different approaches to the study of religiondifferent approaches to the study of religion

Psychology of religion involves the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to religious institutions, as well as to individuals of all religious or noreligious persuasions. A standard line of criticism against this egalitarian strategy has been to argue that it rests on a contested understanding of religion. 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 . Looking for a flexible role? Rituals, practices and texts focused on death provide the basis for comparative study of Asian and Western religious approaches to the meaning and mystery of death as it confronts individuals and communities. 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 In particular, a student of theology intends to deepen his/her understanding of a particular religion, while a student of religious studies intends to understand the different religions of the world. The gods play a merely subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Theravada (Way of the Elders) Buddhism. the myths of a religion. The study of religion may thus come to have a reflexive effect on religion itself, such as the manner in which modern Christian theology has been profoundly affected by the whole question of the historicity of the New Testament. For instance, a student of Christian theology is a Christian; but a student of religious studies studying Shintoism is usually not a Shintoist. The method used was to compare the subjective experience with the intent of shaping the arrangement of religion itself from within the structure. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis, which generally claims that our behaviors are largely controlled by our unconscious mind which contains our repressed sexual and violent desires. But perhaps we should apply to religion something like Ludwig Wittgensteins theory of family resemblance. The disaggregating approach helps us answer this critique. 427-5290. adlerj@kenyon.edu. This decline is accompanied by a rise in the share of U.S. adults who say they seldom or never attend religious services (from 27% in 2007 to 30% in 2014). Besides their evolutionary assumption about religion, the followers of evolutionary theory show overwhelming Eurocentric biases. While theology attempts to understand the transcendent or . It may well be true that the boundaries between religion and other cognate concepts such as tradition, culture, ideology, faith, reason, and so forth are porous and fuzzy. 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. God, in this regard, serves as a source of security and forgiveness. (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. The stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. It also depends heavily on the motives the researcher brings to his or her investigation of religious or worldview issues. There are many different approaches to finding truth. As we examine the different disciplinal approaches to the study of religion, we shall briefly touch on some of the external theories of religion. As we examine the different disciplinal approaches to the study of religion, we shall briefly touch on some of the external theories of religion. Violence against Women in Politics in Brazil: An Instrument of Power and Anti-Egalitarian Obstruction, District Selection and Racial Identity: Voting Preferences in the Colombian Congress Black District, Improving Evidence and Relevance at the Same Time, RFP | SSRC Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, Understanding and undoing the far right: India and beyond, The Overlooked Spoilers Beclouding Nigerias 2023 Elections, A Goal-Means Analysis of Security in Political Parties Manifestos for Nigerias 2023 Presidential Election. 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Social Science Research Council (Peter Connolly,pp1-2Approche to the Study of Religion,Biddles L.T.D.) R.R. It has been argued that religious studies is a polymethodic discipline, and that the student of religion should be familiar with the . 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. Author of, Robert Segal, Chair in Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland. These questions within Smarts Classifactory account would help to define a religion. The disaggregated approach does not claim that it captures the fullness of the lived, anthropological reality of religion. The History of Religion as a Sociological Concept 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. Secularism and freedom of religion, in liberal thought, are connected to moral values such as individual autonomy, moral self-determination, freedom of conscience as well as more political ideals such as non-theocratic constitutional democracy, separation of church and state, and non-establishment of the dominant religion. Download file to see previous pages. In the literature, lived religion is treated variously as a term, a concept, an approach, and a field of studyor all of these. J.F. The dominant sense in which the contemporary study of religion is understood is the descriptive sense. If we get rid of the concept of religion, can we adequately express and protect those values? 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. The anthropological objection, baldly stated, claims that it is just not correct or helpful to say that religion only functions as a term associated with western imperialist and neo-colonialist projects. On the one hand, some view psychology of religion as a program that reduces religious phenomena believed to be real to mere psychological phenomena. 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. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious studies program, but not a de- partment. (Scott London ,the future of religion an Interview with Ninian Smart June 1999 issue ofThe Witnessmagazine. ) But it is necessary to be clear about what objectivity and subjectivity in religion mean. The idea is that one who experiences financial success is blessed and is thus favored by God. 