The Troubled Soul of the Academy: American Learning and the Problem of Religious Studies

Abstract

The decade of the 1960's was important for American scholars who studied religion. Prospects for employment brightened considerably as public and private universities and Colleges created undergraduate and graduate programs in religious studies. Becoming more self-conscious about their academic identity, professors who staffed these programs founded the American Academy of Religion in 1964, an organization designed to promote scholarship and publication in religion. One index to the growing prominence of religious studies was the survey of humanistic scholarship commissioned by Princeton University's Council on the Humanities and funded by the Ford Foundation. Of the thirteen volumes in this series, two were devoted to the field of religion: Clyde A. Holbrook'sReligion, A Humanistic Field(1963), andReligion(1965), a summary of the various fields in religious studies, edited by Paul Ramsey.