Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion PDF Author: William E. Arnal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317543955
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion PDF Author: William E. Arnal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317543955
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion

Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion PDF Author: William E. Arnal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317543963
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Theory in a Time of Excess

Theory in a Time of Excess PDF Author: Aaron W. Hughes
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN: 9781781795118
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Science of Religion: A Defence

The Science of Religion: A Defence PDF Author: Donald Wiebe
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004385061
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Science of Religion: A Defence offers a brilliant overview of Donald 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'.

Religious Studies, Theology, and the University

Religious Studies, Theology, and the University PDF Author: Linell E. Cady
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487849
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection explores the highly contested relationship of religious studies and theology and the place of each, if any, in secular institutions of higher education. The founding narrative of religious studies, with its sharp distinction between teaching religion and teaching about religion, grows less compelling in the face of globalization and the erosion of modernism. These essays take up the challenge of thinking through the identity and borders of religious studies and theology for our time. Reflecting a broad range of positions, the authors explore the religious/secular conceptual landscape that has dominated the modern West, and in the process address the revision of the academic study of religion and theology now underway.

Religious Studies, Theology, and the University

Religious Studies, Theology, and the University PDF Author: Linell E. Cady
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791455227
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the relationship between religious studies and theology and the place of each in the modern, secular university.

Method as Identity

Method as Identity PDF Author: Christopher M. Driscoll
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498565638
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
Method as Identity: Manufacturing Distance in the Academic Study of Religion emphasizes the inexorable influence that social identities exert in shaping methodological choices within the academic study of religion, as witnessed in sui generis appeals to particularity and reliance on (or rejection of) identity-based standpoints. Can data speak back, and if so, would scholars have ears to listen? With a refreshing hip hop sensibility, Miller and Driscoll argue that what cultural theorist Jean-François Bayart refers to as a “battle for identity” forces a necessary confrontation with the (impact of) social identities (and, their histories) haunting our fields of study. These complex categorical specters make it nearly impossible to untether the categories of identity that we come to study from the identity of categories shaping our methodological lenses. Treating method as an identity-revealing technique of distance-making between the “proper” scholar and the less-than-scholarly advocate for religion, Miller and Driscoll examine a variety of discursive milieus of vagueness (consider for instance “essentialism,” “origins,” “authenticity”) at work in the contemporary discussion of “critical” methods that lack the necessary specificity for doing the heavy-lifting of analytically handling the asymmetrical dimensions of power part and parcel to social identification. Through interdisciplinary discussions that draw on thinkers including Charles H Long, Bruce Lincoln, Russell T. McCutcheon, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, C. Wright Mills, Laurel C. Schneider, William D. Hart, Tomoko Masuzawa, Anthony B. Pinn, bell hooks, Roderick Ferguson, John L. Jackson, Jasbir Puar, and Jean-François Bayart, among others, Method as Identity intentionally blurs the lines classifying “proper” scholarly approach and proper “objects” of study. With an intentional effort to challenge the de facto disciplinary segregation marking the field and study of religion today, Method as Identity will be of interest to scholars involved in discussions about theory and method for the study of religion, and especially researchers working at the intersections of identity, difference, and classification—and the politics thereof.

Manufacturing Religion

Manufacturing Religion PDF Author: Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195355687
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. As such, he charges, it has helped to create departments, jobs, and publication outlets for those who are comfortable with such a suspect construction, while establishing a disciplinary ethos of astounding theoretical naivete and a body of scholarship to match. Surveying the textbooks available for introductory courses in comparative religion, the author finds that they uniformly adopt the sui generis line and all that comes with it. As a result, he argues, they are not just uncritical (which helps keep them popular among the audiences for which they are intended, but badly disserve), but actively inhibit the emergence of critical perspectives and capacities. And on the geo-political scale, he contends, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.

A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion

A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion PDF Author: James L. Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441183930
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Religious Studies in Atlantic Canada

Religious Studies in Atlantic Canada PDF Author: Paul W.R. Bowlby
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 088920361X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this final volume in a national survey of the study of religion in Canada, Bowlby (Chair, Religious Studies, St. Mary's U., Nova Scotia) reviews the religious studies departments of the four Atlantic Provinces of Canada (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick). The author begins with a brief history of the foundation of universities in the Atlantic region, then moves on to examine the curriculum, degree programs, and both the strengths and weaknesses of departments, acknowledging that religious studies programs are often at risk, and offers suggestions for future growth, or for some colleges, even survival. c. Book News Inc.