ABSTRACT
This chapter will seek to address certain current trends in the theorization and representation of religious identity in the study of religions. The use of the concept of 'worlds' to represent the conglomerates which we speak of as 'religions' will act as a focus and paradigm of the range of approaches I will seek to critique. I will suggest that some current tendencies to represent religions as autonomous worlds of praxis and discourse exemplify an unjustified reification of identity - a reification which is not only ahistorical and inadequate to the phenomena being theorized, but which both implicitly and explicitly serves to further the interests of those committed to essentialist interpretations of their own traditions in the pursuit of allegedly orthodox authenticity. Such reification allows the theorization of hybridity and transformation only in terms of heterodox deviation or alien contamination. I will first set the scene with a brief overview of the recent trends I will be engaging with. This will be followed by a critique of some exemplars of these trends, principally of the representation of Christianity by 'Radical Orthodoxy' and of the notion of 'worlds' as employed by Hans Frei and the so-called 'Yale School'. I will then attempt to analyse this drive to reification and authenticity using Jacques Derrida's reflection on these processes in the history of Western philosophy. The final section of the chapter will consider alternative ways of theorizing religious identity and make several proposals which seek to maintain the tension between abstraction and specificity which arises during the course of such theorizing.
