Why Study Religion?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Criticism ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Environmental Responsibility ◽  
Critical Reasoning ◽  
Alternative Framework ◽  
Cultural Fluency ◽  
Value Neutrality ◽  
The Way ◽  
Regime Of Truth

This book asks, can the study of religion be justified? It poses this question on the view that scholarship in religion, especially work in “theory and method,” is preoccupied with matters of methodological procedure and is thus inarticulate about the goals that can justify the study of religion and motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, it insists, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. The book identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, each of which it critically examines as symptomatic of this crisis, on the way toward offering an alternative framework for thinking about purposes for studying religion. Shadowing these methodologies is a Weberian scientific ideal for studying religion, one that privileges value-neutrality. This ideal poses obstacles to making justificatory claims on behalf of studying religion and fortifies a repressive conscience about thinking normatively within the field’s regime of truth. After making these points, the book describes an alternative framework, Critical Humanism, especially how it theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship and offers a basis for thinking about the ethics of religious studies as held together by four values: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Ordered to such purposes, the book argues, the study of religion can imagine itself as a valuable and desirable enterprise so that scholars of religion can relax their commitment to matters of methodological procedure and avow the values of studying religion.

Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism

2021 ◽  
pp. 239-302
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Moral Imagination ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
Critical Reasoning ◽  
Cultural Fluency

This chapter proposes that a proper telos for the study of religion is Critical Humanism. Drawing on Aristotle and Charles Taylor, it explains how Critical Humanism provides a theoretical framework for studying religion and describes its mobile, liberal, dialogical, and inclusive aspects. Building on the ideas of Felski, Walzer, Rorty, and the environmental humanities, it notes how Critical Humanism places a premium on expanding the moral imagination and examines the connections between that idea and humanistic scholarship. That discussion leads into an account of four values to which the study of religion can be connected: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. The chapter then describes four works in the study of religion that exemplify these values. Lastly, it summarizes the chapter’s arguments in response to the challenges posed by Weber’s view of science and Welch’s reckoning with the field’s “identity crisis” as described in chapters 1 and 2.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 303-306
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
The Future ◽  
Value Neutrality ◽  
Regime Of Truth

The epilogue concludes the book by clarifying how Critical Humanism makes possible an ethics of religious studies. Positioned against an episteme that draws its sustenance from Reformation, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment thinking, Critical Humanism provides reasons that enable present and future generations to grasp the values of studying religion and provides a model of reasoning that can break the spell of the field’s regime of truth of value-neutrality. It thereby enables scholars to overcome a long-standing repression of desire and discover humanistic excellences according to which motives for studying religion are desirable and worthy of attachment and transmission. Seen in this way, the epilogue argues, Critical Humanism is a vocation. It allows scholars to recommend religious studies for the present and in ways that make possible hope for the future.

First as Sociology, Then as Geography

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-43
Author(s):  
Justin Tse
Keyword(s):  
Social Geography ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Geography ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Ideological Work ◽  
The Way

This essay reviews Steven J. Sutcliffe and Ingvild Sælid Gilhus's New Age Spiritualities: Rethinking Religion. It shows that their attempt to redefine religion through new age spiritualities is actually an attempt to impose an economically elite social geography onto religious studies as a social fact. My central argument is that this effort in turn reveals that religious studies serves as a sociological factory for liberal economic ideologies. It suggests that to mitigate this ideological work, a shift toward critical geography in religious studies is the way forward.

When Is a Religion Like a Weed?

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 10-18
Author(s):  
Nathan Rein
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Study ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
The Way

Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell's 2014 article, "On Essentialism and Real Definitions of Religion," offers a comprehensive rationale for the use of real, essentialist definitions of religion in the field of religious studies. In this article, I examine her arguments and the proposed definition she supplies. I argue that a close reading of Schaffalitzky's piece, concentrating especially on the way she uses examples, helps to demonstrate that she and her anti-essentialist opponents view the field of religious studies in incommensurable ways. While Schaffalitzky views definitions as serving the analytical study of religion as an object, her opponents view definitions primarily rhetorically and seek to focus attention on the process of defining.

Cultural Understandings of “Religion”: The Hermeneutical Context of Teaching Religious Studies in North America

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Murphy
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Communicative Context ◽  
Comparative Manner

AbstractWhen students come into the classroom, they have a prefigured, albeit deeply implicit, notion of what “religion” is and what it is not. They see religion as private, inner, and personal, as distinct from “politics” and “economics.” This prefigured conception of religion is, in this author's view, one of the principle obstacles to teaching Religious Studies in an empirical, cross-cultural, comparative manner. Given the overall structure of the cultural configuration within which students think about and live out “religion,” i.e., that it is private, utilitarian, and simply an obvious given to them, how can we introduce theory into the Religious Studies classroom? The answer given here is that if we use language-based theoretical models of culture such as structuralism and hermeneutics, we do better, in the main, in applying that theory to the communicative context of the classroom than trying to teach theory directly to our undergraduate students. This paper offers an analysis, using such language-based theories, of those cultural conditions which our students bring into the classroom and which shape their “native” understanding of the category “religion,” as well as some suggestions as to how to cope with it in order to teach Religious Studies more effectively.

