ABSTRACT
From its inception, the academic study of religion has been as disorganized and decentred as any discipline in the humanities and social sciences. Consider psychology. During the twentieth century, emerging psychological schools vied for supremacy, each certain of the superiority of its approach and its ability to unify the field. In reality, psychology as a discipline has become more diversified. Already comprising more than fifty divisions designated by the American Psychological Association, the number of sub-disciplines continues to grow, and psychologists still lack consensus on fundamental matters of theory and method. Or consider literary theory. The works of Beckett or Bellows or Saramago might make for stirring reading, but are their deeper meanings as texts, as Roland Barthes (1976) would have it, best revealed through the spectacles of Marxist or Freudian thought, of feminism or historicism, of New Criticism or old criticism, of structuralism or post-structuralism, of Queer theory or the French critics Derrida and Foucault?
