Our Primary Expertise: A Future for the Study of Religion brings the author full circle—from his first book in 1997, on how claims that religion was unique were used to establish the North America field to his present argument that its future is instead based on the degree to which its findings can be applied in a wide assortment of areas, both inside and outside of academia. Its previously uncollected essays, all with new introductions that frame this timely argument, make plain that longstanding critiques of how scholars go about their work have always been about the study of religion’s odd home in the humanities—a place that’s increasingly vulnerable in today’s university. Calling on members of the field not just to revise their research methods but also the ways that they train the next generation, Our Primary Expertise is the only work in the field taking seriously that scholars of religion can help to secure the future of their own field, if only they’re prepared to see “the life of the mind” as a rhetoric that they can no longer afford.
 

RUSSELL T. MCCUTCHEON is university research professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He is the author of many books, including Manufacturing Religion and Critics Not Caretakers, and is the editor of Teaching in the Study of Religion and Beyond and Religious Studies Beyond the Discipline.

Contents
Preface
Sources

“And He Was Gone”: An Introduction

Part I: Overview
1. Religious Studies: Wither and Why?

Part II: Contributions
2. Introduction: Not Playing Favorites
“It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in it! It’s a Sin!”: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Costs of Saving Others from Themselves
3. Introduction: Complicating Not Simplifying
“And That’s Why No One Takes the Humanities Seriously”
4. Introduction: Scrutinizing Structures
The Gatekeeping Rhetoric of Collegiality in the Study of Religion (co-authored with Aaron W. Hughes)
5. Introduction: Practicing Self-Reflexivity
Scholars are People Too: The (Sometimes) Difficult Shift to the Discourse of Crisis
6. Introduction: Redescribing Claims
The Situated Nature of “I’m Spiritual but Not Religious” Claims (co-authored with Andie Alexander)
7. Introduction: Relevance through Generalization
Redescribing Our Primary Expertise Or, In Praise of Promiscuous Curiosities
 
Afterword
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Index