Author: Oliver Freiberger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019092912X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The comparative method is an integral part of religious studies. All the technical terms that scholars of religion use on a daily basis, such as ritual, hagiography, shrine, authority, fundamentalism, hybridity, and, of course, religion, are comparative terms. Yet comparison has been subject to criticism, including postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques. Older approaches are said to have used comparison primarily to confirm preconceptions about religion. More recently, comparison has been criticized as an act of abstraction that does injustice to the particular, neglects differences, and establishes a mostly Western power of definition over the rest of the world. In this book, Oliver Freiberger takes a closer look at how comparison works. Revisiting critical debates and examining reflections in other disciplines, including comparative history, sociology, comparative theology, and anthropology, Freiberger proposes a model of comparison that is based on a thorough epistemological analysis and that takes both the scholar's situatedness and his or her agency seriously. Examining numerous examples of comparative studies, Considering Comparison develops a methodological framework for conducting and evaluating such studies. Freiberger suggests a comparative approach - which he calls discourse comparison - that confronts the omnipresent risks of decontextualization, essentialization, and universalization. This book makes a case for comparison, arguing that it is indispensable for a deeper analytical understanding of what we call religion. The book is intended to enrich the practice of both aspiring and seasoned comparativists, stimulate much-needed further discussions about comparative methodology, and encourage more scholars to produce responsible comparative studies.
Author: Timothy Fitzgerald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195347153
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.
Author: William E. Deal
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415966382
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: Rhiannon Graybill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149856285X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements stages a critical engagement between religious texts and the problem of sexual violence. Rape and other forms of sexual violence are widespread on college and university campuses; they also occur in sacred texts and religious traditions. The volume addresses these difficult intersections as they play out in texts, traditions, and university contexts. The volumegathers contributions from religious studies scholars to engage these questions from a variety of institutional contexts and to offer a constructive assessment of religious texts and traditions.
Author: Robert H. Abzug
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199754373
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
Rollo May (1909-1994), internationally known psychologist and philosopher, came from modest roots in the small town Protestant Midwest intending to do 'religious work' but eventually became a psychotherapist and author. During the 1950s and 1960s, his books combined existentialism and other philosophical approaches, psychoanalysis, and a spiritual-philosophy to interpret the damage bureaucratic and technocratic aspects of modernity and their inability of individuals to understand their authentic selves. 'Psyche and Soul in America' deals not only with May's public contributions but also to his turbulent inner life as revealed in unprecedentedly intimate sources in order to demonstrate the relationship between the personal and public in a figure who wrote about intimacy, its loss, and ways to regain an authentic sense of self and others.--
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic journals
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
A quarterly review of publications in the field of religion and related disciplines.
Author: Rico G. Monge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474235794
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
The hagiographic materials from the world's religions can tell us much about the beliefs and practices of the people, yet the limited degree to which hagiography has been used as an instrument for understanding diverse religious traditions is surprising. Hagiography and Religious Truth provides a clearer understanding of the ways hagiography functions to disclose truth for practitioners and suggests various ways that these underexploited sources enrich our comprehension of broader issues in religious studies. This volume provides a much-needed cross-cultural and interreligious comparison of saints' lives, iconography, and devotional practices. The contributors show that hagiographic sources can in fact be “truths of manifestation,” which function as vehicles for prefiguring, configuring, and refiguring religious, social, and cultural life. The editors argue that some meanings simply cannot be communicated effectively through historical-critical methodologies. By exploring how hagiography functions throughout several of the world's religious traditions, this volume illustrates how various modes of hagiography articulate religious ideas and uniquely represent conceptions of sanctity.
Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745671330
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
Bruno Latour’s long term project is to compare the felicity and infelicity conditions of the different values dearest to the heart of those who have ‘never been modern’. According to him, this is the only way to develop an anthropology of the Moderns. After his work on science, on technology and, more recently, on law, this book explores the truth conditions of religious speech acts. Even though there is no question that religion is one of the values that has been intensely cherished in the course of history, it’s also clear that it has become immensely difficult to tune in to its highly specific mode of enunciation. Every effort to speak in the right key sounds awkward, reactionary, pious or simply empty. Hence the necessity of devising a way of writing that brings to the fore this elusive form of speech to render it audible again. In this highly original book, the author offers a completely different tack on the endless ‘science and religion’ conflict by protecting them both from the confusion with the notion of information. Like The Making of Law, this book is one more attempt at developing this ‘inquiry on modes of existence’ that provides an alternative definition of society.
Author: Jeffrey Kripal
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN: 9780028663517
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Religion: Super Religion is part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks series dedicated to the study of religion. Composed of twenty-five thematic chapters, this volume reexamines the supernatural in the study of religion for the next generation of students and scholars. Toward this same end, Super Religion takes a robust interdisciplinary approach to a wide variety of religious traditions to engage with new thinking about such classical and contemporary topics as spirits, possession, vision, deification, the miraculous, magical powers, and the paranormal. Fields as diverse as modern medicine, philosophy, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, folklore studies, postcolonial criticism, popular culture studies, and New Testament criticism come into play. The volume also includes bibliographies, filmographies, images, a glossary, and a comprehensive index, all of which aid the reader in exploring the fantastic terrain of this ancient and yet ever new mode of human experience and inquiry.
Author: Kimerer L. LaMothe
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 9780823224036
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
This book provides philosophical grounds for an emerging area of scholarship: the study of religion and dance. In the first part, LaMothe investigates why scholars in religious studies have tended to overlook dance, or rhythmic bodily movement, in favor of textual expressions of religious life. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, LaMothe traces this attitude to formative moments of the field in which philosophers relied upon the practice of writing to mediate between the study of religion, on the one hand, and theology, on the other.In the second part, LaMothe revives the work of theologian, phenomenologist, and historian of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw for help in interpreting how dancing can serve as a medium of religious experience and expression. In so doing, LaMothe opens new perspectives on the role of bodily being in religious life, and on the place of theology in the study of religio
