Religion Department

Department News

PRPL Division Speaker: Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

March 17, 2022

Dr. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is a Historian and Philosopher of the Human Sciences from Williams College. Dr. Ānanda Josephson Storm will be speaking here at Reed on April 20, 2022. Please email Cory Chambers for the Zoom link.

The End of Theory of “Religion”? Process Social Ontology and Reconceptualizing the Human Sciences

Religious Studies used to be able to presuppose its object of analysis. It was often taken for granted that there were different “religions” that by virtue of their classification as such ostensibly shared a common essence, function, or perhaps even origin. For a considerable period, the special task allotted to our discipline was to advance the understanding of the nature of religion. But those days are long gone. For more than fifty years, a host of theorists have challenged the universality of religion and its utility as an analytical category.  It may surprise readers coming from other disciplines, but most scholars trained in Religious Studies today now consider it naïve to presume “religion” as a concept.

This might seem to pose a special challenge for our discipline. Religious Studies has no distinctive methodology or clearly delimited territory of focus. The only thing we supposedly share is our commitment to a category we no longer believe in.

This talk will set out from the dissolution of “religion” as an analytical object, but rather than restoring it to its former glory it will complete its disintegration. It will argue that granting the critiques of “religion” and related analytical categories, actually tell us something fundamental about the categories themselves. Based on work elaborated in my new monograph—Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (2021), I will argue that many of these critiques can be solved if the social world is understood in terms of a Process Social Ontology. Thus, the very things that were supposed to have precluded the study of “religion” will turn out to be the opening to what amounts to new theory of society and how it should be studied. This work thus proffers a re- theorizing of the social sphere, and its materialization including a fresh theory of the formation of social categories (applicable to religion, race, science, art, and so on). If we want to change society, we need to understand it better.