RELIGIOUS BELONGING AND THE MULTIPLE

Feminist engagement with resources from the world's religious traditions has sometimes been criticized, but it has not yet been theorized in light of the phenomenon of multiple religious belonging. In order to discern why theologians have had difficulty accommodating data from popular practice and from the margins of religious traditions, Voss Roberts destabilizes each of the three terms of "multiple religious belonging." She finds that modern definitions of religion are partly responsible for perceptions of multiple commitments as problematic, and that the metaphor of belonging obscures important dynamics of religious identity. This article proposes that the major difficulty with the theories, however, lies in the absence of a serious attempt to theorize the multiple. Voss Roberts thus offers alternative metaphors that more adequately capture the religious experience of feminists in relation to religious traditions.