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Clears the ground for students who are setting out to understand, rather than just to practice, religion. It discusses, among other things, the relationship between commitment to a particular tradition and the quest for intellectual understanding of religion "in the round", "holiness" as an identifying aspect of religion, functional "modes" of religion, and finally some questions connected with the secularization process. Assuming throughout that theology and religious studies ought not to be seen as competing approaches, but as sources for complementary insights, it offers the student a fundamental introduction to an important area of inquiry.
Is theology responsible to tradition or new insight? Institutional church or humanity at large? Spiritual or everyday existence? Revelation or scientific findings? In his new bookScience of God: Truth in the Age of Science, Kevin Sharpe proposes a method for doing theology which does not divorce it from the practical applications of science. Not only does this work establish that theology ought to be empirical in what it says about the world and God's relationship to it, but it also outlines a clear method for doing this. Science and theology can each share the same empirical method: when each attempts a description of any part of reality, it is relying on its own essential assumptions, or lens. When applied to theology, the method assumes the existence of God and then seeks the nature of God using falsifiable and verifiable techniques. Starting with the sciences that examine happiness--particularly biology, genetics, psychology, and social psychology--Science of God seeks to understand the spiritual nature of humans and, through it, the nature of God.
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A collection of essays in honor of a retiring professor of religious studies, organized in sections on theory of religion, comparative religion, Christianity, and religion and the imagination. Topics include Tyler's theory of myth as primitive science, Qumran and the implications of historical sociology, the three doctrines of the 1933 Methodist hymn book, and the reflection of Zoroastrianism in modern Parsi secular literature. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR