Readers interested in getting on with the business of describing the ins and outs of the world's religions will likely not be all that interested in this site. Instead, if you are interested in describing ancient Hindu myths, studying Buddhist rituals, and learning more about Jewish holidays then you're recommended to find a world religions web site, dictionary, or textbook--an easy search since both the web and the book market are flooded with them. Because you'll find what you're after in those resources, there's no need to offer yet another descriptive compilation of the whos, whens, wheres, and hows of those things we call religions.

Instead, this site is also intended for those who find it curious that some people even name one element of human behavior as "religion," in the first place, as if it were somehow identifiably distinct from other elements of daily life (the domain we sometimes call culture or history). For, prior to describing how, and then theorizing why, people are religious, we need to consider why we ought to collect up and name certain human behaviors as religious. Case in point: precisely how do we know that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism are things that a scholar of religion ought to study?

For instance, consider a recent case that is well known to people in the region of the U.S. in which I live and work: several years ago the Chief Justice of the state of Alabama's Supreme Court--the highest judicial authority in the state--used private funds to have a two and a half ton granite monument depicting the Ten Commandments as an open book (also bearing inscribed quotations from other recognized influences on the U.S. legal system) built and then erected one night in the lobby of the state's Supreme Court Offices. Given the long, contested nature of Church/State issues in the U.S., his action, followed by his refusal to have the monument removed, resulted in a series of law suits, none of which Chief Justice Roy Moore won, despite his arguments that he was merely following the state's Constitution, which he, inasmuch as he holds the office he does, has sworn to uphold.* In the Spring of 2004 he was removed from his office for defying a court order, and, on August 23, 2003, the monument was removed from the lobby--and it then went on a national tour of the U.S.*

Question: is this a religious news story or a political one? Neither? A little bit of both? If so, which part of the story is which? If you were a newspaper editor the answer to this question of classification would have practical ramifications, determining on which page, and in which section, you would run the story. Would you feature it on the front page, amidst the day's most pressing political and economic news, or would you run it on the back pages, among the various ads for local religious services? Your decision could then influence how seriously people took the issue--after all, they likely won't know about it if you bury it on the back pages. And if no one knows about it, it might as well not even have taken place. Moreover, if you featured it prominently on page one, would it be there because this obviously religious news story had political implications (assuming, perhaps, that religion is a private matter that sometimes makes its way into the public sphere) or because the story was political through and through? Depending which of these options you selected, you will have likely taken a stand on a variety of fairly complex questions, such as : Is religion a unique domain, separate from culture? If so, does religion influence culture? Does culture influence--perhaps even cause--religion? Are they separate domains that ought never to interact? Just what is religion and gets to count as religious?