OVERVIEW OF THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES DEPARTMENT HAMILTON COLLEGE FRAMING DOCUMENT MARCH 2019 Heidi M. Ravven, Chair When one encounters the word 'religion' in a translation of an ancient text: First, cross out the word whenever it occurs. Next, find a copy of the text in question in its original language and see what word (if any) is being translated by 'religion'. Third, come up with a different translation: It almost doesn't matter what. Anything besides 'religion.' Edwin Judge, a personal communication to Brent Nogbri cited in Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013), p. 156 quoted by C. Barton and D. Boyarin in Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities, (New York, Fordham University Press, 2016) p. 1 [I]t was the West that [i.e., falsely] made from this collection of attitudes and ideas an autonomous, singular complex, profoundly different from everything surrounding it. And it conferred on this distinct complex a kind of destiny or essential anthropological vocation: humans are held to be religious in the same way as they are omnivorous, that is by nature, through the effects of an inborn disposition. Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003) p. 12 quoted by C. Barton and D. Boyarin in Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities, (New York, Fordham University Press, 2016) p. 5 "[R]eligion is still widely if somewhat loosely used by historians and social scientists as if it were a genuine cross-cultural category. Typically such writers treat religion as one among a number of different kinds of sociocultural phenomena whose institutions can be studied historically and sociologically. This approach may seem to have some obvious validity in the context of societies (especially Western Christian ones) where a cultural and juridical distinction is made between religion and nonreligion, between religion and secular, between church and state. We shall argue, however, that in most cross- cultural contexts, such a distinction, if it can be made at all, is at best unhelpful and at worst positively misleading because it imposes a superficial and distorting level of analysis on the data." C. Barton and D. Boyarin in Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities, (New York, Fordham University Press, 2016) p. 9 "Religion cannot reasonably be taken as a valid analytical category since it does not pick out any distinctive cultural aspect of human life." Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 4 quoted in C. Barton and D. 1