When I step into a church, a mosque, or a temple, I notice that the rituals differ but the underlying sense of awe and community feels remarkably similar. Yet historians often treat these traditions as isolated phenomena, ignoring the shared psychological roots that anthropologists like Émile Durkheim identified over a century ago. Is it intellectually honest to keep studying religions as separate silos when the emotional experiences across faiths are so parallel? I've attended Christian services, Buddhist meditations, and Hindu pujas, and the core feeling of reverence transcends the specific theology. Maybe our academic frameworks are too rigid to capture the fluidity of human belief, but that rigidity has also produced meticulous scholarship we'd lose. Neither full integration nor strict separation feels right, but the current middle ground seems unsustainable given the global mixing of cultures. What do you think—should religious studies prioritize the commonalities or honor the distinctiveness first?