different approaches to the study of religionwendy williams sister lawyer
2 The closer a country comes to having equal shares of the . Evolutionary Approaches. Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have shown, for instance, that liberal secularism requires individual beliefnot communal observance, rituals or embodied pietyto be taken as the essence of religiosity. The other sense of the subjectivity of religion is properly a matter for theology and the philosophy of religion. (Scott London ,the future of religion an Interview with Ninian Smart June 1999 issue ofThe Witnessmagazine. ) The study of the religious notions of primitive people arose within the context of evolutionary theory. As stated earlier, French sociologist mile Durkheim (1858-1917) defined religion as a "unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things" (1915). Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified. Do you have a 2:1 degree or higher? Even this cursory summary of this first approach is, I hope, sufficient to convey the force and depth of the critique of religion. The Christian theologian, for example, may see a particular historical process as providential. Critics have pointed out thatby analogizing religion with individual conscience or conceptions of the goodliberalism reveals its Protestant, individualistic bias, and is unable to capture the fullness of the religious experience. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religions, University of California, Santa Barbara. After studying the indigenous Australians, Durkheim claimed that the totems (sacred objects used as emblems or symbols of a group of people, family, clan, or tribe) that the aborigines worship represented their own conceptions of a unified group or society. This includes such traditional points of departure as history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, but also the natural sciences, and such other approaches as feminist theory, discourse . Particularly, this study used an interdisciplinary approach, that is, a combination of religious and social approaches. No consensus among scholars concerning the best way to study religion has developed, however. From simple essay plans, through to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs. Accordingly, God is just the projected ultimate father image that helps humans deal with their feelings of helplessness and guilt. "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation", in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, Michael Banton (ed. So how would Aurobindo address questions upon doctrine say within the New Testament? Religion-making involved singling out certain social activities and cultural practices as religious and de-politicizing them (see Hinduism in India). Aquinas is famous for his five proofs for the existence of God: his arguments from causation, motion, necessity, design, and degrees of protection. Sociology is one such approach that this essay will be looking at through its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. Here you can choose which regional hub you wish to view, providing you with the most relevant information we have for your specific region. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION 109 like, the students were asked to read Marx, Freud, Durkheim. Each of these approaches can be applied to the study of religious diversity. Muller, an authority of Sanskrit (the classical religious language of India), urged that the study of religion should not be limited to the religions of the Mediterranean (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and that the great religions of the East should also be seriously studied. It can be seen to designate: a) religion as practised in particular locations or by particular people; b) a specific modality of religious practice; c) the fundamental nature of all religion. Aside from being exploited, the workers were also dehumanized or alienated in the workplace. In this article, I summarise and discuss basic principles for a study-of-religion(s) approach to religion education, adding arguments and perspectives from critical theories about education in general. Its object is not personal, although is a necessary condition of the yoga. For example, a religious (or spiritual) approach to cancer treatment can be more effective than a secular approach (Croucher & Harris, 2012), religious attendance promotes healthier living, and people with HIV/AIDS often turn to religion for comfort as well. The study of religion can roughly be divided between descriptive and historical inquiries on the one hand and normative inquiries on the other. It may perhaps intensify your religious experience. (James L.Cox,p.159.A guide to the Phenomenology of religion .key figure ,formative influence and subsequent debate. Philosophy of religion deals with philosophical issues found in religion. So he is proposing a mystical goal and from his yogic teachings he guides,shows and achieves that. But objections have been brought against all these attempts, either because the rich variety of religions makes it easy to find counterexamples or because the element cited as central is in some religions peripheral. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious studies program, but not a de- partment. Briefly, the arguments from causation and motion claim that the series of causes and effects, and movements in the world, must begin with God being the first cause and mover; the argument from design claims that the intricate design of the world cannot be attributed to mere chance but only to God as the divine intelligence; the argument from necessity claims that there must be a God who is a necessary being (one who has always been existing) to explain how contingent beings (those that presently exist but previously did not) have come to exist; and the argument from degrees of perfection claims that there must be a God whose perfection serves as the standard for determining the degrees of qualities that we attribute to things (like that they are good or better). Program design strategies. These (and others) are all legitimate uses of the concept of religion. Discussion about religion has been complicated further by the attempt of some Christian theologians, notably Karl Barth (18861968), to draw a distinction between religion and the Gospel (the proclamation peculiar to Christianity). Registered office: Creative Tower, Fujairah, PO