Religious Studies Nus

[Kristin Klodzinski]

Religiousstudies, also known as the study of religion, is the scientific study of religion. There is no consensus on what qualifies as religion and its definition is highly contested. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing empirical, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.

While theology attempts to understand the transcendent or supernatural according to traditional religious accounts, religious studies takes a more scientific and objective approach, independent of any particular religious viewpoint. Religious studies thus draws upon multiple academic disciplines and methodologies including anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history of religion.

Religious studies originated in 19th-century Europe, when scholarly and historical analysis of the Bible had flourished, as Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts were first being translated into European languages. Early influential scholars included Friedrich Max Mller in England and Cornelis Petrus Tiele in the Netherlands. Today, religious studies is an academic discipline practiced by scholars worldwide.[1] In its early years, it was known as "comparative religion" or the science of religion and, in the United States, there are those who today also know the field as the "History of religion" (associated with methodological traditions traced to the University of Chicago in general, and in particular Mircea Eliade, from the late 1950s through to the late 1980s).

The religious studies scholar Walter Capps described the purpose of the discipline as to provide "training and practice ... in directing and conducting inquiry regarding the subject of religion".[2] At the same time, Capps stated that its other purpose was to use "prescribed modes and techniques of inquiry to make the subject of religion intelligible."[2]Religious studies scholar Robert A. Segal characterised the discipline as "a subject matter" that is "open to many approaches", and thus it "does not require either a distinctive method or a distinctive explanation to be worthy of disciplinary status."[3]

Different scholars operating in the field have different interests and intentions; some for instance seek to defend religion, while others seek to explain it away, and others wish to use religion as an example with which to prove a theory of their own.[4] Some scholars of religious studies are interested in primarily studying the religion to which they belong.[5] Other scholars take a more unbiased approach and broadly examine the historical interrelationships among all major religious ideologies through history, focusing on shared similarities rather than differences.[6] Scholars of religion have argued that a study of the subject is useful for individuals because it will provide them with knowledge that is pertinent in inter-personal and professional contexts within an increasingly globalized world.[7] It has also been argued that studying religion is useful in appreciating and understanding sectarian tensions and religious violence.[8][9][10]

The term "religion" originated from the Latin noun religio, that was nominalized from one of three verbs: relegere (to turn to constantly/observe conscientiously); religare (to bind oneself [back]); and reeligere (to choose again).[11] Because of these three different potential meanings, an etymological analysis alone does not resolve the ambiguity of defining religion, since each verb points to a different understanding of what religion is. During the Middle Ages, the term "religious" was used as a noun to describe someone who had joined a monastic order (a "religious").

Throughout the history of religious studies, there have been many attempts to define the term "religion".[13] Many of these have been monothetic, seeking to determine a key, essential element which all religions share, which can be used to define "religion" as a category, and which must be necessary in order for something to be classified as a "religion".[14] There are two forms of monothetic definition; the first are substantive, seeking to identify a specific core as being at the heart of religion, such as a belief in a God or gods, or an emphasis on power.[15] The second are functional, seeking to define "religion" in terms of what it does for humans, for instance defining it by the argument that it exists to assuage fear of death, unite a community, or reinforce the control of one group over another.[15] Other forms of definition are polythetic, producing a list of characteristics that are common to religion. In this definition there is no one characteristic that need to be common in every form of religion.[15]

Causing further complications is the fact that there are various secular world views, such as nationalism and Marxism, which bear many of the same characteristics that are commonly associated with religion, but which rarely consider themselves to be religious.[16]

Conversely, other scholars of religious studies have argued that the discipline should reject the term "religion" altogether and cease trying to define it.[17] In this perspective, "religion" is argued to be a Western concept that has been forced upon other cultures in an act of intellectual imperialism.[18] According to scholar of religion Russell T. McCutcheon, "many of the peoples that we study by means of this category have no equivalent term or concept at all".[19] There is, for instance, no word for "religion" in languages like Sanskrit.[18]

Before religious studies became a field in its own right, flourishing in the United States in the late 1960s, several key intellectual figures explored religion from a variety of perspectives. One of these figures was the famous pragmatist William James. His 1902 Gifford lectures and book The Varieties of Religious Experience examined religion from a psychological-philosophical perspective and is still influential today. His essay The Will to Believe defends the rationality of faith.

Notwithstanding the long interest in the study of religion, the academic discipline Religious Studies is relatively new. Christopher Partridge notes that the "first professorships were established as recently as the final quarter of the nineteenth century."[20]

In the nineteenth century, the study of religion was done through the eyes of science. Max Mller was the first professor of comparative philology at Oxford University, a chair created especially for him. In his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) he wrote that it is "the duty of those who have devoted their life to the study of the principal religions of the world in their original documents, and who value and reverence it in whatever form it may present itself, to take possession of this new territory in the name of true science."

Many of the key scholars who helped to establish the study of religion did not regard themselves as scholars of religious studies, but rather as theologians, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and historians.[21]

Partridge writes that "by the second half of the twentieth century the study of religion had emerged as a prominent and important field of academic enquiry." He cites the growing distrust of the empiricism of the nineteenth century and the growing interest in non-Christian religions and spirituality coupled with convergence of the work of social scientists and that of scholars of religion as factors involved in the rise of Religious Studies.

One of the earliest academic institutions where Religious Studies was presented as a distinct subject was University College Ibadan, now the University of Ibadan, where Geoffrey Parrinder was appointed as lecturer in Religious Studies in 1949.[22]

In the 1960s and 1970s, the term "religious studies" became common and interest in the field increased. New departments were founded and influential journals of religious studies were initiated (for example, Religious Studies and Religion). In the forward to Approaches to the Study of Religion, Ninian Smart wrote that "in the English-speaking world [religious studies] basically dates from the 1960s, although before then there were such fields as 'the comparative study of religion', the 'history of religion', the 'sociology of religion' and so on ..."

In the 1980s, in both Britain and America, "the decrease in student applications and diminishing resources in the 1980s led to cut backs affecting religious studies departments." (Partridge) Later in the decade, religious studies began to pick up as a result of integrating religious studies with other disciplines and forming programs of study that mixed the discipline with more utilitarian study.

Philosophy of religion uses philosophical tools to evaluate religious claims and doctrines. Western philosophy has traditionally been employed by English speaking scholars. (Some other cultures have their own philosophical traditions including Indian, Muslim, and Jewish.) Common issues considered by the (Western) philosophy of religion are the existence of God, belief and rationality, cosmology, and logical inferences of logical consistency from sacred texts.

Although philosophy has long been used in evaluation of religious claims (e.g. Augustine and Pelagius's debate concerning original sin), the rise of scholasticism in the eleventh century, which represented "the search for order in intellectual life" (Russell, 170), more fully integrated the Western philosophical tradition (with the introduction of translations of Aristotle) in religious study.

There is some amount of overlap between subcategories of religious studies and the discipline itself. Religious studies seeks to study religious phenomena as a whole, rather than be limited to the approaches of its subcategories.

The anthropology of religion is principally concerned with the common basic human needs that religion fulfills. The cultural anthropology of religion is principally concerned with the cultural aspects of religion. Of primary concern to the cultural anthropologist of religions are rituals, beliefs, religious art, and practices of piety.[23]

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