I remember well how we were constantly told in the 1980s that such a religious studies method is not what Husserl’s phenomenology was about. Wow, that was an understatement. The phenomenology of religion in which we were trained was a setting aside of all ontological questions for the sake of the fair or neutral comparison of religious forms and patterns and, in other modes, toward various critical theories (mostly psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, race, and queer theory at that point in time). One could certainly think normatively, but only on the social and historical plane. That was
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