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). These strategies have been identified as central to the development of programs that prioritize student development and help improve student retention, engagement, and academic performance. c.) the truth or falsity of religion. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues. Freud viewed religion negatively. Introduces students to the study of religion, world religious traditions and ethics through an exploration of death and dying. The study of religion can roughly be divided between descriptive and historical inquiries on the one hand and normative inquiries on the other. 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. Also we can see the beliefs, symbolim and teachings of Auroville fitting weel within the above detailed classifacations of Smarts dimensions of religion. The academic study of religion is an inherently interdisciplinary field, incorporating textual studies of the world's sacred texts, language studies, art, history, philosophy, anthropology, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, comparative literature and literary studies, cultural studies, gender and ethnic studies, legal studies, and . Moreover, in the absence of a tight definition there will always be a number of disputed cases. God, in this regard, serves as a source of security and forgiveness. 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. 2.Religious studies has a bigger scope because it analyzes the different world religions. The term phenomenology refers first to the attempt to describe religious phenomena in a way that brings out the beliefs and attitudes of the adherents of the religion under investigation but without either endorsing or rejecting the beliefs and attitudes. But because they wanted to know who would eventually be saved and enter heaven, they thought that financial success was one good indicator. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF RELIGION WILLIAM E. ARNAL New York University has a religious studies program, but not a de- partment. 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. What Wittgenstein said about the concept of game also applies to the concept of religion: the fact that we cannot identify a single feature that all religions exhibit does not mean that the concept of religion is meaningless. The term fundamentalism can be used in very different religious contexts and texts to describe the devotion and strict loyalty to a set of principles or ideas. As an academic discipline, anthropology studies human beings in aspects ranging from the biology and evolutionary history of Homo sapiens to the features of society and culture that decisively distinguish humans from other animal species. Anthropology has two major fields: physical anthropology, which studies the the origin, evolution, and diversity of people, and cultural anthropology, which studies culture in all of its aspects and uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2013). If your specific country is not listed, please select the UK version of the site, as this is best suited to international visitors. the civilized races. 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. 4 Ecumenical/Inclusivism. Chapter 1 in the Thus, the matter of coming to understand the inner side of a religion involves a dialectic between participant observation and dialogical (interpersonal) relationship with the adherents of the other faith. Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified. Summary: 1.Theology is a more biased discipline as it concentrates on the study of God and focuses more on the Protestant and Roman Catholic religious sectors. By studying different religious . In his own words: Man is on a transitorily passage . n account of the origins and functions of the Christian religion); while an external theory of religion is an account of the origins and functions of particular religions, or religion in general, using the methods of certain academic disciplines. study of religion, attempt to understand the various aspects of religion, especially through the use of other intellectual disciplines. William James (1842-1910) focused on the psychological process that occurs in a religious conversion, when a nonreligious person becomes religious (Merkur 2005, 172). "The notion that such a study is the objective and comparative study of religion. 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 . Theologians adopt a more content-based approach: they study the texts and dogma which capture our fundamental dependence on a greater order of things. "Feminist Approaches." In Approaches to the Study of Religions, edited by Peter Connolly, pp. Is religion a valid category of scholarly inquiry? Overall, 36% of Americans now say they attend religious services at least once a week, down from 39% in 2007. Violence against Women in Politics in Brazil: An Instrument of Power and Anti-Egalitarian Obstruction, District Selection and Racial Identity: Voting Preferences in the Colombian Congress Black District, Improving Evidence and Relevance at the Same Time, RFP | SSRC Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, Understanding and undoing the far right: India and beyond, The Overlooked Spoilers Beclouding Nigerias 2023 Elections, A Goal-Means Analysis of Security in Political Parties Manifestos for Nigerias 2023 Presidential Election. Depending on the researcher's perspective, it is approached in various and often quite different ways. 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. Attempts have been made to find a distinctive ingredient in all religions, such as the numinous, or spiritual, experience, the contrast between the sacred and the profane, and the belief in one or more gods. Durkheim was more interested in the unifying effect of religion among members of a society. Anthropologists, for example, legitimately study a key dimension of human experiencethe religious experiencein its diversity and unruliness. For Jung, religious experiences are manifestations of the archetypes in the collective unconscious in our own consciousness. The journal is a very significant endeavor since, until we launched it, there was no journal in the study of religion that has focused exclusively on developing a critical approach. The normative objection is slightly different. Sullivan demonstrates that religion is too complex, too comprehensive, and too multi-faceted to be adequately captured by the law of the liberal state. Nor does the origin of a concept in itself discredit its uses: the concept may well have been forged in the crucible of missionary and colonial encounters, but its meanings and uses have further proliferated in non-colonial and post-colonial settings, in ways that escaped, distorted, and subverted the original discourse. Religion may be defined as "any set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices pertaining to supernatural power, whether that power be forces, gods, spirits, ghosts, or demons" (C. R. Ember, Ember, and Peregrine 2019, 500). No consensus among scholars concerning the best way to study religion has developed, however. Barths distinction attempts to draw a line between the transcendent, as it reveals itself to humans, and religion, as a human product involved in the response to revelation. Bonferroni correction compensates for multiple . Approaches to Religious/Worldview Studies 1 Sociological. 