Does a politically-informed body of scholarship like feminist theory have a legitimate place in the study of religions or should the study of religions try to maintain a neutral stance? Is this possible? Give reasons for your answer.
Since feminists are likely to have some opinion on certain religious matters it would help civilised debate if Study of Religions academics left a place for the feminist theorists. As long as there is demand for cross-pollination of fields it is certainly legitimate that a place should be granted. Yet particular boundaries ought to be imposed, to the degree that feminist theorists dealing with religious matters need to recognise that they are entering a dissimilar field of study and as a result will need grounding in the varied terminology of Study of Religions.
If Study of Religions is said to be attempting to retain neutrality, surely it is ignoring its own political agenda. Study of Religions is not a dry field, simply compiling base facts and producing books filled with reams of blank data. We are not geographers. Simply by investigating things that so many people take so seriously we are plainly treading on political ground. No serious academic is going to view a ritual where something morally abhorrent happens without raising an objection, even if it is just in a book after the fact. The sheer act of classifying an action as religious is political.
No, instead of attempting to garner neutrality, the Study of Religions should embrace its political position and allow for as much cross-pollination of academic disciplines as possible, in order that it might retain a sense of perspective over the various other opinions that are critically opposed to its aims. A fuller understanding of the motives of others only serves to aid in the act of maintaining a legitimate body of study, if other branches of knowledge are segregated, then academics will be less able to work together in places where fields of study necessarily overlap.