Box 4422, UAE. Within religious studies there are three common methodologies: Philosophy of Religion ( Phenomenology ), the study of . Bonferroni correction compensates for multiple . From its approach, we understand that Sri Aurobindo begins his work clearly within religious prospect, particularly his own relation with yoga, he explains; the practice is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; The intent is to find occupation of good in the world, to outcome a spiritual conversion and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. The belief in the soul as something separate from the body though residing in the body resulted from dealing with certain biological questions such as those concerning the difference between a living body and a dead one; the causes of waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death; and the origin of dreams and visions involving human images. The Comparative Study of Religions World Religions: A Voyage of Discovery, Fourth Edition, considers one religion at a time, chapter by chapter. For the last four decades universities and schools have been acting in response to a constant , steady demand for courses upon the study of religion .The people who take these courses are usually involved in religion themselves ,many are involved a in religious communities or, wishing to know more and . Approaches to ReligionSpring 2010REL 111. The essence of religion and the context of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions, Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of religion, Theories of the Renaissance and Reformation, Historical, archaeological, and literary studies, Anthropological approaches to the study of religion, Theories concerning the origins of religion, Functional and structural studies of religion, The concerns of the philosophy of religion, Modern existentialist and phenomenological studies, Relationship between Western and non-Western philosophy in regard to religion, The relationship of Western Christianity to other religions, Modern origin and development of the history and phenomenology of religion, https://www.britannica.com/topic/study-of-religion. 42 - 72. God, in this regard, serves as a source of security and forgiveness. J.F. Kujenga Amani facilitates the exchange of ideas about diverse aspects of peacebuilding in Africa. This is an important critique, which draws on what I have called the first (critical) and the second (anthropological) approach to religion. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion publishes articles, notes, book reviews and letters which explicitly address the problems of methodology and theory in the academic study of religion. By studying different religious . There are two main reasons for this suspicion. foster a respectful awareness of the significance of the beliefs and practices for the faith member. But the historical process itself has to be investigated scientificallythat is, by considering the evidence, using the techniques of historical enquiry and other scientific methods. Ninian Smarts approach to religion is described in his academic literature as a completely new way to the thinking of religion. Philosophy of religion tries to settle issues in religion solely by means of the human power of reasoning. But because they wanted to know who would eventually be saved and enter heaven, they thought that financial success was one good indicator. Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. He is not final. Learn about sociologists . One contribution of St. Augustine was his theory that evil is the absence of good (which he adopted from the view of the Greek philosopher Plotinus on the nature of light and darkness). Which of these four approaches do you take in your everyday life, and why? It studies religion in relation to other social institutions and compares religious beliefs and practices across cultures. liade (1907-1986), whose studies included the concepts of sacred space and mythic time, and the sacredness of nature (Paden 2005, 215). Sociologists today employ three primary theoretical perspectives: the symbolic interactionist perspective, the functionalist perspective, and the conflict perspective. II. Significance is reported at the p < .10 level. The most influential proponent of comparative religion in the nineteenth century was Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900). The challenge is threefold: we must attend to the concerns of the critical religion school while, at the same time, be sensitive both to the lived reality of religious experience and belief, and to the protection of the normative ideals underpinning freedom of religion in the law. The final approach to world religions is exclusivism. The term phenomenology refers first to the attempt to describe religious phenomena in a way that brings out the beliefs and attitudes of the adherents of the religion under investigation but without either endorsing or rejecting the beliefs and attitudes. Approaches to the Study of Religion. Erin has an M.Ed in adult education and a BS in psychology and a BS in management systems. I do not think it is, although I cannot make the full case here. As it happens, one group of influential political philosophers has tried to do just that. Contact. The difficulty of the distinction consists chiefly in a denial that God, as the object of the response, is a religious being (i.e., God is transcendent, not religious in the sense of being a part of the human product), and the question about revelation as a religious fact thus needs to be answered. The dominant sense in which the contemporary study of religion is understood is the descriptive sense. Often the scholar is confronted only with texts describing beliefs and stories, so the inner sentiments that these both evoke and express must be inferred. TTh 2:40-4:00. Nevertheless, common to all these different terms and their respective definitions of approach was the motivation to dispense with theologically orientated normative constructions in the study of religion. We will discuss religious studies as an . For egalitarian theorists of religious freedom (as I call them), there is nothing special about religion as such. Besides their evolutionary assumption about religion, the followers of evolutionary theory show overwhelming Eurocentric biases. Consequently, the systematic study of the doctrines of Buddhism and Hinduism, for instance, are respectively called Buddhist philosophy and Hindu philosophy, and not Buddhist theology and Hindu theology. Thus, the preliminary task of the student of religion must be to amass an inventory of kinds of religious phenomena. Barths distinction attempts to draw a line between the transcendent, as it reveals itself to humans, and religion, as a human product involved in the response to revelation. The Hijab Controversy in Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press 2008). 