Carl Bielefeldt

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American academic whose work spans Japanese religions, European intellectual history, and the theory of religious studies. He is a professor at Williams College, where he also holds affiliated positions in Asian studies and Comparative Literature. Storm's research has explored how concepts like religion, superstition, and science were constructed in Meiji-era Japan, examining the adoption of Western categories and the origins of State Shinto. He has also delved into movements like Kokugaku, considering their intersection with political theory and philology.

His scholarship critically examines the notion of disenchantment, arguing that social-scientific data do not support a widespread loss of belief in magic in the West. Storm distinguishes secularization from disenchantment and suggests that disenchantment has become a self-fulfilling myth. He also posits a connection between Western esotericism and the foundational development of religious studies as an academic discipline. Storm's theoretical work includes a trinaristic approach to secularism, superstition, and religion, and he advocates for "Reflexive Religious Studies," which analyzes how academic study of religion impacts the religious field itself.

Much of Josephson Storm's early academic output stemmed from his doctoral research on Japanese religions, particularly focusing on the Meiji era. He investigated how categories such as 'religion,' 'superstition,' and 'science' were formulated during this period. His work, including the highly cited paper "When Buddhism became a 'Religion'," examined how traditional Japanese Buddhist practices were classified. In his book, *The Invention of Religion in Japan*, he expanded on this, analyzing how Japanese thinkers integrated Western concepts of religion and science. This lens was also applied to the emergence of State Shinto and intellectual movements like Kokugaku, highlighting the interplay of religious thought, political theory, science, and philology. His approach has been associated with the "Critical Religion" movement, challenging the stability of 'religion' as an analytical category and drawing on postcolonial theory, while also complicating Edward Said's thesis by noting Japanese scholars' agency in adapting these concepts.

Josephson Storm's book, *The Myth of Disenchantment*, directly challenges the widely held social-scientific idea that the West has undergone a pervasive loss of belief in magic. He argues that empirical data do not support this notion and distinguishes between secularization and disenchantment as distinct phenomena that have not consistently correlated throughout European history. Storm proposes that disenchantment functions as a 'regulative ideal' or myth, influencing behavior to conform to its perceived reality. Beyond this sociological critique, the book offers intellectual-historical reinterpretations of key figures like Max Weber, James George Frazer, and Sigmund Freud, suggesting their engagement with mysticism and the occult requires a revision of disenchantment narratives derived from their work. Furthermore, Storm argues for a significant link between Western esotericism and the very origins of religious studies as an academic discipline.

In the realm of theory, Josephson Storm has addressed broader epistemological questions within religious studies. He has developed a 'trinaristic' framework for understanding the relationship between secularism, superstition, and religion, which he argues offers a more nuanced alternative to traditional binary models of secularization. This approach has been recognized for its potential to refine theories of secularism and modernity. Storm is also a proponent of "Reflexive Religious Studies," inspired by Pierre Bourdieu. This approach examines how academic social science influences culture and how the academic study of religion can, in turn, affect and even produce religious phenomena. His work has also applied analytic philosophy of science to critique naturalistic models in religious studies and has introduced the concept of 'metamodernism' as a new theoretical approach for the social sciences.