ABSTRACT
Theological discourse Thinking theologically is a complication in the study of religion that needs to be examined in both the analysis of religion and in the assessment of the possibilities for the study of religion. On a very basic level theological thinking is a practice akin to ritual practices, the veneration of saints, or the recitation of sacred texts. Like many other practices, it is a modality of religious experience that, without giving it special privilege, falls within the range of any phenomenologically based study of religion. However, it is unlike other modalities of religious experience in that at least some of the conditions of its possibility are epistemically isomorphic with the conditions that make the study of religion possible. It is possible that the deracination of theology in a postmodern sensibility may have implications for the study of religion that are more far-reaching than attention to theology alone would indicate.
