O'FLAHERTY, WENDY DONIGER (ed.), The Critical Study of Sacred Texts, Berkeley Religious Studies Series, 1979, xiii + 290 p. $16.-

Numen ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-106
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
P 16

‘Religion,’ ‘the Secular’ and the Critical Study of Religion

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Engler
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Il Y A ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Current ◽  
Academic Study

This essay critically engages Timothy Fitzgerald’s Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007), arguing that it takes an important step beyond Fitzgerald’s first book, The Ideology of Religious Studies ( 2000 ), in diagnosing a current malaise of the academic study of religion and in modelling a way past this malaise. Highlighting this valuable aspect of the book, I argue, requires correcting certain problems with its argument. Specifically, there is a tension between two overarching goals: writing “a critical history of ‘religion’ as a category,” and criticizing “modern discourses on generic religion.” Once these genealogical and critical projects are brought into more effective alignment, the book models an approach where a properly critical study of religion begins with a contingently and strategically theorized domain of ‘religion’ and explores its relation to other domains—not only ‘the secular.’ Cet essai reconsidère d’un œil critique le livre Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007), de Timothy Fitzgerald. Il soutien qu’il donne un pas important au-delà du premier livre de Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies ( 2000 ), dans les faits de diagnostiquer une malaise actuelle de l’étude des religions et de modeler une piste alternative. Pourtant, pour accentuer cet aspect important du livre, on doit corriger des problèmes logiques avec son argument. Spécialement, il y a une tension problématique entre les deux buts du livre : l’écriture « d’une histoire critique de ‘religion’ comme une catégorie »; et la critique « des discours modernes sur la religion générique ». Dès que ces projets généalogiques et critiques sont apportés dans une meilleure alignement, le livre modèle une approche de grande valeur : c’est le travail d’une étude proprement critique du concept ‘de religion’ de le suivre où il mène, et d’analyser ses relations avec des autres concepts.

The Critical Study of Sacred Texts

Numen ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
R. J. Z. Werblowsky ◽  
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Critical Study ◽  
Sacred Texts

The Ethics of Religious Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-42
Author(s):  
Richard B. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Education ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Theoretical Justification ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Routine Work ◽  
Shadow Cast ◽  
Value Neutrality

This chapter argues that the study of religion lacks an “ethics of religious studies,” by which the author means a theoretical justification of the guild. Focusing on a 1971 report by Claude Welch, Graduate Education in Religion: A Critical Study, it targets Welch’s refusal to provide such a justification and explains its silence by referencing the long shadow cast by Protestant thinking about the dangers of self-justification. It is argued that Welch’s argument erects a firewall between the study of religion and the justification of that study, one that reinforces the commitment to value-neutrality that is described in chapter 1. To explain the field’s preoccupation with methodology, the chapter turns to Stephen Toulmin’s discussion of scientific disciplines and the importance of having a goal as a condition for organizing mature research. It concludes by sketching the outlines of scholarship in religious studies and the distinction between routine work and metadisciplinary work.

Abandonment Issues: Reflections on Redescription, Rectification, and J.Z. Smith’s “Trading Places”

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Andrew Durdin
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Do So

Abstract I reflect here on Jonathan Z. Smith’s influence on my approach to the study of religion, interweaving these reflections into the outline of a larger argument for the continued critical study of the category of religion—a project central to Smith’s intellectual project. While many have pursued Smith’s denaturalization of the category of religion, few have tried to imagine what Religious Studies might look like without religion as its primary explanatory category. Here I argue that Smith’s notions of redescription and rectification offer clues for how such a methodological shift might work. I do so by looking specifically at Smith’s brief essay “Trading Places” where he explicitly recommends rejecting efforts to theorize “magic.” I argue that not only do his considerations apply to the category of religion but also that the procedures he discusses in “Trading Place” might be understood as a more radical view of redescription and rectification.

Writing Your Own Scripture?

