approaches to the study of religion pdf

The aim of this paper is to give an outline of key approaches to the study of media and religion, and to direct you towards resources that can help you explore these in more depth. Ever since the study of religion became a discipline independent of Christian The Inside Perspective versus the Outside Perspective; 4. Revisited: Why do evangelicals vote for Trump? The disaggregated approach does not claim that it captures the fullness of the lived, anthropological reality of religion. Read reviews from world’s largest community for readers. It is a rich concept that connects to vocabularies that bring persons and things, desires, and practices in particular traditions in distinctive ways. Specialized knowledge on religion emerged in the 19th century after the industrial revolution and as a result of the ideological need of colonialism for a study of religions in the framework of the general history of mankind; these factors stimulated the appearance and development of the history of religion and comparative religious studies. For “egalitarian theorists of religious freedom” (as I call them), there is nothing special about religion as such. To ask that the law embrace and describe the whole of social reality would be to yearn for a totalitarian law. Sullivan demonstrates that religion is too complex, too comprehensive, and too multi-faceted to be adequately captured by the law of the liberal state. Let me get back to the starting point of our inquiry: Is religion a valid category of scholarly research? The only appropriate scholarly stance towards this object is one that is critical and skeptical. Download Classical Approaches To The Study … The Study of Religion : A Historical Approach (1967), such discoveries were seldom considered in their own right; seldom allowed to `speak for themselves' . According to a number of scholars (often influenced by Foucauldian or post-colonial thought), the category of religion is deeply implicated in the history and practice of western statism and imperialism. So critics confuse an empirical inquiry (describing what religion is) with a normative inquiry (accounting for its status in the law). Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? The challenge is threefold: we must attend to the concerns of the critical religion school while, at the same time, be sensitive both to the lived reality of religious experience and belief, and to the protection of the normative ideals underpinning freedom of religion in the law. This involves identifying a plurality of normative analogies for religion. The first is that religion is (as Daniel Dubuisson once wrote) “the West’s most characteristic concept, around which it has established and developed its identity.” There is a deep and significant continuity between the Christian defense of the “true religion” and the nineteenth-century invention of “world religions.” The universalism of the concept masked an internally hierarchical classificatory scheme, which, as Tomoko Mazuzawa has shown, was crafted within the crucible of the missionary and colonial encounter. Much of the interesting work done in anthropology, sociology, and religious studies departments, for example, draws on both the first and the second approach). By “criticizing religion,” I mean not the critique of the beliefs or practices of self-described religious individuals or groups but rather the critique of the concept of religion as a scholarly category. The normative objection is slightly different. The Hijab Controversy in Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press 2008). First, as religion is not a “thing” but a term of art, it is perfectly legitimate—as suggested above—that different dimensions of it are appropriated in different disciplines and areas of life. Whereas it might, at first, appear that the Americas is an overwhelming Christian bloc, the reality is not that simple. Comparative Religious Studies; 6. For critics, this is visible in three different ways. 5/18/2020 Sophia : Welcome Score 23/25 You passed this … As it happens, one group of influential political philosophers has tried to do just that. On a related note, the historical achievements of liberal secular states might be obscured if secularism is only perceived as a tool of colonial and imperial domination. Intellectual historians and students of political thought study religious traditions as coherent, inter-generational, scholarly bodies of thought—the “Islamic” or the “Christian” or the “Confucian” tradition, for example. The implications of the first approach have been resisted in many quarters. This is an important critique, which draws on what I have called the first (critical) and the second (anthropological) approach to religion. It has been argued that religious studies is a polymethodic discipline, and that the student of religion should be familiar with the approaches of the major disciplines concerned with understanding the nature of religion, not least because the approach adopted has profound influence on the phenomena chose for investigation and the conclusions … Although I cannot make the full case here, I sketch a preliminary defense of the third approach, in the context of recent debates in political theory. Religious beliefs, in particular, are only one sub-set of a larger class, which political philosophers, following John Rawls, call “conceptions of the good.” On this view, a liberal state protects, not only freedom of religion, but more generally freedom of conscience; it disestablishes, not only dominant religion, but also any controversial conception of the good. 300 Cadman Plaza West • 15th Floor • Brooklyn, NY 11201 • USA The concept exhibits “a complex continuum of resemblances and differences.” In sum, the “anthropological” objection urges us to take both ordinary language and ordinary experience seriously. expression, subjective experi ence and scientific (objec tive) research [1, p. 11]. A response to Crockford. