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Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History

Aaron W. Hughes

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a virtual cottage industry in all things “Abrahamic.” Directly proportionate to the rise of religious exclusivism, perhaps best epitomized by the attacks ... More

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a virtual cottage industry in all things “Abrahamic.” Directly proportionate to the rise of religious exclusivism, perhaps best epitomized by the attacks of 9/11 and the current problems plaguing the Middle East and Afghanistan, there has been a real desire both to find and map a set of commonalities between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is often done, however, not for the sake of scholarship, but interfaith dialogue. Recently, however, the term “Abrahamic religions” has been used with exceeding frequency in the academy. We now regularly encounter academic books, conferences, and even positions (including endowed chairs) devoted to the so-called “Abrahamic religions.” Often lost in contemporary discussions of “Abrahamic religions” is a set of crucial questions: whence does the term “Abrahamic religions” derive? Who created it and for what purposes? What sort of intellectual work is it perceived to perform? In order to answer these and related questions, the book examines the creation and dissemination of this category. Part genealogical and part analytical, this study seeks to raise and answer questions about the appropriateness and usefulness of employing “Abrahamic religions” as a vehicle for understanding and classifying data. In so doing, this book can be taken as a case study that examines the construction of categories within the academic study of religion, showing how the categories we employ can become more an impediment than an expedient to understanding.Less

Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools

Jeffrey Guhin

In Agents of God, sociologist Jeffrey Guhin describes his year and a half spent in two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools in the New York City area. At first, these four schools ... More

In Agents of God, sociologist Jeffrey Guhin describes his year and a half spent in two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools in the New York City area. At first, these four schools could not seem more different, yet they are linked by much: these are all schools with conservative thoughts on gender and sexuality, with a hostility to the theory of evolution, and with a deep suspicion of secularism. And they are all also hopeful that America will be a place where their children can excel, even as they also fear the nation’s many temptations might lead their children astray. Guhin shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the outside world, both in school and online. Within these boundaries, these communities have developed “external authorities” like Science, Scripture, and Prayer, each of which is felt and experienced as a real power with the ability to make commands and coerce action. For example, people can describe Science itself as showing something or the Bible itself as making a command. By offloading coercion to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to religious studies, sociology, and education.Less

Aliens and Strangers?: The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals

Anna Strhan

In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. ‘St John’s’ is a vibrant church, ... More

In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. ‘St John’s’ is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle—a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s see themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John’s learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of their projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of these evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by the moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.Less

American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion

Arthur Versluis

By the early twenty-first century, a phenomenon that once was inconceivable had become nearly commonplace in American society: the American public spiritual teacher who does not belong to, or at ... More

By the early twenty-first century, a phenomenon that once was inconceivable had become nearly commonplace in American society: the American public spiritual teacher who does not belong to, or at least, is not authorized by a major religious tradition. From Eckhart Tolle and Andrew Cohen to figures like Gangaji and Adhyashanti, there are now countless such spiritual teachers—both male and female—that claim and teach variants of instant or immediate enlightenment. American Gurus tells the story of how this phenomenon of religious immediatism emerged, especially in American religion. This phenomenon has many precedents and a long history. From Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman through the twentieth century, the Beat movement, the psychedelic revolution, Timothy Leary, the influence of Hindu gurus to the New Age movement, Versluis tells the enthralling saga of how contemporary American immediatism came into being. In American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (1993), Versluis surveyed how Asian religions helped shape the entire Transcendentalist intellectual movement, and in The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (2001), he showed how Western esoteric traditions contributed much to mid-nineteenth-century American literature and literary religion. In American Gurus, Versluis shows how the confluence of Asian religions and Western mysticism come together to produce the continuing and fascinating saga that culminates in the phenomenon of contemporary “spontaneously enlightened” American gurus.Less

Analytic Christology and the Theological Interpretation of the New Testament

Thomas H. McCall

This book draws upon the resources of both contemporary analytic theology and the theological interpretation of the New Testament in order to investigate a set of important issues in Christology. It ... More

