Given this, we, however, also use other approaches especially comparative religion and philosophy of religionwhich we will discuss next. The other sense of the subjectivity of religion is properly a matter for theology and the philosophy of religion. 1 Review. (Stephen H.Phillips.p79,Aurobindo`s Philosophyof Brahman,E.J.Brill Leiden 1986), The strength of Smart can be seen that he does not wish to strip religion or faith down to one or two elements say belief in The Virgin Birth and the dogma of out with the church there is no salvation but his classificatory account makes it clear that it has many elements and strands. Ontology. Author of, Robert Segal, Chair in Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland. 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! "Feminist Approaches." In Approaches to the Study of Religions, edited by Peter Connolly, pp. In the above definition Marx has stressed few points about religion which require special emphasis. The Practical and ritual dimensions (BBC.Religion). Yet the strategy of disaggregating religion has a further, more portentous implication for normative political theory. Historiography then becomes the science that studies the conceptions and production of historical interpretations of human civilization. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious studies program, but not a de- partment. From simple essay plans, through to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs. 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 learn regarding the religious beliefs of others. 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). 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. Omissions? From the belief in human souls grew the belief in other spirits, like those that inhabit nature and those venerated as gods. If theology focuses on a particular religion, religious studies examine the different religions of 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. Moreover, in the absence of a tight definition there will always be a number of disputed cases. While for Marx religion isa creation of capitalism, for Weber it is the other way roundcapitalism is largely due to religion, more specifically, the Calvinist religion. The purpose of this course is to introduce and examine a variety of methodological approaches to the study of religion. The worry here is the hard-won liberal right to religious freedom will not elicit much respect if the existence of religion itself is radically questioned. 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. liade (1907-1986), whose studies included the concepts of sacred space and mythic time, and the sacredness of nature (Paden 2005, 215). Two famous and highly influential Christian theologians who also engaged in philosophy of religion were St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. To some extent the emphasis on neutral description arises in modern times as a reaction to committed accounts of religion, which were for long the norm and which still exist among those who treat religion from a theological point of view. Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified. Most approaches come up with what are called theories of religion, referring to accounts or explanations of the origins and functions of religion. She shows that the First Amendment Free Exercise clause is quite incapable of capturing the popular, unruly, ritualized religiosity that she sees at work in the baroque funerary displays in a Florida cemetery. Even a commonly accepted definition of religion has proved difficult to establish, though not for lack of trying. 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. Sociology is one such approach that this essay will be looking at through its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. 1 This study, however, takes a relatively straightforward approach to religious diversity. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). By criticizing religion, I mean not the critique of the beliefs or practices of self-described religious individuals or groups but rather the critique of the concept of religion as a scholarly category. There are many ways of studying religions. Is Sri Aurobindo truly internal when we have the community of Auroville and a culture around him? This idea led Calvinists to engage in activities that would increase their wealth, paving the way for the development of capitalism. A criticism of Aurobindos view may be seen that it seeks to remain within religion itself, similar to that of Smart as they both emphasise the importance of the experience of religion, a personal contact with God or Gods, however within Marxism we can see a move away from this religious experience. These perspectives offer sociologists theoretical paradigms for explaining how society influences people, and vice versa. Even if an inventory of kinds of belief and practice could be gathered so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion, some scholars would maintain that the differences between religions are more significant than their similarities. The idea is that one who experiences financial success is blessed and is thus favored by God. On the contrary, religion, as it is studied in the secular state university, is both a category and an aspect of human behavior that must be subjected to the same types of scrutiny as any other category of human behavior that one may study. For the workers to bear their miserable and unfulfilling life, the capitalists created various belief-systems, foremost of which was religion, for the working class to see their state as something positive and justified. To ask that the law embrace and describe the whole of social reality would be to yearn for a totalitarian law. How can we best identify and protect the normative values which historically have underpinned freedom of religion, non-establishment and the like? Like Muslim reformists' approach of reform, which attempted to reconstruct Islamic religious thought in the light of modern science and knowledge, Christian neo-orthodoxy insisted that Christianity itself needs continually to be rethought and that theology must engage seriously with the . Besides their evolutionary assumption about religion, the followers of evolutionary theory show overwhelming Eurocentric biases. Contact. 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. The point has been made with particular acuity by legal scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan in her book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. 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. 2 The closer a country comes to having equal shares of the . Will the globalization lead to a kind of universal religion, as prediction might lead, or it will be turned in a lively variety of many different beliefs? So he is proposing a mystical goal and from his yogic teachings he guides,shows and achieves that. Although I cannot make the full case here, I sketch a preliminary defense of the third approach, in the . Smart contemplated these question for many years investigating various religions in the world. The goods that the workers helped produced by means of their labor (using the materials and machines owned by the capitalists) were sold in the market at a certain value. Ascension 120. Geographers study religions and their development based on the role that geography intersects with other important social components within a human geographic approach. Study for free with our range of university lectures! The term phenomenology also refers to the attempt to devise a typology, or classification, of religious phenomenareligious activities, beliefs, and institutions. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religions, University of California, Santa Barbara. Religious beliefs, in particular, are only one sub-set of a larger class, which political philosophers, following John Rawls, call conceptions of the good. On this view, a liberal state protects, not only freedom of religion, but more generally freedom of conscience; it disestablishes, not only dominant religion, but also any controversial conception of the good. Lesson Transcript. describing how religion is experienced by practitioners. It is an illusion because it is just a product of the human imagination. Approaches to Studying Religion (three courses): Three courses, one in each area, covering more than one major religious tradition; level II or level III courses may be used to fulfill this requirement; a general education course in . The stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion. Free resources to assist you with your university studies! Significance is reported at the p < .10 level. Here you can choose which regional hub you wish to view, providing you with the most relevant information we have for your specific region. 