Introduction to the Study of Religion
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Students will find arguments for the strengths and limitations of these approaches, understand connections among religious studies and other intellectual movements, and develop their own ideas of how they might want to go about the study of religion. Studying Religion Within Communities: Social and Cultural Perspectives 4. How People Experience Religion: Perspectives in the Study of Religious Consciousness and Perception 5.
Critical Perspectives and Evaluations 6. Studying Religion in Context: Chronology of Significant Persons and Seminal Texts. Skip to main content. Publications Bio Links Research. Rodrigues H, Harding JS. Today religious studies is practiced by scholars worldwide. The term " religion " originated from the Latin noun "religio", that was nominalized from one of three verbs: During the Medieval Period, the term "religious" was used as a noun to describe someone who had joined a monastic order a "religious". The religious studies scholar Walter Capps described the purpose of the discipline as to provide "training and practice Segal characterised the discipline as "a subject matter" that is "open to many approaches", and thus it "does not require either a distinctive method or a distinctive explanation to be worthy of disciplinary status.
Different scholars operating in the field have different interests and intentions; some for instance seek to defend religion, while others seek to explain it away, and others wish to use religion as an example with which to prove a theory of their own. Scholars of religion have argued that a study of the subject is useful for individuals because it will provide them with knowledge that is pertinent in inter-personal and professional contexts within an increasingly globalised world. Throughout the history of religious studies, there have been many attempts to define the term "religion".
In this definition there is no one characteristic that need be common to every form of religion. Causing further complications is the fact that there are various secular world views, such as nationalism and Marxism , which bear many of the same characteristics that are commonly associated with religion, but which rarely consider themselves to be religious.
Conversely, other scholars of religious studies have argued that the discipline should reject the term "religion" altogether and cease trying to define it. McCutcheon , "many of the peoples that we study by means of this category have no equivalent term or concept whatsoever". Before religious studies became a field in its own right, flourishing in the United States in the late s, several key intellectual figures explored religion from a variety of perspectives.
One of these figures was the famous pragmatist William James.
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His Gifford lectures and book The Varieties of Religious Experience examined religion from a psychological-philosophical perspective and is still influential today. His essay The Will to Believe defends the rationality of faith. Max Weber studied religion from an economic perspective in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , his most famous work.
As a major figure in sociology , he has no doubt influenced later sociologists of religion. He explored Protestant and Catholic attitudes and doctrines regarding suicide in his work Suicide.
In he published his most memorable work on religion, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Interest in the general study of religion dates back to at least Hecataeus of Miletus ca. Peter the Venerable , also working in the twelfth century, studied Islam and made possible a Latin translation of the Qur'an.
Notwithstanding the long interest in the study of religion, the academic discipline Religious Studies is relatively new. Chris Partridge notes that the "first professorships were established as recently as the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
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In his Introduction to the Science of Religion he wrote that it is "the duty of those who have devoted their life to the study of the principal religions of the world in their original documents, and who value and reverence it in whatever form it may present itself, to take possession of this new territory in the name of true science. Many of the key scholars who helped to establish the study of religion did not regard themselves as scholars of religious studies, but rather as theologians, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and historians.
Partridge writes that "by the second half of the twentieth century the study of religion had emerged as a prominent and important field of academic enquiry. One of the earliest academic institutions where Religious Studies was presented as a distinct subject was University College Ibadan, now the University of Ibadan , where Geoffrey Parrinder was appointed as lecturer in Religious Studies in In the s and s, the term "religious studies" became common and interest in the field increased. New departments were founded and influential journals of religious studies were initiated for example, Religious Studies and Religion.
In the forward to Approaches to the Study of Religion , Ninian Smart wrote that "in the English-speaking world [religious studies] basically dates from the s, although before then there were such fields as 'the comparative study of religion', the 'history of religion', the 'sociology of religion' and so on In the s, in both Britain and America , "the decrease in student applications and diminishing resources in the s led to cut backs affecting religious studies departments.
Philosophy of religion uses philosophical tools to evaluate religious claims and doctrines. Western philosophy has traditionally been employed by English speaking scholars. Some other cultures have their own philosophical traditions including Indian , Muslim , and Jewish. Common issues considered by the Western philosophy of religion are the existence of God , belief and rationality, cosmology , and logical inferences of logical consistency from sacred texts. Although philosophy has long been used in evaluation of religious claims e. Augustine and Pelagius 's debate concerning original sin , the rise of scholasticism in the 11th century, which represented "the search for order in intellectual life" Russell, , more fully integrated the Western philosophical tradition with the introduction of translations of Aristotle in religious study.
