Russell T. McCutcheon earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and is now an honorary life member of the International Association for the History of Religions. Beginning in 2001, he was the Department Chair at the University of Alabama, a role that he played for 18 years. His many publications on the history of the field and the practical effects of the category religion in liberal democracies, along with a number of resources created specifically for teachers and students, are widely used in the field today.

• Introduction 1: The Manufacture of Religion 2: Ideological Strategies and the Politics of Nostalgia 3: Autonomy, Discourses, and Social Privilege 4: The Debate on the Autonomy of Eliade 5: The Poverty of Theory in the Classroom 6: The Imperial Dynamic and the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion 7: The Category "Religion" in Recent Publications-Again Afterword: Thirty Years of Manufacturing Religion Appendix: Theses on Making a Shift

[McCutcheon] stands in a long tradition of excellent company that goes back at least as far as classical Greek dramatists and philosophers who inquired persistently into the prevailing mythos....This book's likely to provoke very fruitful debate for many years."-Choice