Preliminary Material / Jason N. Blum -- The Question of Methodological Naturalism / Jason N. Blum -- Naturalism as Method and Metaphysic: A Comparative Historical Taxonomy / Daniel L. Pals -- Incapacitating Scholarship: Or, Why Methodological Agnosticism Is Impossible / Craig Martin -- Orthodoxy Is Not Scientific: A Phenomenological Critique of Naturalism / Jonathan Tuckett -- Naturalisms, Ineffability Claims, and Symbolic Meanings / Nancy Frankenberry -- Natural Ineffability and the Scandal of Language / Jason N. Blum -- In Defense of a Naturalistic Approach to Religion / Robert A. Segal -- Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? Methodological Naturalism and the Academic Study of Religion / Edward Slingerland -- What Can the Failure of Cog-Sci of Religion Teach Us about the Future of Religious Studies? / Ivan Strenski -- Must a Scholar of Religion Be Methodologically Atheistic or Agnostic? / Michael A. Cantrell -- A Better Methodological Naturalism / Kevin Schilbrack -- Index / Jason N. Blum.

The traditions and institutions that we call religions abound with references to the supernatural: ancestral spirits, karma, the afterlife, miracles, revelation, deities, et cetera How are students of religion to approach the behaviors, doctrines, and beliefs that refer to such phenomena, which by their very nature are supposed to defy the methods of empirical research and the theories of historical scholarship? That is the question of methodological naturalism. The Question of Methodological Naturalism offers ten thoughtful engagements with that perennial question for the academic study of religion. Contributors include established senior scholars and newer voices propounding a range of perspectives, resulting in both surprising points of convergence and irreconcilable differences in how our shared discipline should be conceptualized and practiced.