This book draws upon the resources of both contemporary analytic theology and the theological interpretation of the New Testament in order to investigate a set of important issues in Christology. It is the first work in analytic Christology to draw upon both recent scholarship in biblical studies and recent contributions to analytic philosophy and theology. This book explores the themes of union with Christ and the faith of Christ as these are developed by the “apocalyptic” and “New Perspective” interpreters of Pauline theology, it offers an careful analysis of recent dogmatic proposals about the identity of Christ and the doctrine of election, it provides an examination of debates over the subordination of the Son in Hebrews, it probes the relationship of the incarnate Son to his Father in Johannine theology, and it offers an exegetically grounded theological engagement with recent work on the place of logic in the doctrine of the incarnation.Less

Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour

Mark McInroy

In this study, Mark McInroy argues that the ‘spiritual senses’ play a crucial yet previously unappreciated role in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The doctrine of the spiritual ... More

In this study, Mark McInroy argues that the ‘spiritual senses’ play a crucial yet previously unappreciated role in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The doctrine of the spiritual senses typically claims that human beings can be made capable of perceiving non-corporeal, ‘spiritual’ realities. After a lengthy period of disuse, Balthasar recovers the doctrine in the mid-twentieth century and articulates it afresh in his theological aesthetics. At the heart of this project stands the task of perceiving the absolute beauty of the divine form through which God is revealed to human beings. Although extensive scholarly attention has focused on Balthasar’s understanding of revelation, beauty, and form, what remains curiously under-studied is his model of the perceptual faculties through which one beholds the form that God reveals. McInroy claims that Balthasar draws upon the tradition of the spiritual senses in order to develop the means through which one perceives the ‘splendour’ of divine revelation. McInroy further argues that, in playing this role, the spiritual senses function as an indispensable component of Balthasar’s unique, aesthetic resolution to the high-profile debates in modern Catholic theology between Neo-Scholastic theologians and their opponents. As a third option between Neo-Scholastic ‘extrinsicism’, which arguably insists on the authority of revelation to the point of disaffecting the human being, and ‘immanentism’, which reduces God’s revelation to human categories in the name of relevance, McInroy proposes that Balthasar’s model of spiritual perception allows one to be both delighted and astounded by the glory of God’s revelation.Less

The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion

Jeffrey Schloss and Michael Murray (eds)

Over the last two decades, scientific accounts of religion have received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention both because of their intrinsic interest and because they are widely viewed as ... More

Over the last two decades, scientific accounts of religion have received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention both because of their intrinsic interest and because they are widely viewed as constituting a threat to the religion they analyse. This book aims to describe and discuss these scientific accounts as well as to assess their implications. The volume begins with essays by leading scientists in the field, describing these accounts and discussing evidence in their favour. Philosophical and theological reflections on these accounts follow, offered by leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. This diverse group of scholars address some fascinating underlying questions: Do scientific accounts of religion undermine the justification of religious belief? Do such accounts show religion to be an accidental by-product of our evolutionary development? And, whilst we seem naturally disposed toward religion, would we fare better or worse without it? Bringing together dissenting perspectives, this provocative collection will serve to freshly illuminate on-going debate on these perennial questions.Less

Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton

Katharine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce (eds)

Since the rise of critical biblical study in the nineteenth century, there has been a revolution in the way that we interpret the Bible and in the methods we employ to facilitate our reading. ... More

Since the rise of critical biblical study in the nineteenth century, there has been a revolution in the way that we interpret the Bible and in the methods we employ to facilitate our reading. Professor John Barton has been a major recent influence upon such developments and this volume reflects upon his contribution. A generation of scholars has engaged with, adopted, and further developed Professor Barton's nuanced and careful explication of method, as exemplified particularly in his book Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study. The book divides into two parts. In the first, older methods in biblical studies such as source criticism and textual criticism are reviewed, both as methods and in relation to worked examples. In the second part, newer types of criticism such as sociological, feminist, and post-colonial readings are explored, again in relation to particular texts and examples. The book asks questions about the benefits and shortcomings of the methodological tools in our biblical critical tool-box and about the way texts are themselves brought to life in ever fresh interpretative and often interdisciplinary contexts.Less

