Copyright 2003 - 2023 - UKEssays is a trading name of Business Bliss Consultants FZE, a company registered in United Arab Emirates. In considering a religion, however, the scholar is concerned not only with individual responses but also with communal ones. Registered office: Creative Tower, Fujairah, PO Box 4422, UAE. 47. Which of these four approaches do you take in your everyday life, and why? )Of course the phenomenological approach employed by Smart can be interpreted as an attempt of taking into consideration the individual experience of religion a at the same time trying to separate from it. According to William Cavanaughs provocative thesis, the fact that Christianity is construed as a religion, whereas nationalism is not, ensures that the Christians public and lethal loyalty belongs to the nation-state. 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. "Feminist Approaches." In Approaches to the Study of Religions, edited by Peter Connolly, pp. 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. "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation", in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, Michael Banton (ed. Thus, some political ideologies, such as communism and fascism, have been regarded as analogous to religion. For critics, this is visible in three different ways. In this post, I briefly set out three distinct approaches to the study of religion: criticizing religion, upholding religion, and disaggregating religion. 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. The gods play a merely subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Theravada (Way of the Elders) Buddhism. 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. 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 . 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. 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. No consensus among scholars concerning the best way to study religion has developed, however. The other is Sri Aurobindo who brought a change to the vision of evolution of life into the divinity of life. In light of these considerations, our approach in examining the different world religions in the subsequent chapters mainly falls under religious studies. Updates? 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. a creation of capitalism, for Weber it is the other way roundcapitalism is largely due to religion, more specifically, the Calvinist religion. As stated earlier, French sociologist mile Durkheim (1858-1917) defined religion as a "unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things" (1915). The implications of the first approach have been resisted in many quarters. As an academic discipline, anthropology studies human beings in aspects ranging from the biology and evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to the features of society and culture that decisively distinguish humans from other animal species. Anthropology has two major fields: physical anthropology, which studies the the origin, evolution, and diversity of people, and cultural anthropology, which studies culture in all of its aspects and uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2013). liade (1907-1986), whose studies included the concepts of sacred space and mythic time, and the sacredness of nature (Paden 2005, 215). 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. 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. 1 Review. The most influential premodern work in comparative religion is the book The Golden Bough (1890) by James G. Frazer (1854-1941). This idea led Calvinists to engage in activities that would increase their wealth, paving the way for the development of capitalism. All work is written to order. From this perspective, it would be a mistake to think that conceptual imprecision is in itself an obstacle to scholarly inquiry. Religion should be disaggregated into a number of different values which relate to the law of the liberal state in different ways. 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. 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. She has published extensively in the areas of republicanism and toleration, theories of law and the state, and global justice. Corrections? Also we can see the beliefs, symbolim and teachings of Auroville fitting weel within the above detailed classifacations of Smarts dimensions of religion. 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 . In his own words: Man is on a transitorily passage . The stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion. William James (1842-1910) focused on the psychological process that occurs in a religious conversion, when a nonreligious person becomes religious (Merkur 2005, 172). APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION 109 like, the students were asked to read Marx, Freud, Durkheim. They are: commitment theory, which postulates that religion is a system of costly signaling that reduces deception and creates cooperation within groups; cognitive theory, which postulates that religion is the manifestation of mental modules that have evolved for other purposes . Second, however, we may ask whether the normative analogy used by egalitarian theorists of religious freedom is the right one. Approaches to the Study of Religions. b.) Faculty are drawn from a variety of other departments- including (but not restricted to) history, classics, anthropology, He- brew and Judaic studies, Middle Eastern studies, and fine arts-and there are only a . 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. 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). This approach is known as comparative 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. Global studies is a fresh and dynamic discipline area that promises to reinvigorate undergraduate and postgraduate education in the social sciences and humanities. On the one hand, some view psychology of religion as a program that reduces religious phenomena believed to be real to mere psychological phenomena. In this lesson, we will discuss the difference between the scientific and the religious approach and will look at some examples of each. The Christian theologian, for example, may see a particular historical process as providential. These philosophical issues include, among many others, whether we can adequately prove the existence of God, reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of a God who is wholly good and all-powerful, reconcile Gods omniscience (the power to know everything) and foreknowledge (the power to know future events) with human freedom, explain the nature of miracles, determine the meaningfulness of religious language (how religious linguistic expressions acquire their meanings), and many others. For putting the word "academic" in the phrase, "The Academic Study of Religion," indicates that . 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. Durkheim was more interested in the unifying effect of religion among members of a society. That said, these two countries also have many similarities in terms of culture, religion, geography, and social history, and both governments have . 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. Office hours: MW 3-4, TTh 1-2:30. and by appointment. Methodologies provide a lense of analysis from which to view the field of religous studies. 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. 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. Approaches to ReligionSpring 2010REL 111. On the other hand, some view it as a way of purifying religion from the idolatry or worship of human-made objects. Reformulated in this way, Sullivans critique has bite. Religion may also be thought to be subjective because the criteria by which its truth is decided are obscure and hard to come by, so there is no obvious objective test, the way in which there is for a large range of empirical claims in the physical world. Significance is reported at the p < .10 level. 427-5290. [email protected]. For our purposes, we shall examine certain approaches to the study of religions that are based on certain academic disciplines. 3 Phenomenological. Religion is also studied within cultural geography, which studies how cultural processes spread. 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. Your email address will not be published. These different approaches disagree about the essence of religion, but all three camps operate within a shared account of the human. A field study was conducted to achieve the objective of this research. The realities of the modern world significantly contribute to communication between representatives of different cultures. Thus, the bracketing means forgetting about beliefs of ones own that might endorse or conflict with what is being investigated. By studying different religious . Thus in principle it is the study of all religions from a viewpoint not isolated within any one of them. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. 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. Instead, I shall merely sketch an alternative strategy. London and New York, 1999. Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? 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. , Sullivans critique has bite that conceptual imprecision is in itself an obstacle to scholarly inquiry the of... Of life into the divinity of life into the divinity of life within cultural,... Interested in the unifying effect of religion lense of analysis from which to view the of... This perspective, it would be a mistake to think that conceptual imprecision is in itself obstacle... These different approaches disagree about the essence of religion Approaches. & quot ; in approaches the. P & lt ;.10 level scholar is concerned not only with individual responses but also with ones. These considerations, our approach in examining the different world religions in the effect. 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