It's a general principle in religious studies--as opposed to theology, the difference being that theology starts from the beliefs of the theologian's religion and goes from there whereas religious studies is supposed to be an empirical discipline--that one shouldn't make an academic focus of the same religion one practices. That is, Catholics should focus on a religion that isn't Catholicism, Jews should focus on a religion that isn't Judaism, Muslims should focus on a religion that isn't Islam, atheists should focus on religion rather than irreligion, etc. This principle isn't a hard-and-fast rule--I was never run out of courses on Catholicism for being Catholic and my favorite professor certainly wasn't disallowed from teaching courses on Judaism because she was Jewish--but it's a sort of polite rule of thumb that somebody has to be a pretty damn good scholar to get away with flouting.
Not sure how true this is. I'm only somewhat familiar with the field of Biblical scholarship but there you have Raymond Brown, E.P. Sanders, N.T. Wright and more Jews than you can shake a stick at. Would be surprised if (at least in the United States, probably less so in Europe) most academic work in Biblical studies
isn't done by confessional Christians.
The exception to this is Buddhism, in which the norm is "scholar-practitioners" who both study Buddhism academically and practice some form of Buddhism or Buddhist-derived meditation.
Also not sure how true this is. AFAIK there are many western academic scholars of Buddhism who don't engage in Buddhist practices, I'm thinking of Richard Gombrich who has criticised meditation as self-centring and at odds with helping others.
Of course Buddhism is different in that the religion takes an explicitly therapeutic approach which makes it easier to pick Buddhist practices without taking on its theology.
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