There are two aspects of Williams's lecture that I find both viable and admirable. First, Williams attempts to justify philosophically the existence of a secular exceptionalism for religion departments and scholars of religion. He does so by proposing a model of “civic religion” for the study of religion, a model that would create a community of religion scholars within our department based on a sense of civic duty to one another and our subject matter. We then, in all likelihood, could extend these civic duties to the larger local university and city communities, fulfilling our roles of scholars and teachers by making contributions to their stability and growth as well.

Second, Williams implicitly asks the question “What is your department of religion as a historical project?” and answers it by trying to locate our history in a coherent shared knowledge base, a “canon,” presumably one that we scholars have freely chosen to come to a consensus upon, one that can act as the “thread” of tradition to bind our past to our future. Basically, within our department we have built and continue to sustain our own unique intellectual culture that can and does condition future possibilities. Establishing a department on such a basis would be the starting point for expanding the future of our department by enabling it to absorb both academic discords and the perplexing worlds of religions, transforming itself in the process.