heart-felt, existentially self-defining commitment to a sacred worldview with many dimensions for engaging ultimate realities, for instance through the five problematics discussed above.14 In some religious traditions this is like being »born again«. The sacred worldview embraced might be the parental one, or a modification See C.S. Alcorta, »Religion and the Life Course: Is Adolescence an ›Experience Expectant‹ Period for Religious Transmission«, in Where God and Science Meet: Evolution, Genes, and the Religious Brain, ed. P. McNamara (Westport CT: Praeger, 2006), chapter 4. 14

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of the parental one in light of personal experiences, or the rejection of the parental sacred worldview for some other one. The sacred worldview embraced is grasped with the level of sophistication of the individual adolescent and needs to be made more sophisticated as the person matures through life. The adolescent engagement of ultimacy in the meaning of life through making such a deep and life-defining commitment is often extreme, given to black and white feelings, and filled with risk. Religious extremists do best with adolescents for whom their extreme sacred worldview has just the right enticing language. This kind of deep existential commitment is an age-specific affair. If a person does not inherit a sacred worldview from the parental culture, or from somewhere else, adolescence might pass on, as the brain matures, without any existential commitment being made. Later in life, the person might »become religious« by adopting a sacred worldview and joining a religious community but is likely never to have the depth of existential commitment that requires an adolescent brain. Religious communities know the importance of »youth programs« and summer camps for the presentation of their sacred worldview for existential adoption by their adolescents.They also know the dangers of simplistic, stupid, demonic sacred worldviews by which their adolescents might be damaged perhaps irreparably. The shape of an adolescent’s symbolic engagement of the ultimate meaning of life depends on many things, including the sacred worldviews for potential commitment, the communal contexts for making the commitments, but most importantly the neurological readiness to make life-defining commitments. The adolescent’s »religion« is, among other things, just the array of components that enter into the engagement. The same individual, thirty years later, will have a different shape of engagements of the ultimate of life’s meaning and commitment, even if the sacred worldview and the community remains pretty much the same, because a mature adult has a different neurology of commitment. If there is no genuine engagement of ultimacy in the commitment, however, the commitment is just a psychological phenomenon. If ultimate passion is committed to something non-ultimate, for instance a political program, that would be a demonic psychological state. Philosophy of religion needs to sort through these things. One more point needs to be made to illustrate the ecological model for understanding the components of religion and their harmonization in genuine engagement of ultimacy. Just as the components of religious engagement can be harmonized so as to actualize the engagement, so genuine religious engagement can itself be a component in something else. For instance, I suspect that a strong religious sense of the ultimacy of obligation is a crucial component in a society’s political and moral sense of obligation. When a society does not have enough vital religion in enough

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people, its sense of transcendent obligation softens to private selfishness, narcissism, and consumerism.Vital religion in the quest for wholeness can be an important component in matters of health and self-care, psychological steadiness, and the sharpening of intellectual tools. The quest for wholeness enhances discipline.Vital religious engagement with the task of learning to respect and be compassionate for others is extremely helpful in political diplomacy.Vital religious engagement of ultimate issues of the meaning of life is an important component in literature and the arts. Just as many things are components in the harmony that is religion – symbolic engagement with ultimate realities, so religion as symbolic engagement of ultimate realities can be a component in many other spheres of life. When religion is missing or softened in the larger social ecoharmony, many other things that are dependent on religion cannot flourish.

IX. Conclusion In the context of the general question of whether the category of »religion« is »at best an empty concept and at worst a destructive and marginalizing one«, I have argued that there is indeed a subject-matter properly called »religion« that is worth study and that is in fact being studied in all sorts of fruitful ways.15 When philosophy studies it, this can properly be called »philosophy of religion«. The argument has been simultaneously positive and negative. The positive part is to explain and justify the use of »religion« to denote a subject for inquiry. The negative part is to deal with reasons why some people, especially postmodern thinkers, are led to reject the category. I have tried to make the argument linear, as in the order of reading. But in fact it is circular, repetitive, and dialectical, piling on layer upon layer of evidence The definition of religion denoting a proper subject of study is the human symbolic engagements of ultimate realities in cognitive, existential, and practical ways. The definition is put forward as an heuristic proposal about how we should use the term now. This is not the way »religion« has always been used, although most of the main ways it has been used fall under it or relate to it. Section IV rehearsed a brief history of the origin of the term in European history through medieval times. Section V surveyed a number of highly different things people mean by religion today in public discussions. Section VI discussed how some specialized academic disciplines define religion for their inquiries. In light of these considerations, the heuristic The phrase »an empty concept and at worst a destructive marginalizing one« comes from the letter of invitation to contribute to this volume. 15

