The challenge of locating the proper intellectual place of On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers within Schleiermacher's œuvre is especially daunting. An early romantic work that has repeatedly been relegated to its author's juvenilia, the text nonetheless accompanied Schleiermacher throughout his distinguished career as a theologian. In some manner, still difficult to determine, it claims a relationship to the larger contours of his theological imagination and academic work. Hans-Joachim Birkner knows the problem of locating On Religion better than most persons and has shown the pitfalls of approaching this Schleiermacher text (as well as others) with anachronistic notions of philosophy, theology, and their relationship in mind. Of course, as Birkner notes, within his system of theological sciences Schleiermacher understood On Religion as “philosophical theology.” Elsewhere Schleiermacher speaks of On Religion in relation to the even broader category of “philosophy of religion.” Yet the disciplines of “philosophical theology” and “philosophy of religion” were in the process of formation in Schleiermacher's day, and the labels thus bear only a semantic resemblance to the way these terms are used today. As a means of estimating its relationship to his mature theology, we might raise the question of how On Religion fits into this system. Does the early work stand chiefly as an intellectual launching pad, which was substantively cast aside once the journey was begun? Or are there permanent insights within On Religion that unite it with its author's larger purposes?