Religious competition: is it a useful concept?

Abstract

In recent years ‘competition’ has become an ever more popular concept in the study of ancient religions. Or should that be a label? Innovative concept or mere label: to come to a decision, we should ask some questions. What are the studies that advertise themselves as dealing with competition about, what do people understand by it? Does competition do what it should be doing: provide some new interpretative framework, and, in the case of edited volumes, tie the different contributions together? In order to answer these questions, a fairly recently published volume (Rosenblum, Vuong & DesRosiers, 2014) will be analyzed in some detail and compared to some other publications that cover (or seem to cover) the same ground.