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. There are two main reasons for this suspicion. study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines. By studying different religious . A criticism of Aurobindos view may be seen that it seeks to remain within religion itself, similar to that of Smart as they both emphasise the importance of the experience of religion, a personal contact with God or Gods, however within Marxism we can see a move away from this religious experience. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Social Science Research Council Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Historiography then becomes the science that studies the conceptions and production of historical interpretations of human civilization. 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. In other words it is a fair and full study of all religions" (Whaling, 2006, "Theory and methods in religious studies: Contemporary approaches to the . Sullivan demonstrates that religion is too complex, too comprehensive, and too multi-faceted to be adequately captured by the law of the liberal state. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious studies program, but not a de- partment. It looks at the percentage of each country's population that belongs to eight major religious groups, as of 2010. For instance, Christian theologians explain the doctrines of Christianity, and their works constitute Christian theology. It studies religion in relation to other social institutions and compares religious beliefs and practices across cultures. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religions, University of California, Santa Barbara. 2 Psychological. Tylor cited the association of morality with animism which was little represented in the lower races but became an integral part of the religions ofthe civilized races. He is not final. 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 . 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. Accordingly, Calvinists believed in predestination, the view that God has already decided on who will enter heaven or not. But nor does it reduce the normative inscription of religion in the law to a narrow (often ethnocentric) set of concerns and values. This research focuses on the legal basis for anti-corruption measures in Indonesia and Malaysia and touches upon aspects of enforcement. Fall 2005. Corrections? The study of religion may thus come to have a reflexive effect on religion itself, such as the manner in which modern Christian theology has been profoundly affected by the whole question of the historicity of the New Testament. The Comparative Study of Religions World Religions: A Voyage of Discovery, Fourth Edition, considers one religion at a time, chapter by chapter. Personal experience is crucial to any understanding of religion .On this particular account Aurobindo discovers the relation or union, he favours, what he identifies as spiritual psychology and integral methods, but for both he confirms that the objective is to be understood and interpreted in terms of subjective. Methodologies provide a lense of analysis from which to view the field of religous studies. 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. The final approach to world religions is exclusivism. 2. So the starting point of the disaggregation strategy is to accept that, as religion is indeed not a thing but a term of art (it has different meanings in different contexts), different dimensions of it will be appropriated in different ways in different disciplines. 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. 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. Let me get back to the starting point of our inquiry: Is religion a valid category of scholarly research? The realities of the modern world significantly contribute to communication between representatives of different cultures. Understanding Religious Pluralism in India. Consequently, the systematic study of the doctrines of Buddhism and Hinduism, for instance, are respectively called Buddhist philosophy and Hindu philosophy, and not Buddhist theology and Hindu theology. The adherent of a faith is no doubt authoritative as to his own experience, but what of the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which the adherent participates? Thus, some political ideologies, such as communism and fascism, have been regarded as analogous to religion. There are religions, however, in which even worship rituals are not central. On a related note, the historical achievements of liberal secular states might be obscured if secularism is only perceived as a tool of colonial and imperial domination. by Ccile Laborde February 5, 2014. This approach teaches that there is only one true religion and only one way of salvation. 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. While for Marx religion isa creation of capitalism, for Weber it is the other way roundcapitalism is largely due to religion, more specifically, the Calvinist religion. The absence of good (the moral kind) is caused by our disobedience to the will of God. Psychology of religion involves the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to religious institutions, as well as to individuals of all religious or noreligious persuasions. Continuum International publishing group .2006. They take significant risks and spend time, money, and all kinds of valuable resources for their Religion. the civilized races. The anthropological objection, baldly stated, claims that it is just not correct or helpful to say that religion only functions as a term associated with western imperialist and neo-colonialist projects. There are many ways of studying religions. 42 - 72. Psychology is the study of human and animal behavior and how thinking processes operate. 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. Methodologies in religious studies are the interpretive models on which the analysis of religious phenomena and resources are discussed. What may be the way forward in the teaching and definition of religion is to accept the singularity of each religion and each individuals faith and seek ways in which they can be accommodated within a safe international environment that moves away from empirical definitions. Instead, I shall merely sketch an alternative strategy. Sociology of religion, on the other hand, studies religious beliefs, practices, and organizations using the theories and methods of the discipline of sociology. The stage from man to super being is the next which depends from the approach of the achievement on the evolution on earth. Office hours: MW 3-4, TTh 1-2:30. and by appointment. From the belief in human souls grew the belief in other spirits, like those that inhabit nature and those venerated as gods. Intellectual historians and students of political thought study religious traditions as coherent, inter-generational, scholarly bodies of thoughtthe Islamic or the Christian or the Confucian tradition, for example. Registered office: Creative Tower, Fujairah, PO Box 4422, UAE. Although there is still no agreement on this issue, the frontier between traditional religions and modern political ideologies remains a promising topic of study. These perspectives offer sociologists theoretical paradigms for explaining how society influences people, and vice versa. 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. Sociologists today employ three primary theoretical perspectives: the symbolic interactionist perspective, the functionalist perspective, and the conflict perspective. To some extent the emphasis on neutral description arises in modern times as a reaction to committed accounts of religion, which were for long the norm and which still exist among those who treat religion from a theological point of view. This is an important critique, which draws on what I have called the first (critical) and the second (anthropological) approach to religion. It may well be, for example, that, in their exclusive focus on the claims of individual conscience, egalitarian theorists have neglected the normative importance of other dimensions of lived religion, such as the centrality of traditional collective rituals to the moral lives of believers. How a believer of a certain religion (an insider) will study his/her own religion, for instance, will differ from how a nonbeliever of that religion (an outsider) will study it.Their motivations and methods will be different. 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. Other researchers of religion, such as Cornelius Petrus Tiele (1830-1902), preferred the term ' comparative religion '. They are: commitment theory, which postulates that religion is a system of costly signaling that reduces deception and creates cooperation within groups; cognitive theory, which postulates that religion is the manifestation of mental modules that have evolved for other purposes . Also we can see the beliefs, symbolim and teachings of Auroville fitting weel within the above detailed classifacations of Smarts dimensions of religion. Which of these four approaches do you take in your everyday life, and why? 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. Sociology is one such approach that this essay will be looking at through its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. An alternative approach is to select central themes of inquiry and to investigate how the religions engage with each theme. 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. The study of the religious notions of primitive people arose within the context of evolutionary theory. Given this, we, however, also use other approaches especially comparative religion and philosophy of religionwhich we will discuss next. Durkheim argued that "religion happens . A theory of religion may be internal or external. Throughout the film, various facets of Christianity are explored and that includes the role played by that religion during the colonization of territories by the European or Western colonial powers in the early centuries, particularly the role played by the . (Peter Connolly,pp1-2Approche to the Study of Religion,Biddles L.T.D.) Still another difference is that while theology limits itself to its own internal theory of religion (its own account for its origins and functions), religious studies considers external theories of religion (accounts of the origins and functions of religion by other academic disciplines). Sociologists study religion as both a belief system and a social institution. The idea is that one who experiences financial success is blessed and is thus favored by God. Like Muslim reformists' approach of reform, which attempted to reconstruct Islamic religious thought in the light of modern science and knowledge, Christian neo-orthodoxy insisted that Christianity itself needs continually to be rethought and that theology must engage seriously with the . Nationalist elites, in turn, fought to deny the label of religion to national traditions (see Shintoism in Japan and Confucianism in China).