Afterword

The study of religion has come a long way since the bad old days of bold, universalizing theory. The claim that religion can be readily recognized across time and place because it has a sort of ‘essence’ is today viewed as preposterous. What we would much rather insist on is the notion that religion as a category is shifting and complex, with vagueness kept at the center of our analyses. In this article, I play devil’s advocate by asking what (more) we can possibly gain by continuing to foreground religion’s conceptual shiftiness. Reflecting on this collection, I explore how a focus on genealogies and biographies might offer us new insight on the distinction between religiosity and religion. Defining religiosity as a species of attention that inheres in persons, I suggest that writing about and researching religion engages the religiosity of the author, and that religiosity, in turn, may (or may not) bring about definitions or assemblages we might recognize as ‘religion’.