Religious Studies and Race

At the 2019 meeting of the AAR in San Diego, California, Richard Newton, Emily Crews, and Merinda Simmons led a workshop discussing the current state of race studies in academia, particularly in light of NAASR’s attempts to locate itself among other fields undergoing similar work. While highlighting work occurring outside our field, Simmons et. Al addressed the need for discussions in our field to become more proactive rather than reactive, urging scholars to move beyond debates that surround descriptive ethnographies and crypto-theologies and to instead use our skills to discuss more than the trouble spots we have located within our field.