Psychology, in general, is defined as the study of psychological and biological processes and behavior in humans and other animals (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2013). Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? The Essay Writing ExpertsUK Essay Experts. SSRC activities span more than 80 countries on 6 continents, Apply for research opportunities across the globe, Contributions fund research and scholarship worldwide. He is not final. A participatory observation, deep interviews and documentations were employed to collect the data of this study. To export a reference to this article please select a referencing stye below: If you are the original writer of this essay and no longer wish to have your work published on UKEssays.com then please: Our academic writing and marking services can help you! For critics, this is visible in three different ways. 10. Here religion involves subjectivity in the sense of individual experience. As the world's largest democracy, India . Free resources to assist you with your university studies! But because they wanted to know who would eventually be saved and enter heaven, they thought that financial success was one good indicator. Religious beliefs, in particular, are only one sub-set of a larger class, which political philosophers, following John Rawls, call conceptions of the good. On this view, a liberal state protects, not only freedom of religion, but more generally freedom of conscience; it disestablishes, not only dominant religion, but also any controversial conception of the good. If we get rid of the concept of religion, can we adequately express and protect those values? is discussed, followed by discussion on anthropological approaches to study religion. The worry here is the hard-won liberal right to religious freedom will not elicit much respect if the existence of religion itself is radically questioned. 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. One contribution of St. Augustine was his theory that evil is the absence of good (which he adopted from the view of the Greek philosopher Plotinus on the nature of light and darkness). Besides their evolutionary assumption about religion, the followers of evolutionary theory show overwhelming Eurocentric biases. In the above definition Marx has stressed few points about religion which require special emphasis. Thus, the bracketing means forgetting about beliefs of ones own that might endorse or conflict with what is being investigated. The aims of the Diploma Programme world religions course are to enable students to: promote an inquiring, analytical and empathetic approach to the study of religion. These different reasons might lead to different approaches to the study of religion. Briefly, the arguments from causation and motion claim that the series of causes and effects, and movements in the world, must begin with God being the first cause and mover; the argument from design claims that the intricate design of the world cannot be attributed to mere chance but only to God as the divine intelligence; the argument from necessity claims that there must be a God who is a necessary being (one who has always been existing) to explain how contingent beings (those that presently exist but previously did not) have come to exist; and the argument from degrees of perfection claims that there must be a God whose perfection serves as the standard for determining the degrees of qualities that we attribute to things (like that they are good or better). Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? If theology focuses on a particular religion, religious studies examine the different religions of the world. Nevertheless, common to all these different terms and their respective definitions of approach was the motivation to dispense with theologically orientated normative constructions in the study of religion. Most of the major thinkers recognized in this area are also those recognized in the sociology of religion like Durkheim and Weber. Critics have pointed out thatby analogizing religion with individual conscience or conceptions of the goodliberalism reveals its Protestant, individualistic bias, and is unable to capture the fullness of the religious experience. In light of these considerations, our approach in examining the different world religions in the subsequent chapters mainly falls under religious studies. Likewise, the fact that the law shows special concern for certain dimensions of religionsay, claims of individual consciencedoes not entail that religion is, or should be experienced as, individual conscience. These questions within Smarts Classifactory account would help to define a religion. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. "Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation", in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, Michael Banton (ed. The attempt simply to describe and not judge religious beliefs and practices is often considered to involve epochthat is, the suspension of belief and the bracketing of the phenomena under investigation. Thus, the preliminary task of the student of religion must be to amass an inventory of kinds of religious phenomena. How would a strategy of disaggregating religion help here? The specific question which political and legal philosophers (should) ask themselves is this. Office hours: MW 3-4, TTh 1-2:30. and by appointment. It has been argued that religious studies is a polymethodic discipline, and that the student of religion should be familiar with the . They argue, for example, that exemptions from general laws can be justified on the ground of conscience; and that what the state should not establish are conceptions of the good. Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified. Other researchers of religion, such as Cornelius Petrus Tiele (1830-1902), preferred the term ' comparative religion '. The second ground for skepticism is that religion has served to define the western idea of the secular, and remains deeply entangled with it. It is the logic of Natures process. Bonferroni correction compensates for multiple . 2.Religious studies has a bigger scope because it analyzes the different world religions. 300 Cadman Plaza West 15th Floor Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA Our academic experts are ready and waiting to assist with any writing project you may have. How can we best identify and protect the normative values which historically have underpinned freedom of religion, non-establishment and the like? On the other hand, comparative religion refers to a branch of religious studies that is concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices of two or more particular religions. As to the first sense, one of the challenges to the student of religion is the problem of evoking its inner, individual side, which is not observable in any straightforward way. She has published extensively in the areas of republicanism and toleration, theories of law and the state, and global justice. For a Christian, Christ is the only way of salvation and the Bible is the only source of saving revelation today. Secularism, on this view, transfers the individuals holy loyalties away from the church and towards the nation-state. (Michael T.Mclaughlin,p96, Editrice Ponteficia Universita` Grecoriana Roma 2003)In many occasions he confirmed that he does not intend to promote any old religion or to find a new one and he strongly oppose religious particolarism. This approach teaches that there is only one true religion and only one way of salvation. So neutrality, for liberals such as Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, is generalized non-establishment. Egalitarian theorists of religious freedom offer a compelling response to the critical religion school. The author will attempt to evaluate the strengths and weakness of two approaches to religion and try to compare the work of the two representations and their methodology .The first is Professor Ninian Smart as he wrote widely, regarding different topics in religions, with papers and articles appearing in a vast range of publication sand television worldwide developing his own vision and philosophy of human progress and spiritual evolution. The author will attempt to evaluate the strengths and weakness of two approaches to religion and try to compare the work of the two representations and their methodology .The first is Professor Ninian Smart as he wrote widely, regarding different topics in religions, with papers and articles appearing in a vast range of . R.R. Thus in principle it is the study of all religions from a viewpoint not isolated within any one of them. According to a number of scholars (often influenced by Foucauldian or post-colonial thought), the category of religion is deeply implicated in the history and practice of western statism and imperialism. No plagiarism, guaranteed! This means that a student of theology is a follower of the particular religion he/she is studying; whereas a student of religious studies is usually not a follower of the religions he/she is studying. Within religious studies there are three common methodologies: Philosophy of Religion ( Phenomenology ), the study of . After studying the indigenous Australians, Durkheim claimed that the totems (sacred objects used as emblems or symbols of a group of people, family, clan, or tribe) that the aborigines worship represented their own conceptions of a unified group or society. 3 Phenomenological. Freud viewed religion negatively. June 03, 2016. So how would Aurobindo address questions upon doctrine say within the New Testament? Rituals, practices and texts focused on death provide the basis for comparative study of Asian and Western religious approaches to the meaning and mystery of death as it confronts individuals and communities. Conversely, theological claims may imply something about the history of a religion. To a great extent, the meanings now attached to the terms religion and religions have tended to promote the study of religion in order to understand the world in which we live rather than as part of a desire for personal religious self-fulfillment. We may conclude saying that maybe religions will never combine in to one global faith ,but we do think that the society is moving towards a global ideology that have a space for religion and identify the contributions of the diverse ethnicity and traditions and bring a new way in helping us to work together for the support of human values and spirituality. One of the many reasons for this failure is that each discipline enlisted to study religion has its own distinctive methods and topics, and scholars often disagree about how to resolve the inevitable conflicts between these different intellectual perspectives. There are two main reasons for this suspicion. The law does not describe and regulate the full experience of marriage: the fact that, in law, marriage is a contract does not mean that marriage is, or should be experienced as, a contract. First of all we have to say that both, Smart and Aurobindo have not defined religion from objective point of view but rather to determine