The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology

Douglas E. Christie

The fourth-century writer Evagrius of Pontus likens the experience of contemplation to dwelling in a kind of place. “When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace,” ... More

The fourth-century writer Evagrius of Pontus likens the experience of contemplation to dwelling in a kind of place. “When the mind has put off the old self and shall put on the one born of grace,” says Evagrius, “then it will see its own state in the time of prayer resembling sapphire of the color of heaven. This state is called by scripture, the place of God.” This book believes that the ancient tradition of Christian contemplative thought and practice represented by Evagrius has a genuine contribution to make to the world of ecological thought and practice. At the same time, he says, the sense of “the whole” emerging from contemporary ecological discourse has the potential to deepen and expand the classic understanding of contemplative life and practice. One of the striking features of the present historical moment is a deep and pervasive hunger for a less fragmented way of apprehending the world. Attending to these two traditions of thought and practice together, this book argues, can help us recover such an integrated vision of the world. Additionally, there is a growing recognition in the culture at large, and in faith communities in particular, of the need for a response to the ecological crisis that expresses our deepest moral and spiritual values. Drawing on the insights of the early Christian monastics as well as the ecological writings of such figures as Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, and many others, this book forges a distinctively contemplative vision of ecological spirituality that could, the book contends, serve to ground the work of ecological restoration.Less

The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect

Kenneth G. C. Newport

What were the beliefs of the Branch Davidians? This book provides an account of their history. The book argues that, far from being an act of unfathomable religious insanity, the calamitous fire at ... More

What were the beliefs of the Branch Davidians? This book provides an account of their history. The book argues that, far from being an act of unfathomable religious insanity, the calamitous fire at Waco in 1993 was the culmination of a long theological and historical tradition that goes back many decades. The Branch Davidians under David Koresh were an eschatologically confident community that had long expected that the American government, whom they identified as the Lamb-like Beast of the Book of Revelation, would one day arrive to seek to destroy God's remnant people. The end result, the fire, must be seen in this context.Less

Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons

Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced in ... More

Changes in the American religious landscape enabled the rise of mass incarceration. Religious ideas and practices also offer a key for ending mass incarceration. These are the bold claims advanced in Break Every Yoke, the joint work of two activist-scholars of American religion. Once, in an era not too long past, Americans, both incarcerated and free, spoke a language of social liberation animated by religion. In the era of mass incarceration, we have largely forgotten how to dream—and organize—this way. To end mass incarceration we must reclaim this lost tradition. Properly conceived, the movement we need must demand not prison reform but prison abolition. Break Every Yoke weaves religion into the stories about race, politics, law, and economics that conventionally account for the grotesque prison expansion of the last half century in the United States, and in so doing it sheds new light on one of our era’s biggest human catastrophes. By foregrounding the role of religion in the way political elites, religious institutions, and incarcerated activists talk about incarceration, Break Every Yoke is an effort to stretch the American moral imagination and contribute resources toward envisioning alternative ways of doing justice. By looking back to nineteenth-century abolitionism, and by turning to today’s grassroots activists, it argues for reclaiming the abolition “spirit.”Less

Building Faith: A Sociology of Religious Structures

Robert Brenneman and Brian J. Miller

Religious buildings are all around us. From Wall Street to Main Street, from sublime and historic cathedrals to humble converted storefronts, these buildings shape the global religious landscape, ... More

