ABSTRACT
Studying religion involves confronting absolutely fundamental dimensions of individual and communal human experience that are involved in various ways in most other arenas of human activity. The study of religion as a necessarily multi-disciplinary field of study can hasten the needed shift in the modern university to a more open, less guild-dominated, and less compartmentalized community of scholars. The history of religion, or more broadly the study of religion, is certainly not the only way of developing a more adequate understanding of human experience, nor, in author's opinion, does it have special, let alone unique, advantages in this endeavor that other intellectual fields or disciplines lack. The author convictions about "religious studies" in general, being an important subject or field of study, but not a discipline with its own methodology, developed directly out of his own personal experience of other fields and disciplines of the humanities and my subsequent, rather tardy entry into the study of religion to begin with.
