ABSTRACT
Some years ago students who came to study religions at my university were introduced to the subject through a course called ‘Religious Lives’. The purpose of the course was to develop an understanding of religions and their study by means of an examination of the autobiographies and biographies of a variety of religious people – what we might here call ‘religious insiders’. The students came as ‘outsiders’ to these stories; but they also had their own stories, their own subjective experiences which they were asked to reflect on and write about. They were the ‘insiders’ in these accounts. The process of thinking about other people’s religious lives as well as their own raised many critical questions and issues for discussion (Comstock 1995). Can we ever fully understand someone else’s experience? What is the difference between an account of a religion by an insider and one by an outsider? Does translation from one language to another bridge a gap or create a barrier between the person telling the story and the one reading it? Additionally, we find ourselves considering the nature and limits of objectivity and subjectivity, ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ positions, ‘experience-near’ and ‘experiencedistant’ concepts, empathy and critical analysis, the effect of personal standpoint, and the process of reflexivity. We even find that some of the lives we read about make us ask whether it is actually helpful to distinguish between insider and outsider perspectives. We will come to these matters in more detail shortly, but my purpose in listing them here is to show the range of concerns that are related to the insider/outsider debate, many of which have been at the heart of the study of religions since its inception as a discipline distinct from theology (Knott 2008). The debate challenges us by raising questions about the extent and limits of our knowledge and understanding. It invites us to consider whether or not our field of study is scientific. It is central to our methodology. It has an ethical dimension, and a political one.