Religious buildings are all around us. From Wall Street to Main Street, from sublime and historic cathedrals to humble converted storefronts, these buildings shape the global religious landscape, “building faith” among those who worship in them while providing a testament to the faith of those who built them and those who maintain them. Building Faith explores the social impact of religious buildings in places as diverse as a Chicago suburb and a Guatemalan indigenous Mayan village, all the while asking the questions, “How does space shape community?” and “How do communities shape the spaces that speak for them?” The social sciences have mostly ignored the role of physical buildings in shaping the social fabric of communities and groups. Although the emerging field of the sociology of architecture has started to pay attention to physical structures, Brenneman and Miller are the first to combine the light of sociological theory and the empirical method in order to understand the impact of physical structures on religious groups that build, transform, and maintain them. Religious buildings not only reflect the groups that build them or use them; they shape and change those who gather and worship there.Less

The Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation

The Bundahišn, meaning primal or foundational creation, is the central Zoroastrian account of creation, cosmology, and eschatology and one of the most important of the surviving testaments to ... More

The Bundahišn, meaning primal or foundational creation, is the central Zoroastrian account of creation, cosmology, and eschatology and one of the most important of the surviving testaments to Zoroastrian literature and pre-Islamic Iranian culture. Touching on geography, cosmogony, anthropology, zoology, astronomy, medicine, legend, and myth, the Bundahišn can be considered a concise compendium of Zoroastrian knowledge. The Bundahišn is well known in the field as an essential primary source for the study of ancient Iranian history, religions, literature, and languages. It is one of the most important texts composed in Zoroastrian Middle Persian, also known as Zoroastrian Book Pahlavi, in the centuries after the fall of the Sasanian Empire to the invading Arab and Islamic forces in the mid seventh century. The Bundahišn provides scholars with a particularly profitable window on Zoroastrianism’s intellectual and religious history at a crucial transitional moment: centuries after the composition of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian sacred scriptures, and before the transformation of Zoroastrianism into a minority religion within Iran and adherents’ dispersion throughout Central and South Asia. However, the Bundahišn is not only a scholarly tract. It is also a great work of literature in its own right and ranks alongside the creation myths of other ancient traditions: Genesis, the Babylonian Emunah Elish, Hesiod’s Theogony, and others. Informed by the latest research in Iranian Studies, this translation aims to bring to the fore the aesthetic quality, literary style, and complexity of this important work.Less

Calvin and His Influence, 1509–2009

Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (eds)

This book explores central aspects of Calvin’s influence across the centuries and around the world from his lifetime to the present day. The volume offers a perspective on the full scope of the ... More

This book explores central aspects of Calvin’s influence across the centuries and around the world from his lifetime to the present day. The volume offers a perspective on the full scope of the reformer’s impact on the subsequent course of the Protestant tradition and on modern Western civilization more generally. It opens with an examination of Calvin’s theology as the distillation of the first five centuries of Christianity with all its possibilities and limitations. The next four studies focus on Calvin as man and thinker in his sixteenth-century Genevan context, dealing respectively with aristocracy as an orienting principle in Calvin’s own political theory and ecclesiology; Calvin’s notorious passion for work; Calvin’s authorial style, which exercised a crucial influence on French prose; and the particularities of Calvin’s church in Geneva. There follows a study on Calvin’s relations with the Swiss Reformed churches, which gave his system a particular stamp. The seventh study explores the global nature of Calvin’s influence while chapters 8 to 15 branch out into considering various Calvinisms—which the chapters show conclusively to be more or less removed from Calvin’s thought while still claiming his name and label. These include a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political Calvinisms, as well as studies of his theological reception from the seventeenth until the nineteenth century. The two final studies deal respectively with the links between the reformer’s thought and the British Evangelicals and with the complex issue of Calvin and South African apartheid.Less

Catholic Doctrines on the Jewish People after Vatican II

Gavin D'Costa

The book explores Roman Catholic doctrines after the Second Vatican Council regarding the Jewish people (1965–2015). It establishes the emergence of the teaching that God’s covenant with the Jewish ... More

