| Abstract: | There are three things that may serve to disrupt the casual habits of intellect operative within a majority of studies that address American religion: (1) poesis must be practiced as a challenge to flat-footed analyses invested in common-sense literacy; (2) there must be an open and honest discussion of how scholars conceive of the characters they study and how they represent those subjects in print or other media; and (3) subtle attention must be paid to issues of discourse, that is, to issues of how people make themselves up even as they are made up by ideas, concepts, and words that have nothing essentially to do with them. |
