Reframing the history of new religious movements

In this special issue of Nova Religio four historians of medieval and early modern Christianities offer perspectives on basic conceptual frameworks widely employed in new religions studies, including modernization and secularization, radicalism/violent radicalization, and diversity/diversification. Together with a response essay by J. Gordon Melton, these articles suggest strong possibilities for renewed and ongoing conversation between scholars of "old" and "new" religions. Unlike some early discussions, ours is not aimed simply at questioning the distinction between old and new religions itself. Rather, we think such conversation between scholarly fields holds the prospect of productive scholarly surprise and perspectival shifts, especially via the disciplinary practice of historiographical criticism

"Increased religious diversity" in Canada: Some questions and suggestions

The academic study of religious diversity is well established in many national settings, including in Canada. Quantitative claims about religious diversity, often in conjunction with statements that are comparative, either historically or geographically, are a prominent feature of this scholarship. This article poses methodological, historiographical, and ethical-political questions that arise, especially from commonplace claims to "increased religious diversity."

Why was there even a reformation in Lindau? The myth and mystery of Lindau’s conflict-free reformation

Histories of Lindau emphasize a remarkably conflict-free course of early reform in that particular locale. This view is established and maintained by multiple means, including hyper-credulity towards the peacefulness asserted by local authorities, anachronistic projections of the confessional “compromise” that was the Tetrapolitana back into the 1520s, and a deliberately narrow definition of key subjects, to exclude obvious contrary evidence. While Bernd Moeller has recently remarked that Lindau society was so harmonious that it is surprising there was any Reformation at all, archival sources actually indicate conflict in several areas pertaining to the early Reformation in Lindau, including interpersonal violence over key theological issues, the social conflict of the Peasant’s War, and stark communal divisions over iconoclasm, resulting in the ritual conflict of a feud. This article is both a particular historical corrective and a general historiographical illustration of how mythographic and historiographic modes may be entangled in early Reformation studies

Revisiting the confessional: Donald wiebe’s “small ‘c’ confessional,” its historical entailments and linguistic entanglements

1. Sometime in the late 1980s, the academy as a whole entered a phase of intense self-scrutiny, occasioned by a combination of factors ranging from the end of the Cold War, to a radical shift in the way universities around the world were funded, to the conditions of the American culture wars, to various theorists’ shrill insistence on something called “reflexivity.” Remarkably, Religious Studies was at that time already well poised to join the orgy of self-criticism. One of the texts that prepared us so well for the emergence of the dedicated sub-discipline of Religious Studies commonly called “method and theory” was Don Wiebe's “The Failure of Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion,” which appeared in 1984. It was a full decade after the appearance of that article that I was appointed to my first full-time academic position in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. I had just completed a doctorate and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in History (German Reformation), and was a neophyte in Religious Studies. So I read hundredsof articles and monographs in my first years as a bona fide “religionist.” None impressed me as deeply as Wiebe's article. To this day, among the carefully cultivated rows in the maturing forest of methodologically and theoretically “informed” studies of religion-poststructuralist, postmodernist, postcolonialist, etc.-Wiebe's article still towers above and stands apart, an ancient tree affording unique orientation for those lost in the woods