What is religion? How can it be studied? Why is it the object of such diametrically opposed descriptions and evaluations? Textbooks and monographs on the subject usually begin with a definition of “Religion.” So, let us, for a moment, play the game “Definition” using “Religion” as our token.

What shall our first move be? Should we start the game with this move: “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitude” (Whitehead)? Or, perhaps this variant: “Religion is the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James)? But then the counter-move is played: “the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms are social events like any other; they are as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture” (Geertz).