Philosophy of religion?

So here I am at Boston University at "The Future of the Philosophy of Religion: A Symposium of Younger Scholars." (We participants aren't sure whether to be confused or flattered at "younger"; I told the organizer he might be provoking a mass midlife crisis which might mark our generation for ever.) There are eight of us, averaging about age forty, and the conference organizer has slyly chosen four pairs of people who know each other from graduate school - two analytic philosophers of religion from Yale, two scholars of Indian Buddhism from Chicago, two people from the Boston area who work on German idealism, and two of us from Princeton's religion department. Each of us has comment on the paper of our erstwhile classmate - contextualizing the approach but also, as siblings do, carefully positioning yourself at some distance from your friend - in the years since we all finished our PhDs, we've each had ample opportunity to go our own way!

My friend J, who now teaches in the department of theology at Notre Dame, started her remarks by saying she felt both an impostor and a heretic being here - an impostor since she thinks of herself as a Christian ethicist rather than a philosopher of religion, and a heretic for thinking one should be both historicist and metaphysical. I won't tax your patience with the latter point, but with the former I could certainly resonate. I suppose I am a philosopher of religion by default, but I think of myself as in religious studies (which doesn't have an easy moniker: a student or scholar of religion is, I suppose, preferable to religious studiesist) rather than philosophy. My remarks (whose first few paragraphs you know) were entitled "The philosophy of religion is dead, long live the philosophy of religion!" My claim was that the field as it now stands is intellectually bankrupt: hopelessly old-fashioned and Eurocentric in its predominantly "theist" (not even Christian!) discussions, out of tune with developments and discoveries in religious studies, and fundamentally reactive and reactionary in its orientation - but that, if changed in almost every respect, it might turn out to be a very important project for the future. I hoped that my challenge would provoke people to say things would make me more hopeful, but didn't expect it.

Imagine my surprise, then, on finding myself, halfway through, entertaining fond thoughts about "philosophy of religion." It's not that I agree with everything being said, and the more we talk the clearer the challenges - what is religion? what is philosophy of religion? what's it good for? And yet: if it's people like those here, and conversations like those we're having, then I wouldn't mind being part of it! It turns out several others - not just J and I - arrived estranged from this field - and yet we accepted the invitation to come. Maybe our premature collective midlife crises will generate a new lease on life for the philosophy of religion!