McCutcheon/"Religion" in Theory and Practice, 9. So You’re Not a Priest?

Published here for the first time, this chapter—a portion of which was originally a blog post as part of a series—addresses the challenge of not just describing ones work to non-specialists but, as a scholar of religion interested in category formation and the implications of classification systems, the difficulties often encountered when discussing ones work to other scholars who apparently take for granted the limited areas in which scholars of religion ought to carry out their work. Because of the influence that work on category formation has had over the past decades, early career readers would do well to think through the problem well ahead of finding themselves in a job interview—for the assumption that scholars of religions merely study one or more of the world religions will not go away any time soon.