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definition suggests that this is a helpful way of delineating a subject matter that surmounts objections to the category as previously used. Nearly all the terms in the definition are contestable and each section of this paper has addressed some of the issues. But the fact is, to articulate and justify the heuristic definition a philosophy is needed. Philosophical semiotics is needed to explain symbolic engagement. A pragmatic epistemology is needed to explain symbolic engagement. A metaphysics is needed to explain the various meanings of ultimate realities. I have developed these topics in philosophy at great length elsewhere and summarize them briefly here. Although some people believe that philosophy cannot do this kind of work, the burden of proof is on them; philosophy cannot be ruled out apriori as just the opinions of philosophers.The primary definition of philosophy of religion is having a philosophy that deals with these issues of interest to religion. The postmodern critique of the category of religion comes in part from its limitation to a line of European philosophy running from Kant through Heidegger to recent postmodern, post-structuralist and post-colonialist thinking. But there are many other philosophical lines, often embedded in non-European religious and philosophical traditions. The postmodern critique rarely embeds itself in a public consisting of those other traditions as well. If one does pay attention to the array of philosophical traditions relating to religions, I argue that there are five religious problematics that show up in one guise or another in every major religious tradition or historical discussion: ontological contingency, lying under obligation, the quest for wholeness or coping with suffering, engagement with others as others, and the question of the meaning or value of life and existence. If postmodernism immersed itself in the global range of philosophical thinking, it would find a lot going on for which the criticism of »religion« as colonialist is not so important. Section II, discussing this, both criticizes postmodernism for its narrow philosophical public and puts forward an agenda for philosophy of religion with the five problematics. Of course, the analysis of the five problematics might be mistaken. But its correction would yield an even larger array of problematics across traditions for philosophy of religion and assorted other disciplines concerning religion to investigate. The very suggestion of the five problematics serves to exhibit a wide and interesting subject to be studied as religion, at least if they can be connected with the claims about ultimacy in the heuristic definition of religion as symbolic engagement of ultimate realities in cognitive, existential, and practical ways. The five problematics illustrate many cognitive, existential, and practical modes of engagement. A second limitation of the postmodern critique of the category of religion is the very deep problems that its Kant-Heidegger philosophical line

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has with reference. Instead of religious symbols guiding engagement with ultimate realities, whatever they might be, that philosophical line has to believe they guide engagements only with other symbols. There can be no real reference to realities of any sort except insofar as they are within humanly constructed experience. So postmodernism can make no sense of religious claims to be engaging God, or Brahman, or the Ultimate of NonBeing. But if one develops the pragmatic theory of interpretation rather than the Kant-Heidegger line, the problem of reference vanishes and the issues have to do with just how to interpret the realities that are engaged, including the ultimate ones. Given a philosophy of religion with a pragmatic theory of interpretation for understanding the engagement of ultimate realities, we can develop a metaphysics of ultimate realities. The metaphysics sketched here identified five: the ontological contingency of the world on an ontological creative act, the forms of determinate things, the components of determinate things, the position of determinate things in existential fields relative to other determinate things, and the value-identity achieved by getting these components together with this form in this place relative to other things. This metaphysics is a fallible hypothesis vulnerable to correction. But it does correlate with the five problematics of religion, showing them to be about the engagements with five ultimate realities. Thus, this metaphysics, however it might be corrected, does have large areas of empirical application. This goes a long way to answering the objection that there is not legitimate subject matter to be studied as religion. A serious remaining problem is to indicate how what is defined as religious relates to other things that might be part of religion but also might be something else that fails to engage ultimate realities. Part of the metaphysics of ultimacy is to define determinate things as harmonies of conditional and essential components. Religion too is a determinate thing, consisting of engagements of ultimacy, and so has conditional and essential components. The components must harmonize into genuine engagements of ultimacy for there to be religion, and the components are properly part of religion when this happens. But sometimes the components do not so harmonize, no engagement of ultimacy takes place, and those components are not to be understood as religious. The proposal was put forward to use an ecological model to study all this, treating the components as evolved conditions that make possible religion but not necessitating it without the actual religious harmony. Religion, too, can function as components in other domains of life, such as social cohesion, the enlivening of tradition, the sponsorship of art, and so forth. The result of all this, I contend, is the exhibition of religion as a definable phenomenon that is internally complex and whose components are

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properly religious only when they fit together in actual engagements of ultimacy. This is a huge subject for study, with correlations with other subjects of study. It gives important defining roles for many disciplines that approach religion through its components, with clues as to when those disciplines in their tunnels deal with religion or something else.

