Editor’s Note

Abstract

The Journal of the American Academy of Religion publishes top scholarly articles that cover the full range of religions together with provocative studies of the methods and theories by which these are explored. In my interpretation of the JAAR’s charge, this last purpose is the most important one: to raise provocative questions about the ways we do religious studies, to study and therefore challenge ourselves. The journal serves as a space for the free and critical exercise of what is a necessary skill for the study and analysis of religions, cultures, people, and behaviors. That is the skill of reflexivity, a person’s intellectual ability to step out of herself and her society and reflect critically on how she is thinking or how she is not thinking but inheriting and perpetuating the assumptions of her culture and society, including her intellectual traditions and institutions, such as the field of religious studies or the American Academy of Religion. In the act of reflexivity, we think about our own thinking and so free ourselves from the grip of convention.