Comments on Robert A. Segal's defense of "the Religion school"

Abstract

It is interesting that Professor Segal, a gifted essayist by anyone's account, would purport to defend a school of thought whose existence he denies (1995). Moreover, he cites an impressive array of scholars whom he would associate with this non-existent school. Now, he may cite all these people either with good reason or without. If the latter is the case, his citations are in error and he should retract them. If the former is the case, then there must in fact be a coherent school of thought, a school that linked, for convenience's sake, with the journal, Religion. Most of the claims that are presented in the Segal defense are directed at misreadings of my crude and naive prose. For example, where ineptly wrote, I will take up each of these apparent essentials of the Religion school and address them from a symbolic interactionist perspective (1995: 252), the defense essay presents the suggestion that Blasi surprisingly confines in terpretive sociology to symbolic interactionism. Phenomenology would seem equally efficacious for his purposes. (Segal 1995: 259) Now, my purpose was to present a standpoint shared by a large number of sociologists; phe nomenology would be useful to present a standpoint from a kindred but different number of them. imply no intent to exclude phenomenological sociology from the interpretive problematic, and indeed authored a book some years ago devoted specifically to using phenomenology in such an in terpretive sociological program of inquiry. In his defense, Segal cites Max Weber as a sociologist who sought to com bine an interpretive approach with an explanatory one (Segal 1995: 260), suggesting such an influential scholar as he had no difficulty explaining religion and other human institutions. The implication is that my insistence on grounding concepts in the social actors' understandings is more or less out of the mainstream of the field. Weber's prose was probably less naive than mine, but let us allow him to speak for himself: