ABSTRACT
Although critique can be an end in itself, after calling for an end to the Eliadean era and suggesting that the sacred/profane rhetoric may provide, to some degree, a form of recoverable residue upon which we can rebuild a scholarly pursuit, some might find me remiss not to close by saying something about how we might proceed from where we happen to find ourselves, thus venturing a speculative guess about just what a thorough historicization of the rhetoric of “religion” might look like. With broad brush strokes this final chapter offers one possible answer to the question of what might arise from the residue that remains after a disenchanted, post-Cold War generation – raised on the deconstructive suspicion spawned by the student uprisings of the late 1960s and sobered by the alienating, post-1970s academic job market – has decided that the once obvious autonomy of religious experiences is not only a theoretically bankrupt concept but a politically suspect device. Having ceased to be persuaded by the notion of religion as something autonomous and extraordinary – whether it is considered good or bad, productive or destructive – what we have left to explain, then, is why so many individuals have found this very idea particularly contagious, appealing or, better put, useful.