The book explores Roman Catholic doctrines after the Second Vatican Council regarding the Jewish people (1965–2015). It establishes the emergence of the teaching that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is irrevocable. What does this mean for Catholics regarding Jewish religious rituals, the land, and mission? The book examines early magisterial documents that seem to contradict current teachings. The apparent contradiction is historically contextualized. It argues two points. First, that earlier teachings accept the positive value of Jewish rituals within certain conditions. This can be applied, in principle, to contemporary religious Jewish rituals. These earlier traditions also show a positive valuation of Jewish cultic practices within the early Christian church. The book examines new Catholic approaches to the Old Testament. Despite different New Testament teachings about the land, it is argued that the promise of the Land to the Jewish people, with various conditions, can be regarded as valid for Catholics. The book also examines the Holy See’s shifting attitude to the modern State of Israel and its pragmatic silence on the theology of land. The book proposes a form of minimalist Catholic Zionism: affirming the land without excluding a just Palestinian resolution. The book explores unresolved Catholic teachings on ‘mission’ and ‘witness’. The centre of this debate concerns the new assumption that Christians should not erase God-given Jewish identity. The book asks: could Hebrew Catholics witness to this reality while also testifying to the compatibility and unity of the two covenants?Less

The Cherished Five in Sikh History

Louis E. Fenech

For Sikhs, the two most important delimited groups in the tradition are the Ten Sikh Gurus and the Cherished Five (the Panj Piare). Although there are many scholarly works on the first, the second ... More

For Sikhs, the two most important delimited groups in the tradition are the Ten Sikh Gurus and the Cherished Five (the Panj Piare). Although there are many scholarly works on the first, the second has none to date. The Cherished Five were five disciples brought together by Guru Gobind Singh to form the nucleus of the Sikh Khalsa in 1699, or so tradition claims. The story of the Five’s origin resounds with the most important values of the Sikh tradition: courage, selflessness, love, benevolence, compassion, and trust in the divine; its importance is underscored by the fact that the institution of the Cherished Five is recreated daily as it plays an essential role in the Sikh ritual universe, ushering new initiates into the Khalsa and casting out those who have violated Khalsa precepts. This text provides the first sustained study of the Five by tracing the history and the evolution of this institution from its origin in the later eighteenth century until today. In the process, it challenges much of the traditional narratives and accepted wisdom in regard to the Panj Piare, revolving in part around three elements with which the institution is regularly aligned in early manuscripts: caste, karma, and place.Less

Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism

Ruben van Luijk

Satanism adopts Satan, the Judeo-Christian representative of evil, as an object of veneration. This book explores the historical origins of this extraordinary “antireligion.” While the concept of ... More

Satanism adopts Satan, the Judeo-Christian representative of evil, as an object of veneration. This book explores the historical origins of this extraordinary “antireligion.” While the concept of people worshipping Satan was actually an invention of Christianity to demonize its internal and external competitors, this dark stereotype created by the Church eventually came to be embraced as a positive (anti)religious identity by some in the modern West. Children of Lucifer traces the long and tortuous trajectory to this unique occurrence, a story that involves Romantic poets, radical anarchists, eccentric esotericists, Decadent writers, and schismatic exorcists, among others, culminating in the establishment of the Church of Satan by the carnival entertainer Anton Szandor LaVey. Yet it is more than just a collection of colorful characters and unlikely historical episodes. The emergence of new attitudes to Satan proves to be intimately linked to the Western Revolution, the ideological struggle for emancipation that transformed the West and is epitomized by the American and French Revolutions. It is also closely connected to secularization, that other exceptional historical process during which Western culture spontaneously renounced its traditional gods in order to enter into a self-chosen state of religious indecision. As this study seeks to show, the emergence of Satanism thus presents a shadow history of the evolution of modern civilization as we know it.Less

Christmas as Religion: Rethinking Santa, the Secular, and the Sacred

Christopher Deacy

This book begins with the premise that religion plays an elementary role in our understanding of the Christmas festival, but takes issue with much of the existing literature which is predilected to ... More

