Most people do not understand what religious study really is. Professors of religion are often confused with, or assumed to be allies of, professors of theology. The reason for the confusion is no secret. All too often, even at public universities, the religion department is peopled by theologians, and many of those theologians refuse to make the…

When Marvin Meyer was asked by the National Geographic Society to translate the most-sought after religious texts in recent history, the Gospel of Judas, he discovered a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot. Judas was not the reviled traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Judas was the trusted disciple, the close confidant, the friend. When his…

This article reports on two authors' work that has been recycled by Routledge without giving credit or royalty. When William E. Deal casually flipped through "Theory for Performance Studies: A Student's Guide," published this year by Routledge, he noticed a few familiar sentences. After taking a closer look, Mr. Deal, a professor of religious…

Many college students are interested in spirituality and the "big questions" about life's meaning and values, but many professors seem not to know how to respond to that interest. In this article, the author offers several strategies to help students confront the "big questions". One way is to structure assignments and discussions so that students…

Many religious-studies professors consider personal references to one's own faith to be out of place in an academic context. However, the author contends that students nowadays need to know what a professor thinks, including what he believes about some matter of faith, if the comments compare his position with other possibilities and invite…

"Cultural literacy" has been hotly debated ever since E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s best seller of that name injected the desideratum into the culture wars in 1987. Today religious illiteracy is at least as pervasive as cultural illiteracy, and certainly more dangerous. Religious illiteracy is more dangerous because religion is the most volatile…

The academic study of religion is relatively new, beset with several interpretive problems that are not fully sorted out, namely issues of faith and scholarship, of the status of insiders and outsiders, and those problems are displayed in particularly stark relief with respect to the study of Mormonism. A non-Mormon scholar writing his…