Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion

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  • Author: William E. Arnal
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1317543955
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 270

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion presents a provocative critique of the unwillingness of modern scholars to publically distinguish research into comparative religion from confessional studies written within denominationally-affiliated institutions. The book offers the 19th Century founders of the study of religion as a bracing corrective to contemporary timidity. The issue was analysed and documented by Wiebe a quarter of a century ago. Here, marking Wiebe's work, a wide range of contributors reassess the methodology and ambition of contemporary religious research. The book argues that conceptualizing religion as part of the world of human action and experience is the first requirement of the study of religion.


The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion

The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion

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  • Author: Russell T. McCutcheon
  • Publisher: A&C Black
  • ISBN: 1441115781
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 416

Thirty classic and contemporary readings - from such writers as Kant, Hume, Schleiermacher, and Otto, to Ninian Smart, Mircea Eliade, Karen McCarthy-Brown, and Wendy Doniger.


The Sacred and Its Scholars

The Sacred and Its Scholars

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  • Author: Thomas A. Idinopulos
  • Publisher: BRILL
  • ISBN: 9789004106239
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 214

This volume of essays is devoted to a careful examination of the importance of methodology in the study of primary religious data. The essays focus on the 'Sacred' as an ultimate object of descriptive analysis and critical scrutiny on the part of a select number of North American and European methodologists in the study and teaching of the history of religions and its allied disciplines. The central question to which the contributors respond are these: What is the Sacred? Is it a being or a concept of a being; is it a mental state or an objective reality or something else entirely? Can the Sacred be described as an empirical fact, or as a formal rule for religious inquiry? If the Sacred is a valid category in the study and teaching of religion, then what can be said about the antithesis of the sacred, namely the profane or the secular? This volume probes these questions with great care in order to justify a number of ways the Sacred can be construed as an indispensable notion for the study and teaching of religion.


The Oxford Handbook of Friedrich Schleiermacher

The Oxford Handbook of Friedrich Schleiermacher

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  • Author:
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0192584960
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 717

Schleiermacher is now regarded as an influential figure in the history of Christian thought, theories and methods in religious studies, and hermeneutics. The German-language critical edition of his work beginning in 1980, Schleiermacher Kritische Gesamtausgabe, and English translations of key portions of his corpus beginning in the late nineteenth century, have allowed scholars to investigate the richness of his thought. German scholars have often focused on Schleiermacher's ties to early modern philosophy, his aesthetics, hermeneutics, and theory of religion, while English-speaking scholars have often focused on the theological influences and implications of Schleiermacher's work. Over the last 30 years, both German and Anglophone scholars have been at work translating and analyzing key texts. This Handbook gathers authoritative interpretations of Schleiermacher's work from both German and English-speaking scholars, bringing together the best that Schleiermacher scholarship has to offer. The chapters are divided into three parts. The first part offers a clear and nuanced understanding of Schleiermacher's own historical and intellectual context. The second part presents a close analysis of the structure and content of Schleiermacher's thought, in relation both to questions of method and particular theological themes and to broader inquiries in philosophy and the humanities. The third part provides an examination of the reception of his thought and of its contemporary implications for theology and the study of religion.


New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Regional, critical, and historical approaches

New Approaches to the Study of Religion: Regional, critical, and historical approaches

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  • Author: Peter Antes
  • Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
  • ISBN: 9783110176988
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 576

Internationally recognized scholars from many parts of the world provide a critical survey of recent developments and achievements in the global field of religious studies. The work follows in the footsteps of two former publications: Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Jacques Waardenburg (1973), and Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Frank Whaling (1984/85). New Approaches to the Study of Religion completes the survey of the comparative study of religion in the twentieth century by focussing on the past two decades. Many of the chapters, however, are also pathbreaking and point the way to future approaches.


Conversations and Controversies in the Scientific Study of Religion

Conversations and Controversies in the Scientific Study of Religion

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  • Author:
  • Publisher: BRILL
  • ISBN: 9004310452
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 361

Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe together have spent the better part of a century exploring possibilities for a scientific study of religion. The following essays are a record of their conversations together and of their conversations and controversies with a number of leading scholars in religious studies that address that possibility. As with any scientific endeavor, knowledge advances when research assumptions and experimental designs are collegially discussed and critically assessed. It is hoped that these essays might provide the occasion for scholars in the field to discuss the theoretical and methodological issues they have raised, to debate and expand upon them, or, in the spirit of forthright scientific inquiry, to refute the arguments they have made.


A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion

A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion

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  • Author: James L. Cox
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1441183930
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 277

The phenomenological method in the study of religions has provided the linchpin supporting the argument that Religious Studies constitutes an academic discipline in its own right and thus that it is irreducible either to theology or to the social sciences. This book examines the figures whom the author regards as having been most influential in creating a phenomenology of religion. Background factors drawn from philosophy, theology and the social sciences are traced before examining the thinking of scholars within the Dutch, British and North American 'schools' of religious phenomenology.


The Notion of "religion" in Comparative Research

The Notion of

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  • Author: Ugo Bianchi
  • Publisher: L'ERMA di BRETSCHNEIDER
  • ISBN: 9788870628524
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 980

Nel 1990 si tenne a Roma il XVI Congresso del I.A.H.R. che ebbe come tema la nozione di "religione". Venne particolarmente analizzato l'uso di tale termine da parte degli studiosi di lingua europea nei rapporti con le culture non europee e viceversa.


The Science of Religion: A Defence

The Science of Religion: A Defence

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  • Author: Donald Wiebe
  • Publisher: BRILL
  • ISBN: 9004385061
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 352

Donald Wiebe, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Trinity College, University of Toronto, has spent much of his academic career arguing for a clear demarcation between Theology and Religious Studies. The Science of Religion: A Defence offers a brilliant overview of Professor Wiebe's contributions on methodology in the academic study of religion, of the development of his thinking over time, and of his intellectual commitment to 'a science of religion'. The work is divided into three parts. The first part identifies pertinent connections between 'religion', 'religious studies', and 'science' and why 'reductionism' in the academic study of religion, when properly applied, can bridge the explanatory gap between the sceptic and the devotee. The second part treats conceptual debates in the academic study of religion, with particular reference to the place of 'belief', 'understanding', and 'meaning' in the modern study of religion. The third part addresses the theological resistance to the scientific study of religion and how that resistance can be overcome. Finally, two new essays are included: a critique on ‘The Preconceptions of a Science of Religion’ by Anthony J. Palma, and an accompanying reply by Donald Wiebe. The Science of Religion: A Defence is an essential resource for both scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike, and will be of particular interest to both defenders and critics of a scientific study of religion.


The Learned Practice of Religion in the Modern University

The Learned Practice of Religion in the Modern University

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  • Author: Donald Wiebe
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350103446
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 251

In these essays, Donald Wiebe unveils a significant problem in the academic study of religion in colleges and universities in North America and Europe - that studies almost always exhibit a religious bias. To explore this issue, Wiebe looks at the religious and moral agendas behind the study of religion, showing that the boundaries between the objective study of religion and religious education as a tool for bettering society have become blurred. As a result, he argues, religious studies departments have fostered an environment where religion has become a learned or scholarly practice, rather than the object of academic scrutiny. This book provides a critical history of the failure of 20th- and 21st-century scholars to follow through on the 19th-century ideal of an objective scientific study of religious thought and behaviour. Although emancipated from direct ecclesiastical control and, to some extent, from sectarian theologizing, Wiebe argues that research and scholarship in the academic department of religious studies has failed to break free from religious constraints. He shows that an objective scientific study of religious thought and practice is not only possible, but the only appropriate approach to the study of religious phenomena.