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{"id":755,"date":"2014-04-18T10:56:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T10:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/04\/reflexive-religious-studies-a-note.html"},"modified":"2014-04-18T10:56:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-18T10:56:00","slug":"reflexive-religious-studies-a-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/04\/reflexive-religious-studies-a-note.html","title":{"rendered":"Reflexive Religious Studies: A Note"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This process is always incomplete. Christianity, Buddhism<\/a>, and so on always retain remainders that are not fully brought under the category. Moreover, this process of becoming a religion is still ongoing. Indeed, in a certain sense it may be seen as having permeated the whole intellectual stratum of modernity. Even in modernity, \u201creligion\u201d cannot be taken as a self-evident category. Religious Studies must therefore be the discipline that suspends its primary object of inquiry, never taking for granted religion\u2019s meaning. <\/p>\n

To put it in different terms and to indicate this non-universal category, one might say that: things become religions. At the risk of skirting typographical silliness, I want to use the strike through here (evocative of the Lacanian barred subject) in order to indicate religion as an impossible object, something like a term \u201cunder erasure\u201d (Sous rature) in the Heidegger\/Derrida sense, which for our purposes we might identify with a de-essentialized process. By this I mean more than the reification of an abstraction. Irrespective of any \u201cessential\u201d nature, to designate something a religion is to place it into a series of relations with other \u201creligions.\u201d Various entities become religions by being linked up to the world-system in a way that transforms them. Here I mean to gesture toward the insights of both Immanuel Wallerstein\u2019s world-systems analysis and Niklas Luhmann\u2019s social systems theory (as well as those articulated more recently by Peter Beyer). According to a synthesis of these accounts, our current world-system came into effect along with the formation of a system exchange of knowledge and capital, which began to encircle the globe over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In so doing, it produced global systems of self-reinforcing discourse.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"