Contributors Richard Amesbury, Professor of Religious Studies and of Philosophy and Director of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University Tim Knepper, Professor of Philosophy, and Director, The Comparison Project, Drake University Vincent Lloyd, Associate Professor, Christian Ethics and Theories & Methods of Culture; Director, Africana Studies,Villanova University Robert Cummings Neville, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology, Boston University Jin Y. Park, Professor and Department Chair of Philosophy and Religion at American University Michael Ch. Rodgers, Senior Research Advisor, Hanover Research Sonya Sikka, Professor of Philosophy, University of Ottawa J. Aaron Simmons, Professor of Philosophy, Furman University Dwayne A. Tunstall, Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University; Secretary of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Subject Index Absolute, the 115, 123–125 Absolute freedom 108 Academic disciplines 21, 44–45, 47 Afro-pessimists 102 Allah 120, 129 American pragmatism 130 Anti-realism 61, 84 Anxiety 5, 108, 111 Apologetics 20, 27 Atheism 18 Axial Age 134, 143 Aztec 104 Biology 7, 90, 145, 147 Black studies 102 Bourgeoisie 103 Brahman 13, 41, 129, 134, 152 British Empire 50 Buddha 13, 109, 112, 117–118, 120, 135–136 Buddhism 1, 4, 10, 16, 18–19, 36, 45, 56, 79, 100, 108–118, 122, 133, 147 − Pure Land Buddhism 115, 117 − Shin Buddhism 10, 115–116 − Zen Buddhism 1, 110, 117 Buddhists 134 Catholic Church 50 Christianity 2–5, 10, 14–16, 18–20, 26, 32, 49–50, 56, 78–79, 81, 85–88, 100, 109, 114, 138 Christian missionaries 89 Christians 50, 85, 87–88, 103, 132, 134 Christian theism 24, 28, 60, 68–71 Church of England 49–50 Citizenship 50–51, 66 Classical theism 17–18, 20, 24, 27, 69–70 Colonialism 15–16, 19–20, 48, 50, 53–57, 87–89, 102–104, 133–134, 151 Colonization 36, 53–54 Confucianism 4, 108, 110, 113, 129, 148 Consciousness 14, 17, 19, 23–24, 26, 28, 129–130, 138–139, 143 Cosmographic formations 15

Cosmological ultimates 142 Critical history of religion 48–49 Critical theory − Critical theory of religion 43, 57, 59–60, 62, 67, 77–78, 83–84 Cultural universal 47, 49 Dao 41, 134, 143 Disenchanting discourse 104 Diversity 14, 31, 38, 100, 127 Divine order 50 Dualism 109, 122, 128, 132 − Cartesian dualism 128 − Manichaean dualism 132 East Asian intellectual tradition 113, 118 Ecoharmony 145–148, 150 Enlightenment 32, 53, 133 Epistemology 17, 20, 28, 59, 69, 73, 77–78, 127, 130, 151 Ethnography 100 Eurocentrism 16, 18–19, 27, 128 Evil − Problem of 14, 69 Existential insecurity 111 Facebook 100 Faith 16, 19, 49, 69, 70, 119–121 Family resemblances 15–16, 21, 27, 45–46, 56 First Amendment 51 Folk religions 56 Form 93 Fundamentalism 46–47, 135 Gendered identity 108–109 Gender identity 110 Gender studies 44 Genealogical approach 48 Genealogy 43–44, 47–48, 51, 54, 87, 99, 104 − Genealogy of race 91 − Genealogy of religion 43–44, 47–48, 54 German idealism 139

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Subject Index

God − Concept of God 17, 23–24 Heretics 132 Hermeneutics 44, 59, 62–63, 68, 73, 78, 131 Hermeneutics of charity 59 Hermeneutics of Suspicion 59 Hinduism 4, 19–20, 36, 56, 100 Hindus 134 Historiography 100 Human − Category of 103 Humanists 137 Human rights 98 Human sacrifice 104 Incarnation 132 Indigenous communities 50, 53, 56, 87–88, 96, 101, 103–104 Islam 2–5, 7, 16, 18–19, 78, 79, 87, 132, 134 Jewish Christians 87–88 Jews 3, 87, 92, 95, 98–99, 134 Judaism 2–4, 56, 78, 87, 132 Kyoto School 15–16, 19 Liberal economic theory 53 Logocentrism 138 Man − Category of 103–104 Marxist 100 Messianism 122 Metanoetics 115–119 Metaphysics 17, 20, 23, 28, 59, 73, 77, 93, 102, 127, 129, 140, 144, 151–152 Minority communities 90–91 Modernity 4, 16, 21, 97–98 Mohammed 135 Monism 16, 23 Monotheism 56, 132 Moses 135 Multiculturalism 99–102 Muslims 19, 90, 134 Mysterium tremendum 21 Mystical experience 14, 23 Native Americans 88

