Building Religions 21: Phenomenology

One of the challenges in approaching the subject of religion, whether creatively or academically, is that of recognizing one's own presuppositions about what religion is. In my post on the work of J. Z. Smith, I brought up the example of Spanish explorers in the New World who failed to recognize signs of religious life among native islanders because they couldn't see anything resembling a temple. They took their own experiences with religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and perhaps some knowledge of Classical paganism—and used those as the map by which to interpret the new situation in which they found themselves.