On Having Faith in the MDGs: A Response to Katherine Marshall (abstract)

Katherine Marshall’s thorough and thoughtful critique of my chapter raises a number of important objections. However, it appears that among her most important criticisms is that I didn’t write a different chapter. To clarify, my chapter was not a general survey of the literature on ‘religion and development’ (which has already been admirably carried out by Jones and Peterson, whom I cited). It was also not an attempt to present a systematic analysis of Marshall’s substantial corpus and its evolution over time. Nor, indeed, was it intended to be a comprehensive and detailed proposal as to where to go from here. These are all useful and valuable tasks – some are arguably more pressing than the argument I provided – but none were the goals of the chapter. (…)