ABSTRACT
My topic in this chapter is the significance of the Study of Religions as a modern academic discipline. In my inaugural lecture ‘Religious Intelligence and the Study of Religions’, given in April 2000 as Professor of the Study of Religions at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, I described for the benefit of non-specialists such matters as the phenomenological method in the study of religions, ‘methodological agnosticism’ and what I saw as the gradual maturation or evolution, or unfolding, or unravelling, of the discipline of Religious Studies, particularly in this country over the last thirty years or so; in other words, since I first encountered it as an undergraduate at Lancaster University in the early 1970s. This autobiographical reference was not accidental; one of the more obvious developments in the Study of Religions under the influence of postmodernism over the past few years has been the trend towards acknowledging the subjectivity of the scholar. We recognise now that we are agents in the construction of knowledge, not standard bearers of pure objectivity; that each of us has been formed by events and each of us has his or her own agenda.1
