It goes without saying that we remain committed to broadening this ongoing research by considering such papers in the future, and indeed, are actively interested in encouraging contributions that either in authorship or content are not predominantly white, Eurocentric, or Christian (or post-Christian). Yet, as much as these volumes may reflect deeper structural biases at play in the contemporary scholarly world, each chapter makes an original and rigorous contribution to an important and emerging field, and these silences simply highlight the exciting work to done. In what follows, we briefly stake out the current anarchism and religious studies landscape, and introduce the essays included in this volume.
Tentatively mapping the territory
The overlap between anarchism and religion can be studied in many ways, addressing different questions and using different methodologies rooted in different disciplinary conventions. While a detailed heuristic taxonomy of this burgeoning scholarship can be found elsewhere, a condensed summary nevertheless offers a useful compass.7 Without meaning to force a limiting set of categories on to this literature, and noting that there are publications falling outside of this tentative classification, there seems to be four principal types of analysis typical in the scholarship examining the relation between anarchism and religion: anarchist critiques of religion, anarchist exegesis, anarchist theology, and histories of religious anarchists.
An anarchist critique of religion is apparent even in the earliest days of anarchism as a political tradition, and has tended to attack both religious claims and religious institutions.8 The anarchist theoretician Peter Kropotkin is a quintessential example of this approach, portraying religious belief as an obstacle to a critical consciousness of social oppression, and depicting the organised church as a key ally of the nation-state in its efforts to dominate social life in the modern era.9 The social role of religion has undergone significant transformations since the nineteenth century, but rarely have these changes been sufficient to convince anarchist critics that this critique is redundant. Even in Western
