Imagining the future study of religion and spirituality

Abstract

Having learned many useful lessons from the movement of deconstruction over the previous decades, it is high time for our discipline to move forward and begin reconstructing the study of religion as a whole on new and better foundations. If we want to have our voices heard and have an impact on the wider public debate instead of being marginalized and defunded as irrelevant, we need a positive and convincing, even inspiring new narrative about religion that demonstrates its great importance not just to societal but to general human concerns. The article outlines one possible direction for such a new narrative, focusing on the key terms ‘experience,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘imagination,’ and ‘spirituality.’ Far from implying a new kind of religionism along the lines of the Eranos or Eliade schools, this means that we should move such topics out of the taboo sphere for secular scholars and reclaim them for critical non-religionist methods and approaches.