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues. Her last book is Critical Republicanism. New Approaches to the Study of Religion and Peace Convenor: Sandra Rios, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of Aberdeen Contact: smroyola@abdn.ac.uk Abstract The study of the religious involvement in conflict, peacemaking and peacebuilding has mainly focused approach to the study of religion in a coherent way, Gerardus van der Leeuw’s Phänomenologie der Religion (1933).”13 Another scholar who sees Hegel’s infl uence on the phenomenol-ogy of religion is Olof Pettersson who argues that, contrary to seeing van der Leeuw as the originator on the strength of the above named work of this approach: As such, it might be asked in what way a theological (PDF) Approaches to the study of globalization This article throws light on the four important approaches to the study of organisational behavior, i.e, (1) Human Resource Approach, (2) Contingency Approach, (3) Productivity Approach, and (4) System Approach. Items is a space for engagement with insights from the work of the Council and the social sciences. discursive study of religion, historical discourse analysis, social constructivism, defijinitions of reli-gion, sociology of knowledge Although established as an independent discipline at European universities more than one hundred years ago, the academic study of religion is still wres-tling with severe problems of identity and legitimization. Yet the strategy of “disaggregating religion” has a further, more portentous implication for normative political theory. Get Book. Approaches in Psychology - Psychologist World Area Study Approach. Sociology of Religion; 7. Required fields are marked *. Nor does the origin of a concept in itself discredit its uses: the concept may well have been forged in the crucible of missionary and colonial encounters, but its meanings and uses have further proliferated in non-colonial and post-colonial settings, in ways that escaped, distorted, and subverted the original discourse. What Wittgenstein said about the concept of “game” also applies to the concept of “religion”: the fact that we cannot identify a single feature that all religions exhibit does not mean that the concept of religion is meaningless. Reformulated in this way, Sullivan’s critique has bite. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Author: Jacques Waardenburg Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110473593 Size: 70.29 MB Format: PDF, Docs View: 713 Get Books. Your email address will not be published. Religion is a concept created by modern scholars and superimposed on a variety of different phenomena for a variety of motives. The SSRC is an independent, international, nonprofit organization. View Approaches to Studying Religion Milestone 1.pdf from PHL MISC at University of Phoenix. The second ground for skepticism is that religion has served to define the western idea of the secular, and remains deeply entangled with it. Theologians adopt a more content-based approach: they study the texts and dogma which capture our fundamental dependence on a greater order of things. They argue, for example, that exemptions from general laws can be justified on the ground of conscience; and that what the state should not “establish” are conceptions of the good. How can we best identify and protect the normative values which historically have underpinned freedom of religion, non-establishment and the like? METHODOLOGY Different approaches to the study of religion Introduction to Methodology There are many different ways of studying religion. So neutrality, for liberals such as Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, is “generalized non-establishment.” Egalitarian theorists of religious freedom offer a compelling response to the “critical religion” school. “The notion that such a study is the objective and comparative study of religion. It is Jacques Waardenburg’s merit to have assembled in Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion well-chosen excerpts from the works of forty-one scholars, from Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) to Joachim Wach (1898-1955), who sought to explain this most peculiar of human creations. PDF | The issue of methodological approach in the study of religion has remained an enigma to many scholars of science of religion... | Find, read and cite all … They all provide important insights into religious studies. Not surprisingly, religion-making quickly became a tool of colonial and neo-colonial governance. Which politics of nature? Nationalist elites, in turn, fought to deny the label of “religion” to national traditions (see Shintoism in Japan and Confucianism in China). If religion is a western concept that has been used to shore up the authority of the colonial and sovereign state, through shifting, arbitrary demarcations between “religion” tradition, culture, reason, and the nation, then scholars should be wary of treating it as a stable, coherent object of academic study. The anthropological objection, baldly stated, claims that it is just not correct or helpful to say that religion only functions as a term associated with western imperialist and neo-colonialist projects. Secularism and freedom of religion, in liberal thought, are connected to moral values such as individual autonomy, moral self-determination, freedom of conscience as well as more political ideals such as non-theocratic constitutional democracy, separation of church and state, and non-establishment of the dominant religion. 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