This book begins with the premise that religion plays an elementary role in our understanding of the Christmas festival, but takes issue with much of the existing literature which is predilected to associate ‘religion’ with formal or institutional forms of Christianity or to construe Christmas as a commercial and secular holiday. In Christmas as Religion, Deacy argues that such approaches fail to take adequate stock of the manifold ways in which people’s beliefs and values take shape in modern society. It may be, for example, that a supernaturally-themed Christmas film about Santa or a Christmas radio programme such as Junior Choice comprise a non-specifically Christian, but nonetheless religiously rich, repository of beliefs, values, sentiments, and aspirations. This book thus makes the case for laying to rest the secularization thesis, with its simplistic assumption that religion in Western society is undergoing a period of escalating and irrevocable erosion, and to see instead that the secular may itself be a repository of the religious. Deacy argues that a festival of consumerism can be an unexpectedly fertile site of spirituality and transcendence and that materialism and consumption need to be understood within a context of familial, social, and interpersonal connection and, even, transformation. Rather than see Christmas as comprising an alternative or analogous form of religious expression, or dependent on any causal relationship to the Christian tradition, Deacy’s premise is that it is religious per se, and, moreover, it is its very secularity that makes Christmas such a compelling, and transcendent, religious holiday.Less

Cognitive Science and the New Testament: A New Approach to Early Christian Research

István Czachesz

This monograph makes a case for a cognitive turn in New Testament Studies, both surveying relevant developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion and digging into the field of cognitive and ... More

This monograph makes a case for a cognitive turn in New Testament Studies, both surveying relevant developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion and digging into the field of cognitive and behavioral sciences in search of opportunities of gaining new insights about biblical materials. Over the last few decades, our knowledge of how the human mind and brain work increased dramatically. We can now understand religious traditions, rituals, and visionary experiences in novel ways. This has implications for the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. With insights from cognitive science, we can better understand how people in the ancient Mediterranean world remembered sayings and stories, what they experienced when participating in rituals, how they thought about magic and miracle, and how they felt and reasoned about moral questions. The first three chapters of the book introduce the contemporary study of religion in the framework of evolution, culture, and cognition. In subsequent chapters, the study of the New Testament and early Christianity is reconsidered in light of the cognitive approach, including the formation of gospel traditions, the origins and function of rituals and sacraments, religious experience, ethics and moral norms, as well as the expansion of the Christian movement. In addition to rethinking old questions from a novel perspective, the book also shows how new research questions emerge from the cognitive approach, such as the connection between magic and miracle, the neurological correlates of visionary experiences, and the interaction between social network dynamics and theological development.Less

Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies

Oliver Freiberger

This book seeks to rehabilitate the comparative method in the study of religion by highlighting its fundamental role for the academic mission of religious studies and by proposing both a responsible ... More

This book seeks to rehabilitate the comparative method in the study of religion by highlighting its fundamental role for the academic mission of religious studies and by proposing both a responsible theoretical approach and a methodological framework. Analyzing the ways in which comparison is used in the study of religion, the book identifies the primary goals of this method and argues that it is constitutive for religious studies as an academic discipline. Revisiting various critiques of comparison—decontextualization and essentialization charges, postcolonialist and postmodernist critiques, and the perspectives of recent naturalistic approaches—the book incorporates insights gained from such debates into an approach that is based upon thorough epistemological analysis of comparison and that takes the scholar’s situatedness and agency seriously. Few scholars have reflected deeply upon how comparison works in practice. The book argues, and tries to demonstrate, that such reflections are useful both for producing and for evaluating comparative studies. It proposes a methodological framework for the analysis of comparison that is meant to prove relevant both for theoretical reflections and for the pragmatics of comparative work. In addition, it suggests a comparative approach—discourse comparison—that helps to confront the omnipresent risks of decontextualization, essentialization, and universalization. Arguing that the comparative method is indispensable for a deeper analytical understanding of what we call religion, this book makes a case for comparison. It seeks to enrich the considerations of both aspiring and seasoned comparativists, stimulate much-needed further discussions about methodology, and encourage scholars to produce responsible comparative studies.Less