A Critical Study on “Religious Studies” Textbook of Protestant School in the Perspective of Religious Peace

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.

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The Ethics of Religious Studies

10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0002 ◽

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.

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

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion ◽

10.1163/15700682-12341456 ◽

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.

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Ukrainian Religious Studies in the Context of World Religion Science

Ukrainian Religious Studies ◽

10.32420/2006.40.1773 ◽

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.

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Teaching by Production Rather Than Products

Method & Theory in the Study of Religion ◽

10.1163/15700682-12341378 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 28 (3) ◽

pp. 307-315

Author(s):

Nathan R.B. Loewen

Keyword(s):

Best Practice ◽

Fine Art ◽

Religious Studies ◽

Critical Study ◽

World Religions ◽

Pedagogical Tools ◽

Dialogical Self ◽

Critical Scholarship ◽

Current Trends ◽

Conference Papers

The classroom has potential to be the most common context for the dissemination of method and theory in religious studies. Scholars have the ability to perform scholarly competencies in their teaching venues such as providing evidentiary support, taking stock of methodological concerns, and demonstrating familiarity with current trends in criticism within the field, just to name a few. Those who take seriously critical moves in the field, furthermore, might see the dialogical self-consciousness and an attention to structures to be shared primary interests for critical theory and contemporary pedagogy. All too often, and problematically, the competencies applied in scholarship are separated from teaching. Research is seen as “real work” (e.g., publications and conference papers) and, for many, teaching merely serves those practical ends. With this problematic dichotomy in mind, the publishing ofThe Norton Anthology of World Religions(nawr) is sadly not surprising in the year 2015. When critical scholarship is withheld from pedagogical tools (like an anthology), the demonstrable lack of scholarly competency and disciplinary aptitude in Jack Miles’ preface and introduction to thenawrremains unremarkable (particularly since he claims to address religious studies undergraduates and their professors). Miles not only presents thenawras a means by which “international world religions should be allowed to speak to you in their own words” (Miles 2015: li) but he also prescribes—as supposedly prior to theoretical commitments—the method of “secular, neutral comparative study of religion” (41) through the “fine art of page flipping” (lvii) as the original and best practice for the study of religion. Miles’ failures as a critic and as a pedagogue merely reflect the presumption that students need only interact with the superstructures of higher education and not be let in on the processes that create scholarship. This essay will outline this problematic vis-à-vis the preface and introduction to thenawrin order to highlight the role a critical study of religion should play in our teaching.

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Ideology, Ideology-Critique, and the Critical Study of Religion in Bruce Lincoln’s Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars

Bulletin for the Study of Religion ◽

10.1558/bsor.v42i2.2 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 42 (2) ◽

pp. 2-7

Author(s):

Marsha Hewitt

Keyword(s):

Review Essay ◽

Political Correctness ◽

Religious Studies ◽

Professional Association ◽

Critical Study ◽

Ideology Critique ◽

Current State ◽

General Field ◽

Critique Of Religion

This article is a review essay of Lincoln's latest book, contextualizing it within the general field of his previous work. The article situates Lincoln's work with respect to ideology critique mainly in the theoretical tradition of Marx and his critique of religion. It is argued that Lincoln's diagnosis of the current state of the study of religion remains captive to the current regulating practices deriving from some postmodern ideas, political correctness, and the hegemony of theology in 'religious' studies in the academy and its major professional association.

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