task of the history of religions is to delineate the religious meaning of humankind's religious experience and its expressions through the integration and 'significant organization' of diverse forms of religious data.... For historians of religions, all particular religious traditions are 'parts' of the 'whole' of humankind's religious experience, and should be studied from the perspective of the whole.'With these words, Joseph Kitagawa succinctly states the program of that movement in the history of religions with which his name is a virtual synonym. Established byJoachim Wach and catapulted to prominence in the late 1950s and the 1960s under the tutelage especially of the late Mircea Eliade, the has been a dominating force in the history of religions for the last 40 years. As the quote indicates, it has promoted a hermeneutical approach to religion that insists upon religious meaning as a unique, nonreducible dimension of human life, a sort of meaning that invites us to comprehend it in its uniqueness and its totality. We can gauge the prominence of the Chicago school in part from the criticism that its exemplars have received, intense and sometimes scathing criticism. The most vehement and persistent critics have taken issue precisely with the school's hermeneutical orientation, although not always explicitly. They have preferred analytical to hermeneutical modes of thought, whether in the tradition of logical empiricism, the direction toward which most North American critics have inclined, or in the tradition of a critical, positivistic notion of history, as has been more often the case in Europe. The contributions of these critics should not be overlooked. Crucial to their cause is the demand-fundamental to all of