different approaches to the study of religion

Approaches to ReligionSpring 2010REL 111. To export a reference to this article please select a referencing stye below: If you are the original writer of this essay and no longer wish to have your work published on UKEssays.com then please: Our academic writing and marking services can help you! ), London: Tavistock, 85-126. Its object is not personal, although is a necessary condition of the yoga. The Essay Writing ExpertsUK Essay Experts. Intellectual historians and students of political thought study religious traditions as coherent, inter-generational, scholarly bodies of thoughtthe Islamic or the Christian or the Confucian tradition, for example. Religion and 'The Study of Religions' has many approaches which try to investigate the core of what religion is and what it means to the people who practice it. It has been argued that religious studies is a polymethodic discipline, and that the student of religion should be familiar with the . *You can also browse our support articles here >. 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. Here you can choose which regional hub you wish to view, providing you with the most relevant information we have for your specific region. The Comparative Study of Religions World Religions: A Voyage of Discovery, Fourth Edition, considers one religion at a time, chapter by chapter. The specific question which political and legal philosophers (should) ask themselves is this. "Feminist Approaches." In Approaches to the Study of Religions, edited by Peter Connolly, pp. As the world's largest democracy, India . Here you can choose which regional hub you wish to view, providing you with the most relevant information we have for your specific region. The stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion. June 03, 2016. (Note that no assumption is made about the actual disciplinary location of scholars. Learn about sociologists . The second ground for skepticism is that religion has served to define the western idea of the secular, and remains deeply entangled with it. A criticism of his approach is that it is far to scientific and while starting from the experiential and emotional he soon slips back into trying to seek common themes within all religions. It may well be, for example, that, in their exclusive focus on the claims of individual conscience, egalitarian theorists have neglected the normative importance of other dimensions of lived religion, such as the centrality of traditional collective rituals to the moral lives of believers. 42 - 72. Furthermore, if theology studies a particular religion always from the inside, religious studies study different religions mostly from the outside. This distinction depends to some extent upon taking a projectionist view of religion as a human product. 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). Aurobindo did not just stick to an immanental experience of a divine being but that there must be transcendence within the individuals life which is seen in Auroville with a lived approach to ones faith rather like that which is common within Charismatic and Evangelical Churches. Your email address will not be published. study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines. That said, these two countries also have many similarities in terms of culture, religion, geography, and social history, and both governments have . 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. The findings that focus on the scientific study of religion, including the SSSR and the SSR units within the AAR, are especially highlighted, as are contrasts between sociological and psychological approaches in the academic study of religion. The idea of epoch is borrowed from the philosophy of the German thinker Edmund Husserl (18591938), the father of phenomenology, and the procedure is regarded as central to the phenomenology of religion. Smart contemplated these question for many years investigating various religions in the world. Not surprisingly perhaps, the work of those scholars who have most influenced the critical religion school, such as Asad and Mahmood, explicitly aims to provide a thick anthropological description of the complexity and diversity of religious experienceit brings out, for example, the distinctive modes of Muslim religious subjectivity. A&C Black, Jan 1, 1999 - Social Science - 286 pages. He explains that such experience definitely will change positions on previous views regarding religious tradition. To him, sacred meant extraordinarysomething that inspired wonder and that seemed connected to the concept of "the divine.". Conversely, theological claims may imply something about the history of a religion. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Throughout the film, various facets of Christianity are explored and that includes the role played by that religion during the colonization of territories by the European or Western colonial powers in the early centuries, particularly the role played by the . In my opinion, the study of different approaches to the study and comprehension of religions is indeed an exciting and important topic. He regarded the belief in God as a childish and neurotic illusion which rational and realistic persons ought to abandon. Nor does the origin of a concept in itself discredit its uses: the concept may well have been forged in the crucible of missionary and colonial encounters, but its meanings and uses have further proliferated in non-colonial and post-colonial settings, in ways that escaped, distorted, and subverted the original discourse. R.R. Two famous and highly influential Christian theologians who also engaged in philosophy of religion were St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Thus, the matter of coming to understand the inner side of a religion involves a dialectic between participant observation and dialogical (interpersonal) relationship with the adherents of the other faith. An alternative approach is to select central themes of inquiry and to investigate how the religions engage with each theme. The author will attempt to evaluate the strengths and weakness