I attended this year's annual meeting of the AAR virtually again this year. The convention was in person, but it was in Texas, and many of us opted not to go, first for covid safety reasons and then in protest at the state Republicans' brazenly barbaric laws on voting and reproductive rights. Enough, in fact, that most of the sessions were over zoom. While I miss the camraderie of being together with people, it'll have to wait another year. Meanwhile, I was able to attend plenty of interesting panels. For the first year in a while, my eye was caught by many panels sponsored by the Philosophy of Religion section, though I'm not sure if this year's range of themes bespeaks a transformation of the field as younger scholars reach beyond the tired old canon to urgent new questions and interlocutors - or its dissolution. Someone mentioned that the number of job searches in "Philosophy of Religion" had fallen eightfold in recent years, and wondered if there was still a space in the academic study of religion for "normative" rather than "descriptive" study. I'm not comfortable with either of those terms: every description is normative, and every normative view involved in various, often unarticulated, descriptive assertions. And don't we all see the normative (!) blindness of the claim that one can and should be "normative" without specifying context, community, commitments?
Particularly fruitful discussions for me were a celebration of the collection Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion, which "stag[es] a conversation with Black, Indigenous, and decolonial studies" by engaging scholars in these fields who are (also) doing philosophy of religion, and a round robin of participants in a project called Global Critical Philosophy of Religion, which has been exploring ways of reimagining the field of comparative philosophy beyond western assumptions about what philosophy is. Normative, all of them, but committed to particularity, history, plurality, justice.
Whether or not the philosophy of religion will get the second act which these openings point to is another question but it was exciting to learn of people's efforts to get there. Both "religion" and "philosophy" are terms which exclude and distort. The old philosophy of religion's abstracted Christian questions misrepresent the life even of Christianity! But a new philosophy of religion which is decentered and reflexive seems possible - and valuable.
