THAT OLD WORKHORSE 'RELIGION'
In the mid sixties I took an elective unit at university, while I was studying history and philosophy; it was in comparative religion. According to Carl Raschke in his article "Theorizing Religion at the turn of the Millennium," the study of religion only emerged as an academic field at universities in the late 1960s. After thirty years as an academic subject the field is now going through a crisis. Arising out of confessional and sectarian approaches to religion, out of comparativism and classical anthropology, out of the writings of Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade and Clifford Geertz it was fuelled by the New Age movement and its curious contemporary syncretism. The study of religion has been a consortium of disparate intellectual agendas responding to an historically contingent set of market conditions. Now, Raschke states, after being sustained for all the years of my post-graduate life, 1967 to 2001, the academic study of religion cannot survive without sweeping changes. -Ron Price with thanks to Carl Raschke, Internet, 25 November 2001.
I got in early back then
as the study of religion
was finally respectable,
religious pluralism
at last a commitment,
but covert faith agendas
still competed with
scientific rigour.
Christianity was still
number one in this course,
as obvious as the nose on your face;
the guy who taught it
was a committed Christian
from the word go, I liked him
quite a nice chap, I thought.
Deregulating the market,
opening up to global competition,
the praxis and exposure
to a varied theological espousal
got off the ground,
but you had to watch for
that hidden confessional curriculum.
Then, there was that sweeping
efflorescence of definition;
an undemarcated topography
requiring a whole new direction
for that old workhorse 'religion.'
Always there would be questions,
always an angst for meanings,
always a totality of experience,
the aura, the patina, the introspection,
always the need for redemption,
always a resurrection of memory,
always the mythic and the mystical.
always there would be the need for limits.
Ron Price
26 November 2001
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