Naturalism 25–26, 66–67, 77, 134 − Crypto-naturalism 26 Natural law theory 94 Nature of death 24 Nazism 92 Nihilism 111 Nirvana 17, 25 Non-Being 152 Nothingness 10, 107, 109–113, 115–119, 121, 123–125 Ontological contingency 131, 151–152 Ordinary language 37, 93 Original Sin 103, 132 Other-power 115–119 Phenomenology 64, 68, 71, 134, 138–139 Philosophy − African philosophy 21 − Analytic philosophy 139 − Asian philosophy 21 − As mythology 94 − Black feminist philosophy 102 − Continental philosophy 122, 139 − Indian philosophy 16, 18 − Japanese philosophy 114 − Philosophy of Christianity 20 − Philosophy of language 32–33, 59 − Philosophy of race 99 − Philosophy of religion 13–29, 37–39, 41–42, 59–62, 67–73, 75–78, 83–86, 88–89, 92, 99, 101–102, 104–105, 127, 139, 144, 149–152 − Philosophy of the social 99 − Western philosophy 10, 17, 115 Pieds-Noir 95 Pluralism 56 Political rights 98 Polytheism 32, 56 Positivism 138 Postcolonialism 53, 55, 101 Postmodernism 128–130, 151–152 Post-racial 95 Post-secular 95 Prayer 119–122, 124 Proofs for the existence of God 14 Protestantism 51, 89 Pure possibility 24

Subject Index

159

Race − As theological problem 89 − Concept of 7, 85, 88–91 − Racism 91, 94–96, 102, 104 − Racist concepts 96 Reason, fallen 132 Reductionism 21–22, 24, 25, 136–137, 139 Reformation 50 Reincarnation 17 Religion − As salvific 55 − Category of religion 15, 17, 27, 31–32, 34–37, 39–40, 65, 86–87, 89, 131, 133, 151 − Concept of religion 14–16, 18–20, 26–27, 29, 32, 43, 45–49, 52–54, 56–57, 85–91, 99, 127–128, 131, 133 − Deconstruction of religion 48 − Definition of religion 15, 17, 34, 46, 55, 57, 150–151 − Genealogy of religion 85, 87, 91, 101 − History of religion 131 − Language of religion 97 − Ontology of religion 47 Religious concepts 96, 104 Religious experience 13–14, 21, 23, 25, 130 Religious freedom 51 Religious language 103 Religious naturalism 134 Religious phenomena 24, 32, 45–48, 57, 139 Religious studies 14–15, 20–22, 24, 26, 43–48, 55, 59–60, 62–64, 67, 72, 75–78, 87, 102 Repentance 115, 117, 119 Resurrection 17 Revelation 19, 132

Social logic 96–98, 101 Sociology of religion 84 Sovereign power 97–98 Sovereignty, paradox of 96 St. Paul 135 Subjectivism 139 Subjectivity 90–91, 117–119, 123, 125 Sufism 45 Supernatural 26, 48, 65, 81, 103, 135–136 Superstition 48–49, 54, 135

Sacred man 97 Santeria 45 Scientific language 103 Secularism 5, 7, 16, 20–21, 51, 54, 93, 99–103 Secular world 93, 95 Self, the 14, 23, 53 Self-negation 113, 117, 119 Self-reflection 72, 113, 118, 124 Separation of church and state 51 Shintoism 19 Shiva 143 Social construction 20, 52, 90, 108 Social constructivism 139

Vagueness 34, 59–61, 77, 79–83 Vedanta 16 View from nowhere 60

Taboo 7, 97 Tao 13 Theological agenda 21 Theological bias 14, 18, 22 Theology − Asian theology 54 − Black theology 54 − Christian theology 14, 20 − Critical theology 24 − Liberation theology 54 − Natural theology 23–24, 28 The sovereign 96–98 Transcendental signified 129–130 Transcendent being 15, 19 Ultimacy 9–11, 40, 127, 129–131, 133, 140, 144, 147, 149, 151–153 Ultimate concern 134, 148 Ultimate reality 10, 17, 22–23, 28, 39–40, 127–131, 140, 142–144, 148, 150–152 Unmoved mover 13 Upanishads 13–14 Upāya 118–119 US Constitution 51

Werewolves 98 White mythology 93–94 Witchcraft 45 World religions 19, 23, 69–70, 132 World spirit 23 Yuan Dynasty 133 Zen 16, 34

