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 . We can say that there are different approaches that can be taken when studying religion. Durkheim was more interested in the unifying effect of religion among members of a society. 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. describing how religion is experienced by practitioners. Her last book is Critical Republicanism. The second ground for skepticism is that religion has served to define the western idea of the secular, and remains deeply entangled with it. As it happens, one group of influential political philosophers has tried to do just that. The study of religion emerged as a formal discipline during the 19th century, when the methods and approaches of history, philology, literary criticism, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and other fields were brought to bear on the task of determining the history, origins, and functions of religion. The growth of various disciplines in the 19th century, notably psychology and sociology, stimulated a more analytic approach to religions, while at the same time theology became more sophisticated and, in a sense, scientific as it began to be affected by and thus to make use of historical and other methods. 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. (Michael T.Mclaughlin,p96, Editrice Ponteficia Universita` Grecoriana Roma 2003)In many occasions he confirmed that he does not intend to promote any old religion or to find a new one and he strongly oppose religious particolarism. Which of these four approaches do you take in your everyday life, and why? 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. 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. Reformulated in this way, Sullivans critique has bite. As a social institution, religion is a pattern of social action organized around the beliefs and practices that people develop to answer questions about the meaning of existence. Phone: 212-377-2700 Fax: 212-377-2727. 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). In the Australian context, the interdisciplinary pedagogy that defines global studies is gaining wider acceptance as a coherent and necessary approach to the study of global change. Sociologists today employ three primary theoretical perspectives: the symbolic interactionist perspective, the functionalist perspective, and the conflict perspective. Registered office: Creative Tower, Fujairah, PO Box 4422, UAE. Third, the secular separation between a privatized, individualized sphere of religion and a public, social, rational sphere of politics has obscured the way in which the state, the nation, and the law operate as the modern sacred. 427-5290. adlerj@kenyon.edu. One of the significant sociological findings of Max Weber was the significant contribution of that the Calvinist religious ideas had on the development of the economic system of capitalism. Contact. develop an informed understanding of the diversity of world religions. But nor does it reduce the normative inscription of religion in the law to a narrow (often ethnocentric) set of concerns and values. (Peter Connolly,pp1-2Approche to the Study of Religion,Biddles L.T.D.) Network analysis applied to such data may provide insight into real-life mixtures . In addition to the main scriptures of a particular religion, theology often involves the study of the works of recognized theologians who are usually believers of the religion. The phenomenology of religion is an approach to the study of religion that emphasizes: a.) The adherent of a faith is no doubt authoritative as to his own experience, but what of the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which the adherent participates? Ninian Smarts approach to religion is described in his academic literature as a completely new way to the thinking of religion. He is not final. Disclaimer: This is an example of a student written essay.Click here for sample essays written by our professional writers. Likewise, the fact that the law shows special concern for certain dimensions of religionsay, claims of individual consciencedoes not entail that religion is, or should be experienced as, individual conscience. 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. First, the secular state defines what religion is; religion is privatized as a faith whose object is the supernatural, and differentiates it from the natural and the rational which are the jurisdiction of the state. Thus in principle it is the study of all religions from a viewpoint not isolated within any one of them. Like most abstract concepts, the concept of religion is a construction projected onto the world, but one consequence of this large-scale projection may well be that our world has genuinely come to exhibit it. 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. Religious rituals are behaviors or practices that are either required or expected of the members of a particular group, such as bar mitzvah or confession of sins (Barkan and Greenwood 2003). 3.Theology requires its learners to have some degree of faith whereas religious studies does not . TTh 2:40-4:00. 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. As a belief system, religion shapes what people think and how they see the world. In brief, it is the study of religious phenomena in so far as they may be understood psychologically (Merkur 2005,165). 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. The disaggregated approach does not claim that it captures the fullness of the lived, anthropological reality of religion. It is an illusion because it is just a product of the human imagination. Nigerias 2023 Elections: Which Way Democracy? New approaches to the study of religion: the cognitive, the biological, and the neurological. *You can also browse our support articles here >. 