In terms of pedagogy, this volume is particularly helpful to instructors of method and theory: the text has laid out solid arguments regarding the complementarity of objectivity and subjectivity within the study of religion which present a more inclusive way of evaluating seemingly contending approaches.

Religious Studies Review

Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion, by Christopher M. Driscoll and Monica R. Miller, challenges the idea that religion can be studied through methods that are independent of the identities of the scholars working in the field. While it impressively sums up historical developments in the field of religious studies, it is a book that is immensely relevant in the current day and naturally encourages self-reflection and awareness as a response from the reader.

Reading Religion

The study of religion needs this book. With an eye toward institutional decolonization and conversational revitalization, Driscoll and Miller ask us to reflect on the lies we tell when we talk about proper discipline and right method. Departments of religious studies should read this book and ask themselves what they can do to forge better interpretive futures from the bad normative assumptions of our academic past.

Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

Some scholars of religion object when religious identities are brought into the academy. They hold that academic work requires a method that maintains a distance from the people one studies. In this incisive book, Christopher Driscoll and Monica Miller push back against this narrative. Rejecting the claim that there is a method free of identity politics, and rejecting the ideology whereby a European, 'white' world became modern by painting others as anti-modern, tribal, and religious, Driscoll and Miller offer a very welcome interrogation of those approaches that call themselves the critical study of religion.

Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University

Miller and Driscoll offer a brilliant and dialogical engagement with leading scholars argue that theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of religion in which they argue that by the very idea of location implies that the scholar of religion cannot ignore identity as an as an important theoretical tool because it embraces and has broad implications for culture, race, gender, class, and ethnicity. In arguing that identity, especially race constitutes a critical analytical tool they rightly call on scholars of religion to develop a critical posture towards race as one of the many social realities in developing a critical understanding of religion because whether intended or not, behind many disinterested approaches lurk the overriding notion of identity which if not checked through critical inquiry, colors the study of religion and deprives methods and theory of providing critical tools to an understanding of the very concrete personal and social dynamics of identity that animate the study (and one might add) the practice of religion.

Elias Kifon Bongmba, Harry and Hazel Chair in Christian Theology, Rice University

The authors argue that theory-and-method in the study of religion is no more sui generis than its object. Method is shot through with values and interests rooted in the identities of white male scholars from colonizing societies. Method indexes identity. Method is at the cutting edge of distinguishing analyst from data, civilized from primitive, and European “Man” from the rest. Method as Identity is an incisive interrogation of the study of religion that demonstrates how an uninterrogated whiteness haunts every move we make.

William David Hart, Macalester College