Curating Global Religions

This book offers a genealogy and critique of "global religions" as a scholarly category. Beginning with competing narratives of 1492 and Columbus, it traces how the notion was curated by figures like Ninian Smart and Mark Juergensmeyer, staged at the 1993 Parliament of World’s Religions, and deployed in Buddhist studies scholarship. It culminates in an examination of how religion functions within liberal, neoliberal, and algorithmic modes of governmentality. Drawing on decolonial theory, Foucauldian analysis, and critical religious studies, it argues that global religions is not a neutral descriptor but a tool for organizing, disciplining, and commodifying cultural difference — and one serving increasingly authoritarian ends.