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. This idea led Calvinists to engage in activities that would increase their wealth, paving the way for the development of capitalism. (James L.Cox,p.159.A guide to the Phenomenology of religion .key figure ,formative influence and subsequent debate. The specific question which political and legal philosophers (should) ask themselves is this. It has emerged as the single most important means of communication for those interested in critical approaches to the study of religion. In this lesson, we will discuss the difference between the scientific and the religious approach and will look at some examples of each. We can confirm that the method of study that Smart used in his approach comprehend both external and internal analysis of religion, characterized by phenomenological perspectives. For egalitarian theorists of religious freedom (as I call them), there is nothing special about religion as such. These two neighboring countries have different legal systems and, of course, their own unique characteristics. All work is written to order. 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 . 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. People often do truly unique things for their faith. This course introduces students to the variety of academic approaches to the study of religion and to the procedures and sources used in writing academic papers in religious studies. In this post, I briefly set out three distinct approaches to the study of religion: criticizing religion, upholding religion, and disaggregating religion. 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). 4 Ecumenical/Inclusivism. 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. We pick out, from the complex notion of religion that we have inherited, distinct elements and values that democratic law has good reason to protect. Since becoming aware of our unconscious makes us a whole person (a fully realized Self), religion is thus seen by Jung as something positive (Merkur 2005, 177). Summary: 1.Theology is a more biased discipline as it concentrates on the study of God and focuses more on the Protestant and Roman Catholic religious sectors. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION 109 like, the students were asked to read Marx, Freud, Durkheim. Mysticism. Both methods tried to avoid the phenomenological approach. It is present in varying forms in the religions of the lower races up to the civilized races of mankind. It may perhaps intensify your religious experience. Bonferroni correction compensates for multiple . 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 absence of good (the moral kind) is caused by our disobedience to the will of God. 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? We also have Confucian, Taoist, and Shinto philosophies; instead of Confucian, Taoist, and Shinto theologies. 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. But because they wanted to know who would eventually be saved and enter heaven, they thought that financial success was one good indicator. Conversely, theological claims may imply something about the history of a 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. If religion is a western concept that has been used to shore up the authority of the colonial and sovereign state, through shifting, arbitrary demarcations between religion tradition, culture, reason, and the nation, then scholars should be wary of treating it as a stable, coherent object of academic study. Describe a friend, acquaintance, or relative whose approach to religion is different than yours. Sociology of religion, on the other hand, studies religious beliefs, practices, and organizations using the theories and methods of the discipline of sociology. These different approaches disagree about the essence of religion, but all three camps operate within a shared account of the human. ), London: Tavistock, 85-126. The stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion. Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? The normative objection is slightly different. 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). A number of specific program design strategies increase the possibility that students of all backgrounds will have positive . 3 Phenomenological. 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. It is the logic of Natures process. 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. 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). ( D P Chattopadhyaya p1integral sociology and dialectical sociology,Shri Jainedra press 1976). As stated earlier, French sociologist mile Durkheim (1858-1917) defined religion as a "unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things" (1915). 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. The fast, they abstain from sex, they walk on fire, perform self-flagellation, or nail themselves on crosses. India is a multi-cultural and a diverse nation with a flourishing history of pluralism that has been thriving for thousands of years. How would a strategy of disaggregating religion help here? 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). 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 . 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. Even a commonly accepted definition of religion has proved difficult to establish, though not for lack of trying. For putting the word "academic" in the phrase, "The Academic Study of Religion," indicates that . 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. There are doubts about how far there can be neutrality and objectivity in the study of religion. This involves identifying a plurality of normative analogies for religion. Accordingly, Calvinists believed in predestination, the view that God has already decided on who will enter heaven or not. 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. Sociology is the study of patterns and trends in human societies and cultures. Your email address will not be published. by Cristina Echeverri-Pineda and Mateo Villamizar-Chaparro. 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. So critics confuse an empirical inquiry (describing what religion is) with a normative inquiry (accounting for its status in the law). Omissions? On the one hand, some view psychology of religion as a program that reduces religious phenomena believed to be real to mere psychological phenomena. Durkheim further claimed that more complex societies had more complex religious systems, but they were all same in that they had religions as ways of unifying their societies. 