ABSTRACT
Scholarly analyses are only as good as the words in our possession and scholars’ agreement on how they are used and what they do. Words function as the basic tools that we use to name things, to bring features of the world that catch our attention or our curiosity into sharper focus, and to construct a set of narratives about them and their relationships to other things, all of which are often passed on from generation to generation. The long-standing assumption that religion is best or properly defined as having something to do with a god, despite still being widely shared to this day, is hardly the only way of defining religion. With this problem of simplicity and ease in mind, we should also note that the goal of many scholars of religion is either to chronicle how people already talk about themselves and their worlds or to arrive at some sort of mutual understanding amidst the different religions.
