Conceptualizing religion: Some recent reflections

How might we best conceptualize or define religion? Or, for that matter, should we dispense with the term religion in favor of something else? Proffered answers to those questions are not only relevant for marking out and sustaining a field of scholarship in the academy, but they relate more broadly to assumptions and theorizing about the human condition. In this paper, 1 first briefly describe and evaluate three advocacies respecting the conceptual problem that are not discussed in my book, Conceptualizing Religion (Saler, 1993, 2000). While these examples do not exhaust the diversity of available approaches to conceptualizing and defining religion, they testify to that diversity. Second, I outline my approach. Third and finally, I discuss a probable factor that works against an easy acceptance of my proposals for conceptualizing religion.