of two approaches to religion and try to compare the work of the two representations and their methodology .The first is Professor Ninian Smart as he wrote widely, regarding different topics in religions, with papers and articles appearing in a vast range of publication sand television worldwide developing his own vision and philosophy of human progress and spiritual evolution. Human health risk assessment of chemical mixtures is complex due to the almost infinite number of possible combinations of chemicals to which people are exposed to on a daily basis. For this reason, let us examine the ideas of another pioneering anthropologist of religion, namely Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). In brief, it is the study of religious phenomena in so far as they may be understood psychologically (Merkur 2005,165). Carl Jung (1875-1961) was the founder of analytic psychology, the name given to Jungs psychological-therapeutic system which divides the unconscious mind into the personal and the collective. In this . 3.Theology requires its learners to have some degree of faith whereas religious studies does not . 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. It can use either separately or in any combination the methods of history, sociology, Another reason is that questions about the origins and functions of religion have often been conflated with questions about the truth of religion, and this has led to controversies that tend to hinder the development of common concepts, methodologies, and problems. 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. Your email address will not be published. A theory of religion may be internal or external. From this perspective, it would be a mistake to think that conceptual imprecision is in itself an obstacle to scholarly inquiry. This tradition goes back in modern times to the seminal work of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (180472), who proposed that God was the extension of human aspirations, and it is found in the work of the philosopher Karl Marx, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and others. Others have no clear vision upon their religious identity and are searching possible traditions, ready to meet their spiritual exploration .So they start looking for different approaches to their study ,bringing along different opinions and whatever the process and methodology is, will bring them information from which eventually they will find answers or give opinion. In Marrett's view, the first form of religion was a belief in an ever-present and ubiquitous force that gave power to all elements of life (Durkheim 203). foster a respectful awareness of the significance of the beliefs and practices for the faith member. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues. 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. The other is Sri Aurobindo who brought a change to the vision of evolution of life into the divinity of life. The modern sovereign state is grounded in a distinctive political theology that mobilizes the structural categories of metaphysics and theology to bolster and consolidate the higher identity of secular citizenship. Epistemology. Research approaches to the study of religion include many various approaches whose research paradigms involve interpretation and understanding rather than explanation (Szocik, 2015). The term phenomenology also refers to the attempt to devise a typology, or classification, of religious phenomenareligious activities, beliefs, and institutions. The History of Religion as a Sociological Concept 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 Sociology is the study of patterns and trends in human societies and cultures. He also introduced a broad program and methodology of comparing religions, which included principles like gaining knowledge of others through their own writings, grouping religions according to their regional, linguistic contexts, and avoiding the common distortion of comparing the positive aspects of one religion with the negative aspects of another (Paden 2005, 212-213). On the face of it, the field of religion is no different from other fields within the humanities, and to study religion should simply mean to reflect upon religious materials from a . Which of these four approaches do you take in your everyday life, and why? Methodologies in religious studies are the interpretive models on which the analysis of religious phenomena and resources are discussed. 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 . This can often lead to conflicts, including those that arise on religious grounds. Scholars do generally agree that the pursuit of objectivity is desirable, provided this stance does not involve the sacrifice of a sense of the inner aspect of religion. It studies religion in relation to other social institutions and compares religious beliefs and practices across cultures. This suggests that the works of these thinkers cut across the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Required fields are marked *. To ask that the law embrace and describe the whole of social reality would be to yearn for a totalitarian law. This article examines three anthropological theories explaining how religion has evolved and continues to evolve. The reflexive effect of the study of religion on religion itself may in practice make it more difficult for the student of religion to adopt the detachment required by bracketing. . They suggest that, even though historically the liberal state may have defined itself in relation to a problematic construal of religion, it has since broadened the scope of its moral concern, and is therefore less vulnerable to charges of ethnocentrism. Particularly, this study used an interdisciplinary approach, that is, a combination of religious and social approaches. In light of these considerations, our approach in examining the different world religions in the subsequent chapters mainly falls under religious studies. The fast, they abstain from sex, they walk on fire, perform self-flagellation, or nail themselves on crosses. 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