Why the World Needs Religious Studies | Culture | Religion Dispatches.
May the field forgive me for offering a bit of very crude historical psychoanalysis and master-narrativizing to catch everyone up on where we stand. Academic, non-sectarian religious studies in the United States can be more or less traced to the Supreme Court’s 1963 Abington Township v. Schempp decision, which carved out a distinction between teaching about religion, which is okay, and the teaching of religion, which violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Catechists had to shuffle out of public classrooms, and suddenly there was space for a new kind of teacher/scholar who would talk about but not of. It would have to be a space in which all people, of any background or creed, could participate as equals.