Introduction

The origins of this volume go back to the year 2015, when De Gruyter invited us to think about a Handbook that would cover the field of discourse research and religion in an interdisciplinary way. We were torn between two different responses: On the one hand, producing a handbook for a certain field of research means that enough knowledge, theory, and method has been accumulated to sit down and put it all together in an integrative way. So we were thrilled to have the opportunity of doing exactly this with an established press. But then there was hesitation on our side too: Isn’t the genre of a handbook itself something that discourse research should critically address? Handbooks – very much like encyclopedias (Sullivan 1990; von Stuckrad 2005) – are tools (or, as some discourse theorists would say, ‘dispositives’) that present knowledge in a normative way; they pretend to provide the ‘standard’ interpretation and view of a certain field, which should be used in classrooms and should be considered state of the art. They tend to come with a closing vocabulary, not an opening one; the very genre pretends to have all the answers, instead of asking questions that may stimulate interesting debates and reflections. How should we position ourselves between these two responses?