“Down-to-Earth TV dramas”: The reception of authenticity, reality, and modality in Danish TV dramas

2021 ◽  
pp. 174960202110463
Author(s):  
Yeşim Kaptan
Keyword(s):  
Focus Group ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Television Viewing ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Focus Group Interviews ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Group Interviews ◽  
Empirical Material ◽  
The Way

This article investigates how Turkish audiences conceptualize authenticity in their engagement with foreign television (TV) productions in the case of Danish TV dramas. The theoretical notion of authenticity is juxtaposed with empirical material from fieldwork interactions, focus group interviews, and one-on-one interviews conducted with Turkish audiences between 2016 and 2018. By employing a semiotic analysis of fieldwork data, I argue that Turkish audiences attribute authenticity to the Danish TV drama series according to a socially created modality (truth value of a sign). This article draws on accounts about modality markers in TV drama series such as authentic portrayals of Danish TV characters and plausible-realistic depictions as a verisimilitudinous representation of everyday life. In the context of cross-cultural television viewing practices, the way Turkish audiences attribute meaning to Danish TV series in terms of authenticity, realism, and modality reveals a distinct differentiation between Danish TV dramas and other nationally and globally circulating media products.

scholarly journals Women and Orientalism: 19th century Representations of the Harem by European female travellers and Ottoman women

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Thisaranie Herath
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Private Spaces ◽  
The Way

The inaccessibility of the Ottoman harems to European males helped perpetuate the image of the harem as purely sexual in nature and contributed to imperialistic discourse that positioned the East as inferior to the West. It was only with the emergence of female travellers and artists that Europe was afforded a brief glimpse into the source of their fantasies; however, whether these accounts catered to or challenged the normative imperialist discourse of the day remains controversial. Emerging scholarship also highlights the way in which harem women themselves were able to control the depiction of their private spaces to suit their own needs, serving to highlight how nineteenth century depictions of the harem were a series of cross-cultural exchanges and negotiations between male Orientalists, female European travellers, and shrewd Ottoman women. 

Experimental and Cross-Cultural Epistemology

2021 ◽  
pp. 210-232
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stoltz
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Buddhist Epistemology ◽  
Experimental Epistemology ◽  
Tacit Assumptions ◽  
Is Value ◽  
The Way

Chapter 10 examines how contemporary trends in experimental philosophy can benefit from the study of Buddhist epistemology. In particular, it explores the question of whether an appreciation of Buddhist epistemology could inform philosophers about both the merits of experimental epistemology and experimental philosophy’s emphasis on probing intuitions about knowledge. The second half of the chapter steps back from this examination of experimental philosophy and argues that there is value to be found in contemporary philosophers learning more about other traditions of epistemological theorizing, including the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions of epistemology. Among other things, it can serve to change the way we view our own tradition of epistemology and lay bare the tacit assumptions that undergird contemporary discussions of knowledge.

Alienation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen W. Wood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Way

‘Alienation’ is a prominent term in twentieth-century social theory and social criticism, referring to any of various social or psychological evils which are characterized by a harmful separation, disruption or fragmentation which sunders things that properly belong together. People are alienated from one another when there is an interruption in their mutual affection or reciprocal understanding; they are alienated from political processes when they feel separated from them and powerless in relation to them. Reflection on your beliefs or values can also alienate you from them by undermining your attachment to them or your identification with them; they remain your beliefs or values faute de mieux, but are no longer yours in the way they should be. Alienation translates two distinct German terms: Entfremdung (‘estrangement’) and Entäußerung (‘externalization’). Both terms originated in the philosophy of Hegel, specifically in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Their influence, however, has come chiefly from their use by Karl Marx in his manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1930). Marx’s fundamental concern was with the alienation of wage labourers from their product, the grounds of which he sought in the alienated form of their labouring activity. In both Hegel and Marx, alienation refers fundamentally to a kind of activity in which the essence of the agent is posited as something external or alien, assuming the form of hostile domination over the agent.

Final Remarks

2020 ◽  
pp. 131-142
Author(s):  
Majid Daneshgar
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
The Way

The final chapter of the book is divided into two sections: conclusions, and “Islamic Apologetics” everywhere. It informs readers about the future of Islamic studies in the West and the way it gets gradually changed to Islamic Apologetics. In so doing, some of the true stories that have happened in both Muslim and Western academic contexts are discussed. The final remarks aim to show that, in fact, the stronger the connection with politics and traditionalism, the more diminished is the academic approach toward religion and the greater the conservative presentation of religious studies, in both Western and Muslim academic contexts.

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