Horizons ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth P. Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Student Responses ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Primary Resource ◽  
The World ◽  
Practical Guidelines

AbstractIs it possible to write contemporary scripture? This discussion highlights the pedagogical value not only of teaching with primary resource materials, but also of having students creatively rewrite sacred texts. First, I discuss the purpose of a religious studies journal, and then provide some practical guidelines for journal-keeping along with suggestions for grading them. Secondly, I focus upon one type of creative journal exercise—rewriting sacred texts. In response to Ira Progoff s statements that we can create the Bibles of the world anew by recording images drawn up from our depth consciousness, I encourage students to write scripture-styled passages which deepen their appreciation for and understanding of sacred texts. To conclude, I provide six sample creative journal exercises, one from each of the sacred texts read in my Eastern Religions classes, along with several student responses.

scholarly journals A Critical Study of Maulana Shams Naved Usmani’s Rare Thoughts and Writings about Hinduism

Fahm-i-Islam ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-43
Author(s):  
Maryam Noreen ◽  
Dr. Abzahir Khan
Keyword(s):  
Critical Study ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
First Time ◽  
Islamic Literature

Acharya[i] Maulana Shams Naved Usmani’s was an important thinker (mufakkir) and researcher of his times. He had extensive knowledge regarding Hindusim. He was a passionate advocate of Hindu-Muslim inter-faith dialogue, spawning a new trend in India Muslim literary and activist circles. Maulana chartered a new course in Islamic literature in India, seeking to combine a commitment to inter-faith dialogue with what seems to have been his principal mission, that of Da’wah, or inviting others to Islam. Muslim understanding for the first time has highlighted an aspect regarding Hinduism where hindu sacred books are read in contrast with quran and hadith and scattered facts about Islam are collected and presented to manifest the true picture of Islam. Though in the past too, there existed to some extent the proof in Hindu sacred texts regarding the truth of Islam, this trend increased after Maulana’s work in this context. He explained the meaning and interpretation of many important Hindu views in the light if Islam. For this purpose, he also used translated texts, and sayings of sufis besides Quran and hadith. So, this study is an attempt to present Usmani’s views on understanding Hinduism and critically analyze his views in this regard.

scholarly journals Ukrainian Religious Studies in the Context of World Religion Science

2006 ◽  
pp. 69-92
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Community ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Western Science ◽  
World Religion ◽  
The World ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The One ◽  
Scientific Atheism

Ukrainian religious studies has recently entered the world scientific community. Acquaintance with Western science, which has proven to be heterogeneous, often based on different methodological approaches and methodological means, has coincided with difficult internal transformations that have undergone all humanitarian knowledge in Ukraine after worldviews and political changes in society. In pursuit of its identity, domestic religious studies went, on the one hand, by contrasting itself with theology, and on the other, by distinguishing itself from scientific atheism. At first, the emergence of religious studies from the bosom of ideologized social science was more relevant. In the form of a critical study of religion, Soviet-era religious studies were included in scientific atheism. Therefore, religious studies came not as knowledge of religion, but as its critique.

A Sociology of Sacred Texts

Numen ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Davies
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Future Conference ◽  
The Social ◽  
Selection Of

AbstractIn 1992 Sheffield Academic Press will publish a selection of the papers given at this Conference, which was held in Newcastle in July 1991. The Conference was organized by the Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University. The Head of the Department at the time was Professor John Sawyer. The publication will be edited by the new Head of the Department, Jon Davies, and by Isabel Wollaston, currently a British Academy Post Doctoral Fellow at Oxford. Two of our students-Carol Charlton and Michael Burke-worked extra hours to make sure the organisation functioned. Our thanks are due to them and to all participants. This article is in part a summary of the Conference and of those papers which will appear in the book. It is also a contribution in its own right to an understanding of the relationships between the social sciences [sociology and anthropology] and theology. Several cross-cutting social, personal and professional loyalties can, and often do create degrees of distance, dispute and misunderstanding between the two disciplines. As it happens, this Conference managed to find a respectable acreage of common ground; but it is perhaps useful to mention some of the possible areas of controversy, if only because any future conference will probably have to deal with them more directly than we chose to! Readers will of course realise that the book is still being prepared and that the papers discussed here may well be altered or added to. The premise of this article is that all "TEXTS", be they sacred or secular, ancient or modem, canonical or provisional, are the products of human social transactions, a human context, with all that this means for the processes of text-creation and the business of conscious, purposeful, fallible, writing and editing. Texts and contexts change together; and change each other.

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