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 first European missionaries had thought that the native peoples of the Americas or Africa had no religiononly cultures or superstitions. Once colonized, it was discovered that they did have religion after all. Religion should be disaggregated into a number of different values which relate to the law of the liberal state in different ways. If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help! The realities of the modern world significantly contribute to communication between representatives of different cultures. Attempts have been made to find a distinctive ingredient in all religions, such as the numinous, or spiritual, experience, the contrast between the sacred and the profane, and the belief in one or more gods. These questions within Smarts Classifactory account would help to define a 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 learn regarding the religious beliefs of others. Related to Freuds concept, the personal unconscious mind contains all our personal experiences that we are not aware of (because we have suppressed them); whilethe 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. 5 Evangelical Christian. It is the opium of the people (Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). For example different opinions regarding the Trinity between Roman Catholics and Jehovah Witnesses. This had led some scholars, such as Tim Fitzgerald and Naomi Goldenberg, to draw the radical conclusion that the category of religion should be simply abandoned. Furthermore, if theology studies a particular religion always from the inside, religious studies study different religions mostly from the outside. She is the Director of UCLs Religion and Political Theory Centre. 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). Sociology in general looks at people's . Ontology. 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. 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. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Box No. Some of these theories may be controversial, or questionable, for some people; nonetheless, knowing them broadens our understanding of the meaning and nature of religion. 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. Hence the proposed shift from an analogizing to a disaggregating strategy. Religion-making involved singling out certain social activities and cultural practices as religious and de-politicizing them (see Hinduism in India). We also study religion in order to learn more about how different aspects of human lifepolitics, science, literature, art, law, economicshave been and continue to be shaped by changing religious notions of, for example, good and evil, images of the deity and the divine, salvation and punishment, etc. A comprehensive overview of the history and context of feminist approaches to the study of religions, including a helpful discussion of the relationship of these approaches to feminist theology. d.) the impossibility of studying other cultures' religions. 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. Depending on the researcher's perspective, it is approached in various and often quite different ways. For critics, this is visible in three different ways. SSRC activities span more than 80 countries on 6 continents, Apply for research opportunities across the globe, Contributions fund research and scholarship worldwide. 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 most influential proponent of comparative religion in the nineteenth century was Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900). 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. Consider an analogy with marriage. Introduces students to the study of religion, world religious traditions and ethics through an exploration of death and dying. Some of the contributions of William James were his distinction between institutional religion and personal religion, his analysis of religious experiences as mystical experiences, and his pragmatic approach to the value of religionthat the truth and value of a religious belief for an individual depend on the beneficial effects of the belief on the life of the individual. Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? Two famous and highly influential Christian theologians who also engaged in philosophy of religion were St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Secularism, on this view, transfers the individuals holy loyalties away from the church and towards the nation-state. Egalitarian theorists of religious freedom, from this perspective, are right to seek to identify the normative grounds on which certain beliefs and practices call for state protection (or state restraint, in the case of non-establishment). village and nad level bring in solidarity and unity among different social segments . Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UKEssays.com. Looking for a flexible role? The law does not describe and regulate the full experience of marriage: the fact that, in law, marriage is a contract does not mean that marriage is, or should be experienced as, a contract. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious studies program, but not a de- partment. To a large extent and outside the main trend in social science, these approaches were mostly oriented toward meaning, symbolism, language and discourse.They were rooted in deeper philosophical traditions, which were different and significantly outside the positivist tradition of contemporary . 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). In the last quarter of the 20th century, four approaches to cultural studies drew growing attention. Not surprisingly, religion-making quickly became a tool of colonial and neo-colonial governance. Among the many faiths represented here are Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism. 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