Keeping “critical” critical: A conversation from Culture on the Edge

Abstract

In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge—a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions—had a conversation online on the use of the terms “critique” and “critical,” terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that the members of the group thought it worthwhile to focus some attention on them. What follows is the transcript of their conversation.

What makes Critical Religion critical? A response to Russell McCutcheon

“…Not all those within the critical religion camp are in agreement that the scholar should be non-normative in their critique of religion. Granted, the introduction to the Culture on the Edge symposium in CRR (Martin et al 2014) sides with McCutcheon on this issue, and Craig Martin (2015a, 299) thinks that it is possible to have a non-normative definition of the category of religion. To achieve this, it would have to be a "second order, analytical term, rather than .…”

“…To back himself up, McCutcheon quotes from members of Culture on the Edge, who claim that critique can be non-normativeakin to the notion of historicization, denoting a scholarly attitude in which our work rigorously examines the situation and consequences, taking seriously the human and happenstance, examining the contingent and the always interested basis of claims of identity and place. (Martin et al. 2014, 300 quoted in McCutcheon 2018, 301)But I ask, historicizing what?…”

“…The Facebook exchange was subsequently published online in Religion Bulletin (Martin 2015b(Martin , 2015c. The position presented in the editorials triggered responses by the Culture on the Edge Group (Martin et al 2014), Martin (2015a), and Timothy Fitzgerald (2015Fitzgerald ( , 2016, which we published in subsequent issues of the journal.…”

“…To back himself up, McCutcheon quotes from members of Culture on the Edge, who claim that critique can be non-normative akin to the notion of historicization, denoting a scholarly attitude in which our work rigorously examines the situation and consequences, taking seriously the human and happenstance, examining the contingent and the always interested basis of claims of identity and place. (Martin et al 2014 Martin et al (2014) somehow seem to think that when you historicize something, your work is non-normative. Quite the contrary, historians always approach history from an angle, a perspective, which in many cases are identified with schools of history, all of which are normative (for example, the Annales school, Marxist historiography, social history, and in particular the post structuralism of Foucault, etc.).…”

Why be critical? Introducing a symposium onCapitalizing Religion

“…Four editorials -jointly by Warren S. Goldstein, Roland Boer, Rebekka King, and Jonathan Boyarin -set out the more Marxist, Frankfurt School end of the spectrum (Goldstein, Boyarin, and Boer 2013;2014;. Martin -along with Russell McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and others -has countered by defending a reflexive-historicizationof-concepts conception of critique (Martin et al 2014;Martin 2015a;2015b;2015c;Fitzgerald 2015). The majority of scholars taking this side of the debate are affiliated with the Culture on the Edge group (http://edge.ua.edu/).…”