Scholars of religion long have asked what their methods reveal about religious practice. This book takes up the reverse: how sustained practice can reshape the tools with which a scholar interprets the evidence. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork and decades of communal and civic work, and on cases from womanist ethics, chaplaincy, religious education, theology, anthropology, sociology, and Jewish, Islamic, and Native American studies, it argues that practice can change a scholar’s categories, methods, and theories. It moves from reflexive methods to reflexive interpretation, calling for more transparency about how practice affects understanding.

The book shifts focus from scholarly credentials or loyalties to the work itself: whether it shows how its findings were made, so that a reader with no stake can examine and contest them. It locates where practice-derived work stalls on the way to publication, where institutional, normative, and confessional pressures can capture an inquiry, and where knowledge held in community sometimes cannot cross into academic scholarship. An appendix offers a toolkit for producing and assessing such work.

Religious Studies from the Field will interest students and scholars of religious studies, anthropology, and sociology, and practitioners who want to turn what they know into scholarship.

J. Shawn Landres is Senior Fellow at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and Research Affiliate at the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his PhD in religious studies after graduate training in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. His scholarship draws on more than two decades of public and civic practice, including leading the Connected to Give research series on religion and charitable giving.