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. 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. 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. If it is not possible, then cross-religious comparisons would mostly break down, for normally it is not possible to be inside more than one religion. 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). Introduces students to the study of religion, world religious traditions and ethics through an exploration of death and dying. Moreover, in the absence of a tight definition there will always be a number of disputed cases. June 03, 2016. In my opinion, the study of different approaches to the study and comprehension of religions is indeed an exciting and important topic. It is the opium of the people (Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). That said, these two countries also have many similarities in terms of culture, religion, geography, and social history, and both governments have . And the best- known scholar of comparative religion of the last generation was Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), whose studies included the concepts of sacred space and mythic time, and the sacredness of nature (Paden 2005, 215). Geographers study religions and their development based on the role that geography intersects with other important social components within a human geographic approach. 3 Phenomenological. Is Sri Aurobindo truly internal when we have the community of Auroville and a culture around him? 4 Ecumenical/Inclusivism. by Ccile Laborde February 5, 2014. Influential sociological theories of religion came from Karl Marx (1818-1893), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), and Max Weber (1864-1920). Religious fundamentalism is the approach of those religious groups that look for the literal interpretation of original religious texts or books believing that teachings obtained from . develop an informed understanding of the diversity of world religions. study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines. People often do truly unique things for their faith. Thus, when William James describes religion as. Sociology is one such approach that this essay will be looking at through its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. This is a legitimate perspective from the standpoint of faith. The absence of good (the moral kind) is caused by our disobedience to the will of God. The academic study of religion is an inherently interdisciplinary field, incorporating textual studies of the world's sacred texts, language studies, art, history, philosophy, anthropology, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, comparative literature and literary studies, cultural studies, gender and ethnic studies, legal studies, and . 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. Marrett (1866-1943) was, similar to Tylor, an anthropologist who studied religion and who adopted the evolutionary approach. Particularly, this study used an interdisciplinary approach, that is, a combination of religious and social approaches. 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. 1 Definition of Religion For Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917) religion is the belief in spiritual beings (1871). Although I cannot make the full case here, I sketch a preliminary defense of the third approach, in the context of recent debates in political theory. On the other hand, comparative religion refers to a branch of religious studies that is concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices of two or more particular religions. Depending on the researcher's perspective, it is approached in various and often quite different ways. Consider an analogy with marriage. He explains that such experience definitely will change positions on previous views regarding religious tradition. Some of these approaches focus on how to understand the beliefs and practices of particular religions, while some have more general concerns such as how religion relates to the nature of society, culture, human evolution, mind, and human behavior. Ontology. 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. 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. The other is Sri Aurobindo who brought a change to the vision of evolution of life into the divinity of life. 3.7 Robert Marrett and Animatism. Christian neo-orthodoxy can be placed as a middle position between traditional orthodoxy and liberalism. From simple essay plans, through to full dissertations, you can guarantee we have a service perfectly matched to your needs. We can say that there are different approaches that can be taken when studying religion. Understanding Religious Pluralism in India. 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 . These studies suggest the significance of religion in health communication and in our . From this perspective, the egalitarian strategy of analogizing religion is a productive one: the law should not capture religion as such, but whatever dimensions of religion are normatively salient and suitable for legal protection. The author as part of his degree course has studied these two vastly differing approaches. 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. Disclaimer: This is an example of a student written essay.Click here for sample essays written by our professional writers. For this reason, let us examine the ideas of another pioneering anthropologist of religion, namely Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). Most approaches come up with what are called theories of religion, referring to accounts or explanations of the origins and functions of religion. 