Method Today - Redescribing Approaches to the Study of Religion - Brad Stoddard
10. Perhaps Action Enough
Method Today - Redescribing Approaches to the Study of Religion - Brad Stoddard
Emily D. Crews [+]
University of Chicago Divinity School
Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and uses historical and ethnographic methods to make sense of the ways that religion, gender, and the reproductive body are entangled in the formation of personhood.
Description
In "Description, Prescription, and the Category of 'Religion,'" Emily Crews offers a response to Naomi Goldenberg's "Toward a Pushier Critique of 'Religion' and Attendant Categories." After a summary of Goldenberg's argument, she focuses on three primary issues raised by the article: the imbrication of governments and the category of 'religion,' the relationship between categories and essences, and the generative tensions between the descriptive and prescriptive methods. She ultimately argues that Goldenberg's efforts might be a persuasive roadmap for projects in Religious Studies that productively intertwine the normative and the scholarly.