Russell McCutcheon, "Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, second edition" (Oxford UP, 2026)

About this episode

Russell McCutcheon discusses the impact of his book 'Manufacturing Religion' and critiques the notion of religion as sui generis.

First published in 1997, Manufacturing Religion was a controversial book because it critiqued a widely adopted style of scholarship that presumes that religion is utterly unique, inexplicable, and therefore able only to be interpreted by privileged scholars. Claiming religion to be sui generis (or self-caused), this approach has undisclosed practical effects--institutional and geo-political--at a variety of sites, from the types of textbooks commonly used in introductory classes to the way that political events are often represented in the mass media. Russell McCutcheon documented the ubiquity of this approach and showed how harmful it was Updating its wide-ranging evidence and adding new chapters, this new edition demonstrates the impact of this critique while showing how little the field has generally moved in the past thirty years. Russell T. McCutcheon earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and is now an honorary life member of the International Association for the History of Religions. Beginning in 2001, he was the Department Chair at the University of Alabama, a role that he played for 18 years. His many publications on the history of the field and the practical…

People in this episode

Host: Jacob Barrett

Guest: Russell McCutcheon

Topics covered

• Manufacturing Religion
• sui generis religion
• politics of nostalgia
• scholarship critique
• history of religions
• educational resources

Keywords

• Manufacturing Religion
• sui generis
• scholarship
• politics of nostalgia
• Russell McCutcheon
• religion studies
• educational resources

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Toronto, International Association for the History of Religions, University of Alabama, Oxford UP

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