Religion in History: The Word, the Idea, the Reality

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

This collection of essays, 10 in English and 7 in French, grew out of a
1989 Religion in History Conference inspired by the ideas of Wilfred
Cantwell Smith, Michel Despland, and Ernst Feil. These three scholars
concern themselves with the meaning of religion as it relates to
conceptions of the human place in a cosmos ordered by a superior force.
Written with a specialist in religious studies in mind, the essays
canvas the broad range of issues that occupy this dynamic field of
social and metaphysical inquiry.

Two of the weaker links in the whole, however, are Smith’s and
Feil’s own offerings. Smith’s short essay preserves the flavor of a
colloquium paper, but offers no new insights and reflects a relatively
uncritical humanist approach that clashes with current academic
practice. Feil’s piece on the concept “religio” from 1550 to 1650,
while concerned with unearthing new information, nevertheless overwhelms
the reader with too many names and too little analysis. Richard J.
Plantinga’s piece on the Dutch scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw and
Michael Pye’s work on the Japanese thinker Tominaga Nakamoto
illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the volume as a whole.
Whereas Plantinga uncritically redacts the words of van der Leeuw, Pye
not only conveys the complexities of a relatively unknown work, but also
relates Nakamoto’s text to a broader project of re-examining Asian
theology in a post-Eurocentric world.

Despite the repeatedly claimed centrality of religion to personal and
community experience, a number of the essays embody a distance from the
daily reality of human life that is problematic. Exceptions to this rule
are Despland’s historically grounded discussion of 19th-century French
religion, and Ellen Badone’s anthropological examination of changing
religious attitudes toward death amongst Roman Catholics in Brittany.
Simcha Fishbane’s frank discussion of the problems encountered by
scholars of rabbinic theology who must work in a conservative
socio-historical tradition and context speaks to the pervasiveness of
ideology in religious studies, a reality that the best essays in this
volume confront and that the rest rather tellingly ignore.