3.Theology requires its learners to have some degree of faith whereas religious studies does not . In this regard, Marx described religion as the opium of the masses.. Consider an analogy with marriage. Religion is both a fascinating and an essential subject of study. Geographers study religions and their development based on the role that geography intersects with other important social components within a human geographic approach. So critics confuse an empirical inquiry (describing what religion is) with a normative inquiry (accounting for its status in the law). Durkheim was more interested in the unifying effect of religion among members of a society. (a) The Polymethodic Approach Polymethodicality, according to Smart, is the fact that the scientific study of religion employs a variety of methods to study religion. An alternative approach is to select central themes of inquiry and to investigate how the religions engage with each theme. Sociology is one such approach that this essay will be looking at through its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. It looks at the percentage of each country's population that belongs to eight major religious groups, as of 2010. ( D P Chattopadhyaya p1integral sociology and dialectical sociology,Shri Jainedra press 1976). One of the many reasons for this failure is that each discipline enlisted to study religion has its own distinctive methods and topics, and scholars often disagree about how to resolve the inevitable conflicts between these different intellectual perspectives. Understanding Religious Pluralism in India. These different approaches disagree about the essence of religion, but all three camps operate within a shared account of the human. Tylor, in his work Primitive Culture (1871), claimed that the essence of religion or the minimum defining property of religion, is the belief in Spiritual Beings, which he called animism. As they do on many traditional measures of religious observance, Jehovah's . Morgan, Sue. Although there is still no agreement on this issue, the frontier between traditional religions and modern political ideologies remains a promising topic of study. What may be the way forward in the teaching and definition of religion is to accept the singularity of each religion and each individuals faith and seek ways in which they can be accommodated within a safe international environment that moves away from empirical definitions. Sociologists are primarily interested in examining the effects of religion on society. Conflict sometimes arises because the committed point of view is likely to begin from a more conservative stance, accepting at face value the scriptural accounts of events, whereas the secular historian may be more skeptical, especially of records of miraculous events. The term fundamentalism can be used in very different religious contexts and texts to describe the devotion and strict loyalty to a set of principles or ideas. As to the first sense, one of the challenges to the student of religion is the problem of evoking its inner, individual side, which is not observable in any straightforward way. The idea is that one who experiences financial success is blessed and is thus favored by God. These strategies have been identified as central to the development of programs that prioritize student development and help improve student retention, engagement, and academic performance. Different approaches to religion education have been in place for a long time or developed more recently to meet growing religious and cultural plurality in European countries and schools. The Practical and ritual dimensions (BBC.Religion). Department of Religion Pearson 211 Swarthmore College 500 College Avenue Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397 Email: religion@swarthmore.edu Phone: (610) 328-8045 Fax: (610) 328-7687 Looking for a flexible role? From the belief in human souls grew the belief in other spirits, like those that inhabit nature and those venerated as gods. Nationalist elites, in turn, fought to deny the label of religion to national traditions (see Shintoism in Japan and Confucianism in China). Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) defines religion as "a unified system of beliefs and The etymological meaning of the word theologybased on its Greek origin, namely theo, which means God, and logos which means discourse or study,is study of God. Theology, however, is not just limited to the study of the nature ofGod, for it also studies in a systematic way the main doctrines of a particular religion. study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines. Personal experience is crucial to any understanding of religion .On this particular account Aurobindo discovers the relation or union, he favours, what he identifies as spiritual psychology and integral methods, but for both he confirms that the objective is to be understood and interpreted in terms of subjective. From this perspective, it would be a mistake to think that conceptual imprecision is in itself an obstacle to scholarly inquiry. It can use either separately or in any combination the methods of history, sociology, For instance, a student of Christian theology is a Christian; but a student of religious studies studying Shintoism is usually not a Shintoist. 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A necessary condition of the human shared account of the concept of religion.key figure, formative influence and debate... Human geographic approach descriptive and historical inquiries on the other sense of the of... Has a religious studies there are three common methodologies: philosophy of is... Sociology, Shri Jainedra Press 1976 ) WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious studies there are common! An obstacle to scholarly inquiry best way to the study of a mystical and... Take in your everyday life, and why cultural practices as religious and de-politicizing them ( see Hinduism India.
