ABSTRACT

The place of the study of religion within the modern publicly funded university is a topic that continues to provoke discussion. The debate is greatly complicated by the failure of some participants to discriminate between religion and the study of religion as special cases and those things we call religion and the study of religion as simply being subsets of ordinary, human practices. In one form or another, this debate has raged for quite a number of years and shows no signs of dying down anytime soon. As in the case of many intellectual and/or academic controversies of this nature, some clarification of the argument can be found in tracing a bit of its history and vocabulary, determining more precisely the lines of the conflict and just what has been, and perhaps remains, at stake for either side. This and the following chapter will attempt just that, looking first at the early-twentieth-century emergence of the field in the U.S. and its subsequent re-emergence in the late 1950s and 1960s.