Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm (né Josephson) is an American academic, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is currently Professor and chair in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. He also holds affiliated positions in Asian studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Storm's research focuses on Japanese religions, European intellectual history from 1600 to the present, and theory in religious studies. His more recent work has discussed disenchantment and philosophy of social science.
Storm has written three books and over a dozen academic essays in English. He has also published articles in French and Japanese, and translated academic essays and primary sources from Japanese to English. His first book, The Invention of Religion in Japan, earned the 2013 "Distinguished Book Award" from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and was a finalist for the American Academy of Religion's "Best First Book" award in the History of Religions. Benjamin G. Robinson, a scholar of religion and race, has described Storm's work as "seminal."
Education
Storm earned a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School in 2001. He earned a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006, where he studied Japanese religions under Bernard Faure, Carl Bielefeldt, and Helen Hardacre. During this time, he also researched Continental philosophy, especially post-structuralism. He was a visiting student at St Antony's College, Oxford in the 2004 academic year. Storm's doctoral dissertation was entitled Taming Demons: The Anti-Superstition Campaign and the Invention of Religion in Japan (1853–1920).
Research
Japanese religions
Much of Storm's early writing on Japanese religions built on his doctoral research. This writing particularly examined how the categories of religion, superstition, and science came to be constructed in Meiji-era Japan. For example, the paper "When Buddhism became a 'Religion'," one of Storm's most cited papers according to Google Scholar, examined the categorization of different aspects of traditional Japanese Buddhism as religion and superstition in the work of Inoue Enryō.
In his 2012 book The Invention of Religion in Japan, Storm expanded this argument to examine how Japanese thinkers in the Meiji era adopted Western categories of religion, superstition, and science. Storm examined the origins of State Shinto in this light. The book also examined the confluence of Japanese religious thought, political theory, science, and philology in movements such as the Kokugaku.
Kevin Schilbrack has associated The Invention of Religion in Japan with "Critical Religion" or the "critical study of religion", an approach in religious studies that challenges the stability of religion as an analytical category. Other thinkers in this movement include Talal Asad and Russell T. McCutcheon. Within this field, The Invention of Religion in Japan draws on insights from postcolonial theory and has been connected to Edward Said's Orientalism and Richard King's Orientalism and Religion. At the same time, Storm complicates Said's thesis, noting in particular that Japanese scholars adapted the concept of religion to their own ends and contributed to orientalist scholarship to position Japan as a culturally and intellectually dominant force in East Asia, including over Korea during Japan's colonization of the region.
In his book introducing different concepts of religion, Benjamin Schewel claimed that Storm's work in The Invention of Religion in Japan made "major conceptual contributions" to what Schewel terms the "Construct Narrative" of the definition of religion.
Other ideas developed in The Invention of Religion in Japan have been applied more broadly in religious studies. For instance, the ideas of hierarchical inclusion and exclusive similarity, which Storm coined to describe Japanese methods of conceiving religious difference, have been applied in research on South Asian religions.