religion in terms of its own value. Egalitarian theorists of religious freedom, from this perspective, are right to seek to identify the normative grounds on which certain beliefs and practices call for state protection (or state restraint, in the case of non-establishment). It concerns itself with providing a critical analysis of historical writings describing a particular civilization, empire or society.Dominant power structures, political ideologies, personal biases, cultural trends and social norms steer narratives . It looks at the percentage of each country's population that belongs to eight major religious groups, as of 2010. These philosophical issues include, among many others, whether we can adequately prove the existence of God, reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of a God who is wholly good and all-powerful, reconcile Gods omniscience (the power to know everything) and foreknowledge (the power to know future events) with human freedom, explain the nature of miracles, determine the meaningfulness of religious language (how religious linguistic expressions acquire their meanings), and many others. Aurobindo offers no guidance upon other religions as his account is purely personal. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Although I cannot make the full case here, I sketch a preliminary defense of the third approach, in the context of recent debates in political theory. For our purposes, we shall . The word anthropology means science of human beings or humanity. Yet we may wonder whether analogizing religion with conceptions of the good is satisfactory. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The works of both Sri Aurobindo and Ninian Smart shows two drastic and completely different approaches to religion. Items is a space for engagement with insights from the work of the Council and the social sciences. Here I focus on two objectionswhich, for ease of presentation, I call the anthropological and the normative objection. study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines. Evolutionary Approaches. But the historical process itself has to be investigated scientificallythat is, by considering the evidence, using the techniques of historical enquiry and other scientific methods. Instead, I shall merely sketch an alternative strategy. 2. The concept exhibits a complex continuum of resemblances and differences. In sum, the anthropological objection urges us to take both ordinary language and ordinary experience seriously. The first is that religion is (as Daniel Dubuisson once wrote) the Wests most characteristic concept, around which it has established and developed its identity. There is a deep and significant continuity between the Christian defense of the true religion and the nineteenth-century invention of world religions. The universalism of the concept masked an internally hierarchical classificatory scheme, which, as Tomoko Mazuzawa has shown, was crafted within the crucible of the missionary and colonial encounter. 1 Definition of Religion For Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917) religion is the belief in spiritual beings (1871). Different approaches to religion education have been in place for a long time or developed more recently to meet growing religious and cultural plurality in European countries and schools. Approaches to Religious/Worldview Studies 1 Sociological. The findings that focus on the scientific study of religion, including the SSSR and the SSR units within the AAR, are especially highlighted, as are contrasts between sociological and psychological approaches in the academic study of religion. Often the scholar is confronted only with texts describing beliefs and stories, so the inner sentiments that these both evoke and express must be inferred. O . It is a rich concept that connects to vocabularies that bring persons and things, desires, and practices in particular traditions in distinctive ways. They suggest that, even though historically the liberal state may have defined itself in relation to a problematic construal of religion, it has since broadened the scope of its moral concern, and is therefore less vulnerable to charges of ethnocentrism. )Of course the phenomenological approach employed by Smart can be interpreted as an attempt of taking into consideration the individual experience of religion a at the same time trying to separate from it. Religion can be said to be subjective in at least two senses. An alternative approach is to select central themes of inquiry and to investigate how the religions engage with each theme. Will the globalization lead to a kind of universal religion, as prediction might lead, or it will be turned in a lively variety of many different beliefs? 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. This idea led Calvinists to engage in activities that would increase their wealth, paving the way for the development of capitalism. Sociology in general looks at people's . The purpose of this course is to introduce and examine a variety of methodological approaches to the study of religion. From this perspective, it would be a mistake to think that conceptual imprecision is in itself an obstacle to scholarly inquiry. I do not think it is, although I cannot make the full case here. Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have shown, for instance, that liberal secularism requires individual beliefnot communal observance, rituals or embodied pietyto be taken as the essence of religiosity. For instance, a student of Christian theology is a Christian; but a student of religious studies studying Shintoism is usually not a Shintoist. Download file to see previous pages. Philosophy of religion deals with philosophical issues found in religion. People often do truly unique things for their faith. No consensus among scholars concerning the best way to study religion has developed, however. 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. Updates? Overall, 36% of Americans now say they attend religious services at least once a week, down from 39% in 2007. 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. 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. . describing how religion is experienced by practitioners. Department of Religion Pearson 211 Swarthmore College 500 College Avenue Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397 Email: religion@swarthmore.edu Phone: (610) 328-8045 Fax: (610) 328-7687 First, the secular state defines what religion is; religion is privatized as a faith whose object is the supernatural, and differentiates it from the natural and the rational which are the jurisdiction of the state. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. This course introduces students to the variety of academic approaches to the study of religion and to the procedures and sources used in writing academic papers in religious studies. It is present in varying forms in the religions of the lower races up to the civilized races of mankind. The reflexive effect of the study of religion on religion itself may in practice make it more difficult for the student of religion to adopt the detachment required by bracketing. First, as religion is not a thing but a term of art, it is perfectly legitimateas suggested abovethat different dimensions of it are appropriated in different disciplines and areas of life. The point has been made with particular acuity by legal scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan in her book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Ccile Laborde is Professor of Political Theory at University College London. 3.7 Robert Marrett and Animatism. Accordingly, God is just the projected ultimate father image that helps humans deal with their feelings of helplessness and guilt. St. Augustine used this theory to resolve the philosophical question, If everything comes from God, where does evil come from? According to him, evil exists in the world but it does not come from God, for what only comes from God is good. The stage from man to super being is the next which depends from the approach of the achievement on the evolution on earth. Approaches to the Study of Religion. Discussion about religion has been complicated further by the attempt of some Christian theologians, notably Karl Barth (18861968), to draw a distinction between religion and the Gospel (the proclamation peculiar to Christianity). 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. Durkheim further claimed that more complex societies had more complex religious systems, but they were all same in that they had religions as ways of unifying their societies. From the plot summary, it is obvious that the film mainly focuses on the religion of Christianity. First, the practice of religion involves inner experiences and sentiments, such as feelings of God guiding the life of the devotee. Copyright 2003 - 2023 - UKEssays is a trading name of Business Bliss Consultants FZE, a company registered in United Arab Emirates. Accordingly, Calvinists believed in predestination, the view that God has already decided on who will enter heaven or not. It also depends heavily on the motives the researcher brings to his or her investigation of religious or worldview issues. During his time, Marx observed that the capitalists, in their pursuit of profits, eventually exploited the workers. It is the opium of the people (Contribution to Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right). Christian neo-orthodoxy can be placed as a middle position between traditional orthodoxy and liberalism. Each perspective uniquely conceptualizes society, social . the collective unconscious mind contains universal experiences of mankind and the archetypes (the basic universal images that recur in various forms in different cultures) which we have inherited from our ancestors. Such struggles were political through and through, and it is impossible to discern any common core or essence to all the world religions, as W. C. Smith pointed out in 1962. 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 .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 . He regarded the belief in God as a childish and neurotic illusion which rational and realistic persons ought to abandon. (Peter Connolly,pp1-2Approche to the Study of Religion,Biddles L.T.D.) Hence the proposed shift from an analogizing to a disaggregating strategy. 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. Like most abstract concepts, the concept of religion is a construction projected onto the world, but one consequence of this large-scale projection may well be that our world has genuinely come to exhibit it. village and nad level bring in solidarity and unity among different social segments . Here you can choose which regional hub you wish to view, providing you with the most relevant information we have for your specific region. According to William Cavanaughs provocative thesis, the fact that Christianity is construed as a religion, whereas nationalism is not, ensures that the Christians public and lethal loyalty belongs to the nation-state. 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