Geography, religion, and emerging paradigms: problematizing the dialogue

This introduction to the subsequent forum addresses social and cultural geography's recent engagement with religion and spirituality. While representing a laudable and increasing willingness to approach religion/spirituality through sophisticated concepts and theories, this engagement should include more than just an imposition of the discipline's emerging paradigms on a new object of study. Geographers need to allow religion to 'speak back'. The articles in this forum suggest that this speaking back may range from, for example, spirituality/religion's insistence on its own centrality in social space, to its tendency to complicate categories and experience, to its reminder that it informs the lives and identities of many geographers.