Blurb:

This chapter will argue—beginning to pull the book’s threads together—that scholars of religion\s should avoid essentializing tradition by uncritically assuming that religions are static or bear a privileged relation to the past. The concept of tradition will be shown to be at the heart of tensions between religionist and critical/historical approaches in the study of religion, in the sense that the conceptual tensions brought out in the previous chapters are echoes in those debates within the field. (The main example here will be Traditionalism, an early twentieth-century western esoteric current.)