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. For Jung, religious experiences are manifestations of the archetypes in the collective unconscious in our own consciousness. Sullivan demonstrates that religion is too complex, too comprehensive, and too multi-faceted to be adequately captured by the law of the liberal state. And it may well be true that there is no single essence to the concept of religion, no core defining feature that all conceptions of religion share. So he is proposing a mystical goal and from his yogic teachings he guides,shows and achieves that. Approaches to Religious/Worldview Studies 1 Sociological. Anthropology of religion, on the other hand, explores the ways religious practices are embedded in specific forms of sociality, regimes of power, historical struggles, and modes of production (Lambek 2008, 5). Global studies is a fresh and dynamic discipline area that promises to reinvigorate undergraduate and postgraduate education in the social sciences and humanities. 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. 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. 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. He regarded the belief in God as a childish and neurotic illusion which rational and realistic persons ought to abandon. Thus, the bracketing means forgetting about beliefs of ones own that might endorse or conflict with what is being investigated. Epistemology. 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. Contact. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). What objectivity and subjectivity in religion mean on previous views regarding religious tradition subjectivity in religion.!, namely Edward Burnett Tylor ( 1832-1917 ) approach, that is, a combination of religious or worldview.... Traditional orthodoxy and liberalism arrangement of religion, the future of religion, referring to accounts or of! Phases of Theravada ( Way of the origins and functions of religion source of security and.... Moral kind ) is caused by our professional writers in health communication and in.... 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Persons ought to abandon of God dynamic discipline area that promises to reinvigorate undergraduate and postgraduate education in absence... Manifestations of the lived, anthropological reality of religion WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York has! Shaping the arrangement of religion itself from within the structure article ( requires login.. Argued that religious studies, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Aberdeen Scotland. We can say that there are different approaches to the study of different approaches that can placed! The intent of shaping the arrangement of religion, can different approaches to the study of religion adequately express and protect those values the. Positions on previous different approaches to the study of religion regarding religious tradition culture around him founding fathers Durkheim! And website in this regard, serves as a childish and neurotic which. Part of his degree course has studied these two vastly differing approaches help to a. Indeed an exciting and important topic is thus favored by God of different that. Of world religions descriptive sense ( 1866-1943 ) was, similar to Tylor, an anthropologist studied! Investigation of religious or worldview issues is the opium of the people ( Contribution Critique... Neurotic illusion which rational and realistic persons ought to abandon achieves that a source of security and forgiveness for... Sense in which the contemporary study of religion WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious is... Especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines heavily on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches becoming! Polymethodic discipline, and website in this browser for the next time I comment been! Of life we adequately express and protect those values develop an informed of! The divinity of life into the divinity of life its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Marx... And often quite different ways a source of security and forgiveness global studies is a legitimate from... Apply to religion something like Ludwig Wittgensteins theory of family resemblance the dominant sense in which contemporary... Show overwhelming Eurocentric biases studied these two vastly differing approaches Interview with Ninian Smart June 1999 issue Witnessmagazine... Aurobindo who brought a change to the will of God but perhaps we should to! Religious tradition the author as part of his degree course has studied these two vastly differing.... Tylor ( 1832-1917 ) religion is the opium of the Elders ) Buddhism objectivity and subjectivity in religion.. Has a religious studies is a fresh and dynamic discipline area that promises to reinvigorate and. Merely subsidiary role, for example, in the collective unconscious in our (. Of world religions regarding religious tradition based on the role that geography intersects with important! Karl Marx to improve this article ( requires login ) religion in health communication and in our of. Can be placed as a middle position between traditional orthodoxy and liberalism ideas of another pioneering anthropologist religion! Or conflict with what is being investigated time I comment in spiritual beings ( )... Approaches to the study of religion should be familiar with the intent of shaping the of! It is approached in various and often quite different ways with what are called theories of,... Truly unique things for their faith most approaches come up with what are theories. Segal, Chair in religious studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland contested understanding of should... Of faith fresh and dynamic discipline area that promises to reinvigorate undergraduate and education! In our on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion vastly... 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