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 . Required fields are marked *. Copyright 2019 - 2022 Elcomblus Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing systematic, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives. No plagiarism, guaranteed! The Christian theologian, for example, may see a particular historical process as providential. Religion is a concept created by modern scholars and superimposed on a variety of different phenomena for a variety of motives. Our academic experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have. He explains that such experience definitely will change positions on previous views regarding religious tradition. 3 Phenomenological. 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. As noted, there is a specific pedagogical SSRC activities span more than 80 countries on 6 continents, Apply for research opportunities across the globe, Contributions fund research and scholarship worldwide. For this reason, let us examine the ideas of another pioneering anthropologist of religion, namely Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). Conversely, theological claims may imply something about the history of a religion. II. 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. How a believer of a certain religion (an "insider") will study his/her own religion, for instance, will differ from how a nonbeliever of that religion (an "outsider") will study it.Their motivations and methods will be different. 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. Certain attempts at a functionalist definition of religion, such as that of the German American theologian Paul Tillich (18861965), who defined religion in terms of human beings ultimate concern, would leave the way open to count these ideologies as proper objects of the study of religion (Tillich himself called them quasi-religions). Sociology is the study of patterns and trends in human societies and cultures. He regarded the belief in God as a childish and neurotic illusion which rational and realistic persons ought to abandon. Human biomonitoring (HBM) approaches can provide inter alia information on the chemicals that are in our body at one point in time. But what the capitalists gave back to the workers as payment for their labor were merely their subsistence wages that were just enough for the workers to survive. Accordingly, Calvinists believed in predestination, the view that God has already decided on who will enter heaven or not. 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. The field of religion/worldview is a broadly defined area of study. Philosophy of religion deals with philosophical issues found in religion. 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. For critics, this is visible in three different ways. These (and others) are all legitimate uses of the concept of religion. Even this cursory summary of this first approach is, I hope, sufficient to convey the force and depth of the critique of religion. We can say that there are different approaches that can be taken when studying religion. On the one hand, some view psychology of religion as a program that reduces religious phenomena believed to be real to mere psychological phenomena. Author of. 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. If your specific country is not listed, please select the UK version of the site, as this is best suited to international visitors. Religion is both a fascinating and an essential subject of study. Tylor cited the association of morality with animism which was little represented in the lower races but became an integral part of the religions ofthe civilized races. India is a multi-cultural and a diverse nation with a flourishing history of pluralism that has been thriving for thousands of years. Global studies is a fresh and dynamic discipline area that promises to reinvigorate undergraduate and postgraduate education in the social sciences and humanities. In this regard, Marx described religion as the opium of the masses.. For example different opinions regarding the Trinity between Roman Catholics and Jehovah Witnesses. ), London: Tavistock, 85-126. Hence the proposed shift from an analogizing to a disaggregating strategy. 47. 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. To him, sacred meant extraordinarysomething that inspired wonder and that seemed connected to the concept of "the divine.". It is a childish illusion for, as Freud remarked, religion originates in the helplessness and anxiety of childhood and early manhood (quoted in Merkur 2005,166). In considering a religion, however, the scholar is concerned not only with individual responses but also with communal ones. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) defines religion as "a unified system of beliefs and Freud viewed religion negatively. So with Aurobindo is clear the goal is more directly mystical ,to became one with the divine . 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. (Peter Connolly,pp1-2Approche to the Study of Religion,Biddles L.T.D.) The term theology, though often used to refer to Christian theology, also applies to the systematic study of the other monotheistic religions, standardly referring to Judaism and Islam. The attempt simply to describe and not judge religious beliefs and practices is often considered to involve epochthat is, the suspension of belief and the bracketing of the phenomena under investigation. Manifestations of the sacred. For our purposes, we shall examine certain approaches to the study of religions that are based on certain academic disciplines. Sociologists study religion as both a belief system and a social institution. Thus, when William James describes religion as. the collective unconscious mind contains universal experiences of mankind and the archetypes (the basic universal images that recur in various forms in different cultures) which we have inherited from our ancestors. He is not final. Your email address will not be published. Such distinctions, however, only serve to shore up the arbitrary power that the state has to demarcate the sphere of its own sovereignty. 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 Let me get back to the starting point of our inquiry: Is religion a valid category of scholarly research? For Jung, religious experiences are manifestations of the archetypes in the collective unconscious in our own consciousness. Mysticism. The disaggregating approach helps us answer this critique. She is the Director of UCLs Religion and Political Theory Centre. First, the practice of religion involves inner experiences and sentiments, such as feelings of God guiding the life of the devotee. The SSRC is an independent, international, nonprofit organization. How would a strategy of disaggregating religion help here? The study of the religious notions of primitive people arose within the context of evolutionary theory. Both methods tried to avoid the phenomenological approach. But because they wanted to know who would eventually be saved and enter heaven, they thought that financial success was one good indicator. It does this by examining the dynamics of the constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial, or age groups (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2013). Fall 2005. Still another difference is that while theology limits itself to its own internal theory of religion (its own account for its origins and functions), religious studies considers external theories of religion (accounts of the origins and functions of religion by other academic disciplines). Here religion involves subjectivity in the sense of individual experience. 427-5290. adlerj@kenyon.edu. For egalitarian theorists of religious freedom (as I call them), there is nothing special about religion as such. To know who would eventually be saved and enter heaven, they thought financial. Theology focuses on a particular religion, Biddles L.T.D. ask that the law embrace describe. When studying religion can not make the full case here, I sketch preliminary. 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