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About This Book
Drawing on recent developments in the comparative study of religion, this book explores the trends of the past sixty years from a global perspective. Each of the ten chapters covers the study of religion in a different region of the world, from Europe and the Americas to Asia and the Far East. Topics covered include:
- local background to the study of religions
- formation of religious studies in the region
- important thinkers and writings
- institutions
- interregional diversity and interregional connections
- emerging issues.
This book is a major contribution to the field of religious studies and a valuable reference for scholars, researchers and graduate students.
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1
Western Europe
Prehistory of the study of religion 16 | ||||
Searching for the roots | ||||
âReligionâ: a foundational concept | ||||
The sacred and the holy | ||||
The emergence and institutionalization of the study of religion: the 1870s to the 1990s 19 | ||||
Dimensions and places of emerging institutionalization 20 | ||||
Early reference works and textbooks | ||||
Subsequent institutionalization throughout Europe | ||||
Fascism and National Socialism | ||||
Post-World War II developments | ||||
Scholarly associations and whatâs in a name | ||||
The decline of institutionalized Christendom and a field on the rise | ||||
Changing constituencies | ||||
Changing religious background of the scholars | ||||
Developments in scholarship 27 | ||||
Post-World War II scholarly journals and reference works | ||||
Textbooks and historical survey works | ||||
The great age of the phenomenological treatises | ||||
Leading figures | ||||
Religious education | ||||
The twilight of the phenomenology of religion | ||||
From structuralism to anthropology | ||||
Beyond disciplinary boundaries 34 | ||||
Gender matters | ||||
Emerging issues and perspectives 36 | ||||
Acknowledgments 38 | ||||
References 38 |
THE CHAPTERS IN THIS VOLUME REFER TO geographical units. But while Western Europe may appear as a homogeneous unit from an American or Asian perspective, it is in fact rather inhomogeneous. It is divided by linguistic barriers, powerful nation-states, and national cum regional identities.
Linguistically, Western Europe is dominated by Germanic and Romance languages. This division also identifies different intellectual environments. Even in Switzerland and Belgium, where both Romance and Germanic languages enjoy official status, the linguistic areas have different academic traditions. These linguisticâterritorial divisions, however, are hardly static. For example, nowadays, few young Scandinavian scholars publish in or read German or French, and many scholars mainly follow international debates only to the extent that they are conducted in English (cf. Antes 2004:44). American scholars are generally better known and enjoy greater respect than colleagues from neighboring countries.
European countries have extremely different religious cultures and stateâ church relationships. Compare the separation of church and state effected in France in 1905 and the French ideology of laĂŻcitĂ© (BaubĂ©rot 1998) with the various state and folk churches of Northern Europe or with the separation of church and state in countries such as Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain, which nevertheless grant the church a special legal and cultural status. All of these different relationships shape the study of religion.
The European Union is currently attempting to internationalize the academic landscape. It is introducing a common grading system, funding the intra-European exchange of students and teaching staff, and making considerable funds available for research. Nevertheless, most research in the humanities is still funded by national research agencies. Furthermore, although there is extensive short-term mobility among students and scholars, recruitment of faculty is almost exclusively done either nationally or occasionally within subcontinental regions.
There is as yet no census of departments and programs in the study of religion similar to that undertaken by the American Academy of Religion or a review of current research similar to the Canadian Corporation for Studies of Religionâs State-of-the-Art Review series (Warne 2004:15â23). Peter Antes (2004) is, however, a useful country by country survey. At present the non-confessional study of religion is taught at universities in more than a dozen countries of Western Europe, and the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), founded mainly by European scholars in Amsterdam in 1950, has member-organizations in fifteen Western European nations. (The study of religions is still lacking in Ireland and Portugal.) In 2000 the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) was founded. It sponsors several electronic discussion lists, subdivided by language, and arranges a series of annual conferences jointly with one of its member-associations.
Prehistory of the study of religion
The non-confessional study of religion did not fall from heaven any more than the books of revelation it studies did. Its pundits have devised several competing accounts of its origins.
According to Eric Sharpe (1986:1), the emergence of âcomparative religionâ ârepresented the germination of seeds planted and watered over many centuries of Western historyâ. Sharpe even suggests that âthe entire history of the study of religion in the Western world ⊠[i]s an extended preludeâ to modern comparative religion. While that may seem like an illegitimate teleological reconstruction, Sharpe is probably right when he claims that â[t]he antecedents of comparative religion were far more numerous, and far more diverse, than is commonly realizedâ. At the same time, he attributes the eventual emergence of the academic subject to theories of evolution as the âone single guiding principle of method which was at the same time also able to satisfy the demands of history and scienceâ (Sharpe 1986:26).
Searching for the roots
Scholars have identified virtually every major epoch of Western history as the ârealâ origin of the modern field. In a recent book the Swiss historian of ancient religions, Philippe Borgeaud located the roots of the comparative study of religion in antiquity (Borgeaud 2004). He also argued that the modern history of religions required an act of liberation from religion that resulted from adopting an outsiderâs perspective (Borgeaud 2004:207).
In a review of Borgeaudâs book the Israeli Jewish scholar, Guy Stroumsa (2006:259), claims that contacts between Christians, Muslims, and Jews have contributed to âthe genesis of our modern categories for understanding religionâ. Jonathan Z. Smith (2004:364) attempts to re-describe âour field ⊠as a child of the Renaissanceâ, given that the practice of the history of religions âis, by and large, a philological endeavor, chiefly concerned with editing, translating and interpreting textsâ.
Together with the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, Stroumsa (2001:89) had earlier identified the seventeenth century as laying the foundations for a critical, impartial study of religion. Nevertheless, the study of religion practiced by learned scholars such as John Selden and Samuel Bochart was confessional, often polemical, almost always religiously and apologetically motivated, and deeply immersed in religious worldviews and frames of reference.
The Enlightenment is a more traditional candidate. In his Haskell Lectures the German historian of religions Kurt Rudolph summarily calls the history of religions âa child of the Enlightenmentâ (cf. Hutter 2003:3), citing that eraâs âscientific curiosity and religious toleranceâ (Rudolph 1985:23). J. Samuel Preus credits David Humeâs Natural History of Religion (1757) with the âparadigm-shift from a religious to a naturalistic framework for the study of religionâ (Preus 1996:207; cf. Segal 1994).
Roughly a century, however, separates Humeâs Natural History from the academic institutionalization of the study of religion. This observation led the German scholar of religion, Hans Kippenberg, to challenge Rudolphâs thesis and point to the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment as the birth-era of the study of religion (Kippenberg 1991:28â31). He credits Friedrich Schleiermacherâs speeches On Religion (1799) with the decisive change.
Obviously, a substantial gap of three quarters of a century separates Schleiermacherâs speeches from the institutionalization of the study of religion. Hence, other relevant developments and stimuli need to be taken into account. These include a further influx of relevant materials inviting scholarly attention and intellectual domestication; political, religious, and cultural developments, such as the increasing separation of state and religion; industrialization and urbanization; missionary activities and colonialism; groundbreaking achievements within the humanities such as the translation of hitherto unintelligible writing...
Table of contents
- Contents
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Western Europe
- 2 Eastern Europe
- 3 North Africa and West Asia
- 4 Sub-Saharan Africa
- 5 South and Southeast Asia
- 6 Continental East Asia
- 7 Japan
- 8 Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands
- 9 North America
- 10 Latin America1
- AfterwordâToward a global vision of religious studies
- Index