ABSTRACT
In one sense, the study of religions is as old as religion itself, or at least as the first human beings who looked at their neighbours or themselves and wondered what they were doing when they did what we have come to call religion. In another sense, in most parts of the world the study of religions in a narrower, more technical sense, as the non-theological study of religion in the context of higher education, did not begin in earnest until after the Second World War. In the same period, the academic study of religions expanded greatly in Europe, which already had firm if small traditions of such study. In those parts of the world that had traditions of teaching theology, such as North America and colonial Africa, the development of the study of religions was largely a shift in emphasis from examining the world through a lens shaped by religious conviction to examining it through one shaped by perspectival pluralism, religious uncertainty, or anti-religious naturalism, usually an uneven mixture of all three. The shift rarely satisfied everyone. In other parts of the world, such as East Asia, it involved building an academic enterprise around an imported foreign category, ‘religion’.
