Fabricating Religion

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1997-06-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780195355680

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Manufacturing Religion by Russell T. McCutcheon Pdf

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. As such, he charges, it has helped to create departments, jobs, and publication outlets for those who are comfortable with such a suspect construction, while establishing a disciplinary ethos of astounding theoretical naivete and a body of scholarship to match. Surveying the textbooks available for introductory courses in comparative religion, the author finds that they uniformly adopt the sui generis line and all that comes with it. As a result, he argues, they are not just uncritical (which helps keep them popular among the audiences for which they are intended, but badly disserve), but actively inhibit the emergence of critical perspectives and capacities. And on the geo-political scale, he contends, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.

Author : Richard Hagenston
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 98 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2014-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1598151460

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Fabricating Faith by Richard Hagenston Pdf

According to Hagenston, Jesus had such a hard edge when it came to Gentiles that he coined his own unflattering term for them-dogs. He limited what he was offering strictly to Jews. Yet the religion that began in his name quickly transformed into a predominantly Gentile movement centered on human sacrifice, a practice rejected by Judaism long before Jesus came on the scene. How did this happen? Hagenston exposes the roots of brutal justice underpinning traditional Christianity, but finds hope in a Jewish movement toward grace that preceded and influenced the historical Jesus.

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2018-09-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783110560831

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Fabricating Religion by Russell T. McCutcheon Pdf

The revised essays collected here, four of which are published for the first time, continue a longstanding argument made by McCutcheon and others: that the study of religion would benefit from self-conscious scrutiny of its tools, the interests that may drive them, and the effects that might follow their use. The chapters examine a variety of contemporary sites in the modern field where this thesis can be argued, whether involving the anachronistic use of of the category religion when studying the ancient world to current interest in so-called critical religion or critical realist approaches. Moreover – contrary to some past characterizations of such critiques – a constructive way forward for the field is once again recommended and, at several sites, exemplified in detail: redescribing not only religion as something ordinary but also our tendency to create the impression of exceptional and thus set-apart things, places, and people. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the book is an invitation to examine our own scholarly practices and thereby take a more active role in shaping the field in which we carry out our work as scholars of this thing we call religion.

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2018-09-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783110559507

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Fabricating Religion by Russell T. McCutcheon Pdf

The revised essays collected here, four of which are published for the first time, continue a longstanding argument made by McCutcheon and others: that the study of religion would benefit from self-conscious scrutiny of its tools, the interests that may drive them, and the effects that might follow their use. The chapters examine a variety of contemporary sites in the modern field where this thesis can be argued, whether involving the anachronistic use of of the category religion when studying the ancient world to current interest in so-called critical religion or critical realist approaches. Moreover – contrary to some past characterizations of such critiques – a constructive way forward for the field is once again recommended and, at several sites, exemplified in detail: redescribing not only religion as something ordinary but also our tendency to create the impression of exceptional and thus set-apart things, places, and people. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the book is an invitation to examine our own scholarly practices and thereby take a more active role in shaping the field in which we carry out our work as scholars of this thing we call religion.

Author : Yoshiko Ashiwa,David L. Wank
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780804758413

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Making Religion, Making the State by Yoshiko Ashiwa,David L. Wank Pdf

This volume combines the perspective of religion as a constructed category of modernity with the analytic focus and empirical grounding of institutional social science to develop a new approach to the study of state and religion in modern and contemporary China.

Author : Alfred North Whitehead
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2011-06-09
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781107647992

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Religion in the Making by Alfred North Whitehead Pdf

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a prominent English mathematician and philosopher. Religion in the Making, which originated in a series of four lectures delivered in King's Chapel, Boston, during February 1926, constitutes an exploration of the relationship between human nature and religion.

Author : Vaia Touna
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2017-06-12
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004348615

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Fabrications of the Greek Past: Religion, Tradition, and the Making of Modern Identities by Vaia Touna Pdf

In Fabrications of the Greek Past, Vaia Touna demonstrates that present-day meanings of historical artifacts are created by social actors through their ever-contemporary acts of identification, such as their interpretations, categorizations, representations, and classifications.

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2021-06-08
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783110721867

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On Making a Shift in the Study of Religion and Other Essays by Russell T. McCutcheon Pdf

Although many would today argue that the onetime dominance of the phenomenology of religion has receded, and with it the traditional approach to studying religion as a unique and deeply-felt experience that defies explanation, the essays collected here take quite the opposite stand: that this approach has merely been re-branded and continues to characterize much work being done in the field today. Offering a different way forward—one that is based on experiences gained by the members of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, a program that has successfully reinvented itself over the past 20 years—the book includes a variety of practical suggestions for how members of Religious Studies departments can revise their approach to studying and teaching about religion. Seeing religion instead as mundane but always exemplary of basic social elements found all across cultures, the volume argues that the way forward for this field lies not in the specialness of its object of study but, instead, the fact that thinking and acting as if something is special is itself an ordinary aspect of history and culture. Making just this shift helps the scholar of religion to contribute to wide, interdisciplinary conversations all across the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrating the practical relevance of their work.

Author : Randall Styers
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2004-01-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780190287924

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Making Magic by Randall Styers Pdf

Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.

Author : Andrew Lang
Publisher : Alpha Edition
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2022-11-18
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9356705674

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The Making of Religion by Andrew Lang Pdf

The Making of Religion, has been considered an important book throughout the human history. So that this work is never forgotten we have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. The whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. This book is not made of scanned copies and hence the text is clear and readable.

Author : Frank Burch Brown
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1993-05-09
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780691024721

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Religious Aesthetics by Frank Burch Brown Pdf

In this groundbreaking work, Brown shows how aesthetics, no less than ethics, can play a central role in the study of religion and in the practice of theology. "An important book, wide ranging, often very witty . . . showing an impressive grasp of the current state of aesthetics and possible new directions".--Nick McAdoo, British Journal of Aesthetics.

Author : T. Utriainen,P. Salmesvuori
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2014-07-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1137388684

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Finnish Women Making Religion by T. Utriainen,P. Salmesvuori Pdf

Finnish Women Making Religion puts forth the complex intersections that Lutheranism, the most important religious tradition in Finland, has had with other religions as well as with the larger society and politics also internationally.

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 3110560844

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Fabricating Religion by Russell T. McCutcheon Pdf

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2016-03-11
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004309180

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Making Religion by Anonim Pdf

Making Religion provides a unique overview of theoretical and practical aspects of the discursive study of religion. Leading scholars in the field discuss the opportunities and challenges of discourse analysis and its application in the study of religion.

Author : Timothy Keller
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2016-09-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780525954156

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Making Sense of God by Timothy Keller Pdf

We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.