The Politics of Classification

Forthcoming, 2025

This collection brings together an international team of scholars to assess and think with the work of Russell T. McCutcheon. Though McCutcheon is often accused of bringing the field into disrepute, and thus often ignored or dismissed, the chapters collected here prefer to see him as one of the foremost observers and critics of the intellectual practices associated with the field of religious studies.

The volume is divided into two sections. The first deals with theoretical engagements of his works: pushing it in different directions, critiquing certain aspects of it, and seeing if some of his earlier work still holds. The second part provides a collection of more practical applications as scholars working in various subfields (Buddhism, Islam, early Christianity, and Christian Nationalism in the US) use aspects of McCutcheon’s work to illumine those subfields.