Bridging the gaps: a better future for the study of religion

A better future for the study of religion would incorporate innovative and engaging approaches to bridge the gaps between popular and scholarly understandings of what comprises religion and why it remains relevant and significant in our world. This article calls for studying religion in a manner that emphasizes how it is thoroughly enmeshed with other ways of acting and existing in the world. The study of religion appears here as the study of how people attribute certain things as special, powerful, and authoritative, which conveys much about how people construct and manage social and cultural forms more generally. We argue that religion matters not because it supposedly represents a unique, autonomous realm of life, but rather because its workings are related to and paradigmatic for many other forms of human behavior.