Ward on religion

Religious studies itself may be inseparable from these logics. It is not only the child of modernity, it is the heir to the aspirations of modernity for systematizing knowledge. It is heir to the Faustian dreams and desires for total knowledge: that all practices of belief can be catalogued, and that in and through this cataloguing they become many aspects of the one religion, varieties of human spirituality.

Graham Ward, ”Review Essay: Religionists and Theologians: Toward a Politics of Difference”, Modern Theology 16, num 4 (2000): 545.