Author Index Agamben, Giorgio 10, 86, 95–99, 101, 104 Alcorta, Candace 148 Amane, Nishi 113 Aquinas, Thomas 13, 132 Aristotle 13, 145 Asad, Talal 2–3, 5, 16, 19, 43, 87 Augustine 3, 92, 131 Balagangadhara, S.N. 15, 21 Baldwin, James 91 Baring, Edward 95 Barrett, Nathaniel 130–131 Boyarin, Daniel 87–88 Brandom, Robert 55 Buell, Denise 87 Caputo, John 122 Cavanaugh, William 43 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 101 Chidester, David 2, 88 Columbus, Christopher 103–105 Confucius 135 Corrington, Robert 130, 134 Crosby, Donald 130 Dallmayr, Fred 123 Danto, Arthur 56 Davies, Stephen 46 Davis, Bret 15, 19 Daniel, Defoe 88, 120 Derrida, Jacques 10, 36, 71, 86, 92–96, 99, 101–102, 104, 107, 119–124, 129–130 Descartes, Rene 114 Dewey, John 130–131 Dubuisson, Daniel 2–4, 15 Durkheim, Emile 97, 135 Eliade, Mircea 25, 130, 139 Enryō, Inoue 113–114 Fitzgerald, Timothy 14–15, 20–21, 31, 43–55, 57, 59, 63 Foucault, Michel 47, 98

Frankenberry, Nancy 130 Freud, Sigmund 97 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 130 Garfield, Jay 112 Goldenberg, Naomi 43 Goldschmidt, Henry 91 Griffith-Dickson, Gwen 18 Guantanamo, Bay 98 Hajime, Tanabe 10, 107, 113–119, 122–124 Haynes, Stephen 89 Hegel, Georg W.F. 23–24, 109–110, 114, 127, 138 Heidegger, Martin 10, 24, 28, 110, 115, 118, 128–129, 131, 151–152 Hickman, Jared 88, 91 Higgins, Jean 115 Hogue, Michael 134 Hume 85, 127, 133 Husserl, Edmund 10, 115, 138 Iryŏp, Kim 10, 107–112, 117–118, 122–124 James, William 127, 130 Johnson, Roger 132 Kant, Immanuel 116–117, 127–128, 131, 136, 140, 151–152 Kantorowicz, Ernst 97 Kidd, Colin 89 Kierkegaard, Soren 74, 81–82 King Jr., Martin Luther 91 King, Richard 16, 19 Lactantius 131 Lechner, Frank 51 Levinas, Emmanuel 122 Lloyd, Charles 49 Locke, John 50–51 Lull, Raymond 132 Mandela, Nelson 94–95

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Author Index

Marco Polo 133 Martin, C. 59, 62 Marty, Martin 46–47 Masuzawa, Tomoko 43, 70, 89, 133 Mauss, Marcel 97 McCutcheon, Russell 15, 21, 31, 43, 60–68, 72–77, 79 Michaels, Walter Benn 101 Nandy, Ashis 16, 20 Nicholas of Cusa 132 Nietzsche 85, 109 Orsi, Robert 135 Otto, Rudolph 21–22, 25 Peirce, Charles Sanders 129–130 Plantinga 68, 71, 85 Plato 85–86, 94 Purchas, Samuel 49 Pyŏngt’ae, Yi 113 Raposa, Michael 130 Robinson, Crusoe 88, 120–121 Rumi 14 Schellenberg, John 25–27 Schelling, Friedrich W.J. 24 Schilbrack, Kevin 32–33, 38, 43, 48, 53, 55–57, 63–65, 67, 69–71, 75, 79, 82–84

Schleiermacher, Friedrich 130 Schmitt, Carl 97 Shinran 115 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 2, 5, 9, 21, 31–32, 49, 59–63, 67, 73, 77–80, 84, 86–87, 97 Smith, J.Z. 59–62, 79, 87–88 Sŏnguk, Paek 113 Taylor, Charles 5, 70, 87 Teresa of Avila 14 Tillich, Paul 123, 143, 148 Unno, Taitetsu 115 Vichy, France 92 Voltaire 85 Whitehead, Alfred North 123, 127 Wiebe, Donald 22, 24–26, 60, 62–68, 73–77, 82 Wilderson, Frank 102 Wildman, Wesley 1–2, 130, 134 William, Robertson Smith 97 Wise, Christopher 92 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 15, 34–35, 45 Wynter, Sylvia 10, 86, 102–105 Yoshifumi, Ueda 115 Yoshitani 14