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Method Today
Thirty or forty years ago, the phrase method and theory in Religious Studies scholarship referred to more social scientific approaches to the study of religion, as opposed to the more traditional theological hermeneutics common to the field. Today, however, it seems that everyone claims to do theory and method, including those people who shun social scientific approaches the academic study of religion. As a result, what does it mean to do theory and method in an era where the phrase has no distinct meaning? To help address this question, the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) addressed the issue of theory at its annual meeting in 2015. Based on what all agreed were productive and rigorous conversations, NAASR returned to the topic at its meeting a year later, where panelists and presenters discussed the issue of method. This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 2016 NAASR meeting, where panelists specifically addressed description, interpretation, comparison, and explanation in Religious Studies scholarship.
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: Working Papers from Hannover
Since the downfall of the phenomenology of religion as the leading paradigm in the study of religion in the 1960s, theoretical and methodological discussions surrounding the nature and identity of the study of religion as an academic discipline have proliferated. The essays included in this volume approach these debates from a variety of angles. Based on a series of talks held at the University of Hannover over the last few years, the essays are intended to be understood as diagnostic works in progress and thus as working papers, all of which strive to point out important problems and perspectives in the field of theories and methodology and to draw attention to the future of the discipline. Using developments in Hanover as a launch pad, the volume forms the basis for further insights into the direction of the study of religion as a discipline at large.
Manufacturing Religion
In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. ...
Key Categories in the Study of Religion
Key Categories in the Study of Religion builds upon the groundwork laid by previous NAASR Working Papers titles in order to bring us full circle to the symbiotic relationship between context and critique. This volume assembles diverse sets of data to consider pertinent categories in which critique occurs. By looking at intentionally disparate case studies, the volume centers on four key contextual categories which stand at the heart of the academic study of religion: Citizenship and Politics, Class and Economy, Gender and Sexuality, and Race and Ethnicity. The contributors to this volume explore questions concerning how scholars construct such categories and/or critique scholars who do? Who ...
Reading J.Z. Smith
Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017) was perhaps the most influential theorist of religion of the last half century. In this book, four interviews and a previously unpublished essay display something of the dynamic, thinking-on-his feet liveliness that Smith brought to questions about the study of religion, his theoretical preferences, and his methods of teaching.
Constructing "data" in Religious Studies
provides a critical introduction to the ways in which the category "data" is understood, produced, and deployed in the discipline of religious studies. The volume is organized into four different sections, entitled "Subjects," "Objects," "Scholars," and "Institutions,"
Hijacked
Whether intentionally or not much of our public discourse on religion involves a subtle, but incredibly powerful, distinction between "good" and "bad" religion. The implications of these labeling practices are far-reaching, indeed, for such judgments manifest in terms such as "fundamentalist," "radical," and "extremist," words that are often the gauge by which governments worldwide determine everything from the parameters of religious freedom, to what constitutes an act of terrorism, to whether certain groups receive legal protections. Conversely, it is often surprising to see how different groups that may otherwise better typify the extremist profile remain unscathed by punitive governmenta...
Imagining Religion
With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds ...
Relating Religion
One of the most influential theorists of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith is best known for his analyses of religious studies as a discipline and for his advocacy and refinement of comparison as the basis for the history of religions. Relating Religion gathers seventeen essays—four of them never before published—that together provide the first broad overview of Smith's thinking since his seminal 1982 book, Imagining Religion. Smith first explains how he was drawn to the study of religion, outlines his own theoretical commitments, and draws the connections between his thinking and his concerns for general education. He then engages several figures and traditions that serve to define his intere...
Jesus and Addiction to Origins
This collection of essays constitute an extended argument for an anthropocentric, human-focused, study of religious practices. The basic premise of the argument, offered in the opening section, is that there is nothing special or extraordinary about human behaviors and constructs that are claimed to have uniquely religious status and authority. Instead, they are fundamentally human and so the scholar of religion is engaged in nothing more or less than studying humans across time and place and all their complex existence-that includes creating more-than-human beings and realities. As an extended and detailed example of such an approach, the second part of the book contains essays that address...
