ABSTRACT
Smith is the author of five volumes of essays on religion, published between 1978 and 2004. These volumes contain upwards of fifty essays, all written from the mid-1960s through the early 2000s. Many commentators on Smith have taken the mantra, there is no data for religion, to constitute an invocation of absolute constructivism. Reading the term religion in Smith's phrase as referring to a category is not new. The challenge is that, while most readers would probably agree to put the quote marks in Smith's phrase, relatively few actually interpret it through this emendation, religion, but rather elaborate and react to the implications of the phrase as if the referents of the term religion were traditions themselves or, far more damning in terms of the potential ethical implications of Smith's position. Reading Smith is hard work. His essays are self-consciously dense with data of multiple types regarding manifold areas of human activity.
