In the passage in question, Masuzawa starts out sympathetic to the poor professors of non-western traditions conventionally charged with teaching the popular "Introduction to World Religions" courses which keep religious studies programs solvent, but her fellow feeling runs dry.
These non-Western specialists turned teachers of "world religions" not infrequently complain that such a comprehensive treatment of the subject in one course is bound to be too broad a survey, too flattening an analysis. It would be an unmanageable survey indeed, unless, perhaps, one begins with the scholastically untenable assumption that all religions are everywhere the same in essence, divergent and particular only in their ethnic, national, or racial expressions. Of course, this is an assumption alarmingly prevalent among the world religions books now available on the market. And it cannot be denied that this well-meaning yet uncritical assumption is what brings a large number of people into our classrooms year after year.
She grants the difficult realities of neoliberal university budgets but concludes, darkly, one cannot assume that this line of work is intellectually responsible just because it is economically viable. I was so put off by this condemnation last year that I vowed to take on constructing a course in world religions, something which I had so far (as she has been) been spared having to teach. But that was then, this is now. In a couple of months I need to put my money where my mouth was! I've had some nifty ideas since then but all pretty vague. Confronting the sharpness of Masuzawa's critique again I realize it's going to be a heavy lift. Defaulting to the idea that religions are in some respect comparable will be hard to resist. Notice served, again!
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9-10
