While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines. 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. Thus, the preliminary task of the student of religion must be to amass an inventory of kinds of religious phenomena. Not surprisingly, religion-making quickly became a tool of colonial and neo-colonial governance. 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 . 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. 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. Evolutionary Approaches. Nigerias 2023 Elections: Which Way Democracy? Method & Theory in the Study of Religion publishes articles, notes, book reviews and letters which explicitly address the problems of methodology and theory in the academic study of religion. 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. 427-5290. adlerj@kenyon.edu. 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. It can use either separately or in any combination the methods of history, sociology, Sociology is the study of patterns and trends in human societies and cultures. It is present in varying forms in the religions of the lower races up to the civilized races of mankind. 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. The realities of the modern world significantly contribute to communication between representatives of different cultures. In fact, the religions of civilized races evolved from the animism of the lower races. Religion should be disaggregated into a number of different values which relate to the law of the liberal state in different ways. 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). 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. Hence the proposed shift from an analogizing to a disaggregating strategy. He is not final. 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. In this article, I summarise and discuss basic principles for a study-of-religion(s) approach to religion education, adding arguments and perspectives from critical theories about education in general. The word anthropology means science of human beings or humanity. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) defines religion as "a unified system of beliefs and A&C Black, Jan 1, 1999 - Social Science - 286 pages. In my opinion, the study of different approaches to the study and comprehension of religions is indeed an exciting and important topic. Thus, the bracketing means forgetting about beliefs of ones own that might endorse or conflict with what is being investigated. 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 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. This idea led Calvinists to engage in activities that would increase their wealth, paving the way for the development of capitalism. 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. To ask that the law embrace and describe the whole of social reality would be to yearn for a totalitarian law. 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 . Approaches to the Study of Religions. Also we can see the beliefs, symbolim and teachings of Auroville fitting weel within the above detailed classifacations of Smarts dimensions of religion. How would a strategy of disaggregating religion help here? Instead, I shall merely sketch an alternative strategy. For a Christian, Christ is the only way of salvation and the Bible is the only source of saving revelation today. Approaches to the Study of Religion. Your email address will not be published. Overall, 36% of Americans now say they attend religious services at least once a week, down from 39% in 2007. There are many different approaches to finding truth. Here you can choose which regional hub you wish to view, providing you with the most relevant information we have for your specific region. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION 109 like, the students were asked to read Marx, Freud, Durkheim. 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. Aquinas is famous for his five proofs for the existence of God: his arguments from causation, motion, necessity, design, and degrees of protection. At this juncture, let us x-ray some of the approaches in studying religion scientifically. Historiography then becomes the science that studies the conceptions and production of historical interpretations of human civilization. Understanding Religious Pluralism in India. 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. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. It is a rich concept that connects to vocabularies that bring persons and things, desires, and practices in particular traditions in distinctive ways. These questions within Smarts Classifactory account would help to define a religion. The History of Religion as a Sociological Concept William James (1842-1910) focused on the psychological process that occurs in a religious conversion, when a nonreligious person becomes religious (Merkur 2005, 172). the myths of a religion. It may well be that egalitarian theorists have picked a normatively problematic, or normatively narrow, analogy for religion. 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 . Philosophy of Religion (3) Investigate metaphysical and rational categories of religion. Among the many faiths represented here are Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism. 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. It studies religion in relation to other social institutions and compares religious beliefs and practices across cultures. This means, among others, that the philosophy of religion justifies claims by the strength and coherence of arguments. A more promising method would seem to be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though not necessarily universal, such as the occurrence of the rituals of worship. 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. Furthermore, if theology studies a particular religion always from the inside, religious studies study different religions mostly from the outside. 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. 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. These different approaches disagree about the essence of religion, but all three camps operate within a shared account of the human. Sociologists study religion as both a belief system and a social institution. Sociology is one such approach that this essay will be looking at through its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. It may perhaps intensify your religious experience. 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. 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. 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). Means, among others, that the philosophy of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion be... 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