Mr. Schlatter's Dilemma Re-examined

I am grateful to Professor Wilson for the candor with which he has dealt with my book, Religion, A Humanistic Field. He has recognized some of its strengths as well as lavishly expounding upon its inadequacies. Although it is usually distateful to an author to offer rejoinders to his critics, it may prove necessary, if not for purely egoistic reasons at least for purposes of clarification. Therefore I hope Mr. Wilson will not think me overly presumptuous if I first make a few comments on the art of writing review articles. It has always seemed to me that the critic should read carefully and digest thoroughly the author's preface. In this way he saves time and space for his reader and wear and tear on the author's disposition. He is less likely to charge the author with failing to do what he had no intention of accomplishing, and he avoids the pitfall of suggesting that the author ought to have written a quite different type of book. A searching perusal of the preface will often show the critic what exactly the author set out to achieve and to what reading public the book is addressed. In this case the book was expressly written for the benefit of academic colleagues in fields other than religion. It was not addressed to the needs and interests of the specialist in the field of religion. Neither was it intended as a defense, as Mr. Wilson insists, but rather as an analysis of the field of religion, with attention paid to some of the problems which religion construed as a liberal arts or humanistic subject encounters. I have not attempted to conceal diversities of opinion within the field, even that about the acceptability of religion as a humanistic field. Perhaps as a specialist in a segment of the field of religion Mr. Wilson labors under peculiar difficulties as a reviewer because he is sensitive to certain issues related to several problems the book discusses but which are not germane to its plan and execution. The value of his criticisms should be weighed against this observation. Unless he has caught my intent and estimated the degree of my success or failure in fulfilling that intent, his evaluation will be off the mark. It is equally obvious that a critic should understand what the author actually has written in the body of a book and that he is forbidden to substitute terms or concepts for those which the author holds to be essential to his case. For example, I am afraid Mr. Wilson has remuddied the waters about religion teaching and scholarship by substituting the word "religious" for "religion" studies a distinction which I labored over in chapter two and which apparently escaped his attention. Nor is the sediment settled when he repeatedly refers to religion as a "discipline" rather than as a "field." Another of my precious distinctions thereby goes for naught, with confusing consequences! Another desirable by-product of careful reading of the text is the elimination of a possible embarrassment on the critic's part which occurs whenever he draws attention to the author's omission or slight treatment of a subject dear to the critic's heart, only to have the text betray him. It may be that my critic has maneuvered himself into this curious position when he claims that I have given only facile treatment to the problem of "religious 262