Recent conversations on this blog and elsewhere about the historical study of religion, the place of religion (or religiosity) in historical study, whether or in what ways scholarship written by “confessing historians” can be regarded as inescapably (or admirably) confessional, the place (or lack thereof) for confessing historians in the secular academy, what “secular” even  means, the political and moral commitments that may (must?) be implicit in various epistemologies of historical inquiry — all these discussions have in one way or another bumped up against a set of (mostly unspoken) assumptions by which (or against which) professional historians construct our Read more