(The) Discipline and the Confessional: Toward Methodological Numenism and an Engaged, Embodied Study of Religion

Abstract For all its transdisciplinarity, religious studies remains a field focused on boundaries, especially those between scholars and practitioners and between confessional and nonconfessional scholarship. The disciplinary use of the confessional in religious studies calls for a Foucauldian analysis that has not yet been central to our discussion of methods, despite important work on Foucault and religion from a number of prominent scholars. Disentangling the threads of the disciplinary and the confessional in religious studies and (re)articulating scholars’ often disjointed response to the uncanniness of the worlds beyond the human, I build on the critiques offered by scholars such as Masuzawa, Beliso-De Jesús, Driscoll and Miller, and Schaefer to argue for methodological numenism and an engaged, embodied study of religion as critical steps in the decolonization of the field.