Normative and Descriptive Modes of Inquiry: Can they Relate?

This roundtable convenes a programmatic conversation between scholars who work in “normative” fields (e.g., ethics, theology, and philosophy) and scholars who work in more “descriptive” fields (e.g., history, ethnography, and social scientific approaches), regarding issues around the relationship of normative and descriptive inquiry in religious studies.

Some sort of “normative”/“descriptive” binary still organizes much scholarship in religious studies.  We aim not to obliterate the distinction, but to engage the two modes of inquiry in fruitful conversation, to see what they might learn from one another.

Can normative scholars better incorporate the enormous empirical sophistication of descriptive scholarship?  And how might descriptive modes of inquiry usefully learn from the practices of normative scholars?  We do not aim at producing an anti-positivist polemic nor an apologetic for normativity, but simply advancing a kind of ongoing conversation on these matters.