[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Sliver

I think the people that practice the religion are too biased and too vested in maintaining the status quo within their faiths. They may also not have an objective enough perspective to scrutinize their religions with the detachment a social scientist would. And are the changes they would want to make in the best interests of society in general, or would they be in the best interest of only those in the religion?

In other words, anyone who doesn’t reject religion is “too biased” to properly teach religion. How draconian.

This stereotype of the “status quo” simply betrays your extremely limited experience within the field. There are certainly religious scholars in private, confessional institutions for whom this might be true, but as an instructor who has taught in both confessional and secular institutional settings it seems to me that one’s own personal religious convictions does not deeply affect the presentation of ideas and the curriculum. Most religious scholars I know are personally religious, but I also know many who are emphatically non-religious. Their approach to religious studies is indistinguishable on these grounds; the best scholars and teachers are those who can manage to maintain “disinterest” regardless of their own personal feelings and beliefs.

Originally Posted by Sliver

As fellow humans, we should want to know what these large (and small) organizations are doing, what they believe, and why they believe it. When those beliefs are going to have an influence on the outside world, Religious Studies departments need to have a mechanism of bringing it to the attention of those it affects (whether that's those external to a religion or those in the religion) with a view to mitigating or changing the force of that influence.

We DO HAVE SUCH MECHANISMS, and virtually every religion scholar that I know is regularly and consistently publishing their findings. If we don’t publish, we lose our faculty appointments. This is an economic problem more than anything, since the sorts of findings and discoveries that we make in our research generally do not capture headlines. There is simply not much public interest in what we do, and the influence of scholarship tends to lag behind in the practice of religion by a factor of decades. For example, Archaeological discoveries that are ongoing in Israel today will likely not have a perceptible impact on church doctrine for at least another 25–50 yearss—if at all. The publication of ancient biblical texts that I will be releasing with my colleagues next year will likely not affect modern Bible translations for another generation.

Originally Posted by Sliver

We expect psychologists to study psychology so they can ultimately apply their knowledge in the real world to help people. We expect the same of sociologists. Volcanologists apply what they learn to save lives. In almost every field of study in which the subject of the study has a tangible affect on the planet, animals or people, scholars in those vocations try to use their knowledge to affect positive change. I don't see that happening in Religious Studies and I think that's because we are holding the department to too low a standard. I want to see something practical come out of it.

I suspect that your not seeing anything “practical” in part because you are not really paying much attention. But mostly, because the sorts of results that you WISH to see—the suppression and disappearance of religion—is entirely outside of the subject of investigation for religious studies.