Playing with Religion: Delight at the Border between Epistemological Worlds

Abstract

Abstract This article builds on conversations that began here in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2019 on Jonathan Z. Smith’s legacy to the study of religion. Specifically, in this article I take up and elaborate on Heather Blair’s tentative proposal for thinking about religious studies as a kind of play. Beginning with Blair and engaging with the work of Sam Gill, Tyler Roberts, Robert Orsi, and others, I put forward a strong argument for adopting a playful approach to the study of religion. A programmatic alternative to reading religion against the grain and between the lines, a ludic approach to religious studies enables the scholar to engage with religion in ways that fruitfully combine at least provisional commitment to its rules with ironic disavowal, inviting the scholar to play between the incommensurate epistemologies of enchanted religious worlds, on the one hand, and the disenchanted modern academy, on the other. It is here, I argue, in this frictive space between these mutually exclusive and logically incompatible positions that religious studies finds its niche (or should), trafficking—and delighting—in the creative insights generated by the oscillation between fit and no-fit.