There is some amount of overlap between subcategories of religious studies and the discipline itself. Religious studies seeks to study religious phenomena as a whole, rather than be limited to the approaches of its subcategories. The anthropology of religion is principally concerned with the common basic human needs that religion fulfills. The cultural anthropology of religion is principally concerned with the cultural aspects of religion. Of primary concern to the cultural anthropologist of religions are rituals, beliefs, religious art, and practices of piety.
Gallup surveys have found that the world's poorest countries may be the most religious.
Introduction To The Study Of Religions: UG Course: SOAS
The geography of religion is principally concerned with the spatial elements of religious practice and embodiment. In the s and s, geographers of religion such as Wilbur Zelinsky and David Sopher were mostly associated with the "Berkeley school" of cultural geography and focused mostly on the cultural imprints of religion on the landscape. Since the turn in the new cultural geography of religion through the work of James Duncan on the City as Text, geographers of religion have focused on what Lily Kong has called the "politics and poetics" of religion, especially in relation to the political geographies of secular nation-states.
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The history of religions is not concerned with theological claims apart from their historical significance. Some topics of this discipline are the historicity of religious figures, events, and the evolution of doctrinal matters.
The history of religions is not concerned with theological claims apart from their historical significance. Trisha rated it really liked it Jan 06, Partridge writes that "by the second half of the twentieth century the study of religion had emerged as a prominent and important field of academic enquiry. How Religion Uses Religious Studies Religion is infused in political rhetoric. These and many other questions are addressed in this engaging introduction to the discipline of religious studies, written by two experienced university teachers. The temporal lobe has been of interest which has been termed the "God center" of the brain.
There are many approaches to the study of sacred texts. One of these approaches is to interpret the text as a literary object. Metaphor, thematic elements, and the nature and motivations of the characters are of interest in this approach.
Why do people study religion? How have they studied it in the past? How do we study religion today? Is the academic study of religion the same as religious. Religion undoubtedly plays an important part in the lives of people around the world. As Professor Charles B. Jones notes, many people "would say [religion] is .
An example of this approach is God: A Biography , by Jack Miles. The temporal lobe has been of interest which has been termed the "God center" of the brain. Scientific investigators have used a SPECTscanner to analyze the brain activity of both Christian contemplatives and Buddhist meditators, finding them to be quite similar. The "origin of religion" refers to the emergence of religious behavior in prehistory , before written records.
The psychology of religion is concerned with the psychological principles operative in religious communities and practitioners. William James 's The Varieties of Religious Experience analyzed personal experience as contrasted with the social phenomenon of religion. Some issues of concern to the psychologist of religions are the psychological nature of religious conversion , the making of religious decisions, religion and happiness , and the psychological factors in evaluating religious claims.
Sigmund Freud was another figure in the field of psychology and religion.
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He used his psychoanalytic theory to explain religious beliefs, practices, and rituals, in order to justify the role of religion in the development of human culture. The sociology of religion concerns the dialectical relationship between religion and society ; the practices, historical backgrounds, developments, universal themes and roles of religion in society. The sociology of religion is distinguished from the philosophy of religion in that it does not set out to assess the validity of religious beliefs, though the process of comparing multiple conflicting dogmas may require what Peter L.
Berger has described as inherent "methodological atheism".
Religious studies
It may be said that the modern formal discipline of sociology began with the analysis of religion in Durkheim's study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations. The works of Max Weber emphasised the relationship between religious belief and the economic foundations of society. Contemporary debates have centred on issues such as secularization , civil religion , and the cohesiveness of religion in the context of globalization and multiculturalism.
The sociology of religion also deals with how religion impacts society regarding the positive and negatives of what happens when religion is mixed with society. At least one comprehensive study refutes this idea. Research has found that secular democracies like France or Scandinavia outperform more theistic democracies on various measures of societal health. The authors explains, "Pressing questions include the reasons, whether theistic or non-theistic, that the exceptionally wealthy U. Conversely, how do the latter achieve superior societal health while having little in the way of the religious values or institutions?
Vogel reports that in the s a new "law and religion" approach has progressively built its own contribution to religious studies. Over a dozen scholarly organizations and committees were formed by , and a scholarly quarterly, the Journal of Law and Religion first published that year and the Ecclesiastical Law Journal opened in As of , major Law and Religion organizations in the U. Between and , the field saw the publication of some books and scholarly articles. Exponents look at canon law, natural law, and state law, often in comparative perspective. The earliest serious writing on the interface between religion and film appeared in the work of film critics like Jean Epstein in the s.