Blurb:

In "Description, Prescription, and the Category of 'Religion,'" Emily Crews offers a response to Naomi Goldenberg's "Toward a Pushier Critique of 'Religion' and Attendant Categories." After a summary of Goldenberg's argument, she focuses on three primary issues raised by the article: the imbrication of governments and the category of 'religion,' the relationship between categories and essences, and the generative tensions between the descriptive and prescriptive methods. She ultimately argues that Goldenberg's efforts might be a persuasive roadmap for projects in Religious Studies that productively intertwine the normative and the scholarly.