McCutcheon/"Religion" in Theory and Practice, 1. Feast and Famine in the Study of Religion

Written originally as the Afterword for a volume of papers from the 2015 annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR), this chapter argues that, although it now seems to some that theoretical issues and critical acumen pervade the academic study of religion, what some call the post-theoretical field is still characterized by an idealist approach that presumes the word religion merely names a deeply personal, pre-social disposition that is simply expressed in varied situations.