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Religious studies. Religious studies, also known as the study of religion, is the scientific study of religion. There is no consensus on what qualifies as religion and its definition is highly contested. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing empirical, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.
- Overview
- The essence of religion and the context of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions
- Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of religion
study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines.
The study of religion emerged as a formal discipline during the 19th century, when the methods and approaches of history, philology, literary criticism, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and other fields were brought to bear on the task of determining the history, origins, and functions of religion. No consensus among scholars concerning the best way to study religion has developed, however. One of the many reasons for this failure is that each discipline enlisted to study religion has its own distinctive methods and topics, and scholars often disagree about how to resolve the inevitable conflicts between these different intellectual perspectives. Another reason is that questions about the origins and functions of religion have often been conflated with questions about the truth of religion, and this has led to controversies that tend to hinder the development of common concepts, methodologies, and problems.
Even a commonly accepted definition of religion has proved difficult to establish, though not for lack of trying. Attempts have been made to find a distinctive ingredient in all religions, such as the numinous, or spiritual, experience, the contrast between the sacred and the profane, and the belief in one or more gods. But objections have been brought against all these attempts, either because the rich variety of religions makes it easy to find counterexamples or because the element cited as central is in some religions peripheral. The gods play a merely subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Theravada (“Way of the Elders”) Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though not necessarily universal, such as the occurrence of the rituals of worship. There are religions, however, in which even worship rituals are not central. Thus, the preliminary task of the student of religion must be to amass an inventory of kinds of religious phenomena.
Even if an inventory of kinds of belief and practice could be gathered so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion, some scholars would maintain that the differences between religions are more significant than their similarities. Moreover, in the absence of a tight definition there will always be a number of disputed cases. Thus, some political ideologies, such as communism and fascism, have been regarded as analogous to religion. Certain attempts at a functionalist definition of religion, such as that of the German American theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965), who defined religion in terms of human beings’ ultimate concern, would leave the way open to count these ideologies as proper objects of the study of religion (Tillich himself called them quasi-religions). Although there is still no agreement on this issue, the frontier between traditional religions and modern political ideologies remains a promising topic of study.
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Discussion about religion has been complicated further by the attempt of some Christian theologians, notably Karl Barth (1886–1968), to draw a distinction between religion and the Gospel (the proclamation peculiar to Christianity). This distinction depends to some extent upon taking a projectionist view of religion as a human product. This traditio...
The academic study of religion rests on the basic distinction between studying about religion as a field of inquiry and being religious or a religious practitioner. This distinction is central to the U.S. Supreme Court case Abington vs. Schempp (1963), a case involving daily prayer as part of a Pennsylvania school's opening exercises. The Court ...
The academic study of religion has often failed to acknowledge what it is. It is academic; it is Western; it is intellectual. This iden-tification does not mean the academic study of religion must be narrow-minded, insensitive, irresponsible, closed, or exclusive. It does mean that rational discourse is the basic mode of communi-cation.
The academic study of religion is fundamentally an anthropological enterprise. That is, it is primarily concerned with studying people (anthropos is an ancient Greek term meaning “human being”; logos means “word” or a “rational, systematic discourse”), their beliefs, behaviors, and institutions, rather than assessing “the truth ...
May 3, 2017 · For putting the word “academic” in the phrase, “The Academic Study of Religion,” indicates that one uses the same methods in Religious Studies that would be used in the study of other social sciences. Bruce Lincoln, a prominent University of Chicago scholar, makes this point in a brief article entitled, “ Theses on Method ” by ...
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Dec 3, 2019 · Defining Religious Studies. In contrast to theology, The Encyclopedia of Religion (2005) defines the study of religion as follows: "Unlike theology, the academic study of religion seeks to provide accounts of the world's religions from perspectives that have no confessional (religious) ground or agenda. As an empirical pursuit, it is concerned ...
