When Play Gets Serious: The Study of Religion Beyond the Limits of Critique

Abstract

Abstract This article takes as its starting point the deep and enduring attachments between scholars of religion and their religious subjects to which the secular study of religion sometimes gives rise—attachments that can have profoundly transformative intellectual and existential consequences for the scholar. The methodological posture of critique, however, forecloses the possibility of such attachments. As an alternative to critique, the postcritical both renders these attachments legible and plumbs their epistemological potential to generate new insights into religion, religions, and religious phenomena. A promising methodological horizon for the future of religious studies, the postcritical makes room for the kinds of attachments that follow from taking religion seriously, making room for the possibility that close engagements of the religious kind might not inhibit but, to the contrary, advance scholarship on religion.