ABSTRACT
“Knowledge of any set of phenomena, whether natural or cultural, comes about not primarily from the application and development of taxonomies, but from explanatory theorizing”—so we read in the entry on “Typology, Classification” in 1995’s The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion. Important to recognize, however, is that this basic role played by explanatory theories—a position shared across many of the human and natural sciences—has long been contested in the study of religion, all depending on what someone means by this term religion and how they think it ought to be studied. The noun “explanation,” often opposed in modern speech to the word “interpretation,” comes into the English language somewhere around the fifteenth century and derives from the classical Latin explanare , meaning to level, flatten, and to spread or roll something out. This derivation links the modern English verb “to explain” to the other modern verb “to plane” as well as the modern noun “plane” along with “explicate”.