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. So critics confuse an empirical inquiry (describing what religion is) with a normative inquiry (accounting for its status in the law). Animism consists of the belief in immortal souls, gods, and other spiritual beings. The growth of various disciplines in the 19th century, notably psychology and sociology, stimulated a more analytic approach to religions, while at the same time theology became more sophisticated and, in a sense, scientific as it began to be affected by and thus to make use of historical and other methods. 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. There are religions, however, in which even worship rituals are not central. A comprehensive overview of the history and context of feminist approaches to the study of religions, including a helpful discussion of the relationship of these approaches to feminist theology. Mysticism. Aurobindo offers no guidance upon other religions as his account is purely personal. In this lesson, we will discuss the difference between the scientific and the religious approach and will look at some examples of each. In light of these considerations, our approach in examining the different world religions in the subsequent chapters mainly falls under religious studies. In addition to the main scriptures of a particular religion, theology often involves the study of the works of recognized theologians who are usually believers of the religion. Author of. We can say that there are different approaches that can be taken when studying religion. Required fields are marked *. He explains that such experience definitely will change positions on previous views regarding religious tradition. Religion can be said to be subjective in at least two senses. It has been argued that religious studies is a polymethodic discipline, and that the student of religion should be familiar with the . The works of both Sri Aurobindo and Ninian Smart shows two drastic and completely different approaches to religion. For egalitarian theorists of religious freedom (as I call them), there is nothing special about religion as such. 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. 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 Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. 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. 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. She shows that the First Amendment Free Exercise clause is quite incapable of capturing the popular, unruly, ritualized religiosity that she sees at work in the baroque funerary displays in a Florida cemetery. It can use either separately or in any combination the methods of history, sociology, The final approach to world religions is exclusivism. 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. 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 . The apologetic approaches to the study of religion is pro-religion in that it defends religion and attempts to prove that religion is true, right, or good. This includes such traditional points of departure as history, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, but also the natural sciences, and such other approaches as feminist theory, discourse . Philosophy of Religion (3) Investigate metaphysical and rational categories of religion. 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. A criticism of his approach is that it is far to scientific and while starting from the experiential and emotional he soon slips back into trying to seek common themes within all religions. Lesson Transcript. During his time, Marx observed that the capitalists, in their pursuit of profits, eventually exploited the workers. For our purposes, we shall examine certain approaches to the study of religions that are based on certain academic disciplines. From the belief in human souls grew the belief in other spirits, like those that inhabit nature and those venerated as gods. This suggests that the works of these thinkers cut across the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Particularly, this study used an interdisciplinary approach, that is, a combination of religious and social approaches. How can we best identify and protect the normative values which historically have underpinned freedom of religion, non-establishment and the like? 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. For other religions, the systematic study of their doctrines is usually referred to as philosophy instead of theology. One obvious reason is that the term theology implies a belief in one God but other religions may not subscribe either to the belief in God or gods or to the belief that there is only one God. Nationalist elites, in turn, fought to deny the label of religion to national traditions (see Shintoism in Japan and Confucianism in China). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UKEssays.com. 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. 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. Aquinas is famous for his five proofs for the existence of God: his arguments from causation, motion, necessity, design, and degrees of protection. Items is a space for engagement with insights from the work of the Council and the social sciences. If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help! b.) So with Aurobindo is clear the goal is more directly mystical ,to became one with the divine . . India is a multi-cultural and a diverse nation with a flourishing history of pluralism that has been thriving for thousands of years. Human biomonitoring (HBM) approaches can provide inter alia information on the chemicals that are in our body at one point in time. Erin has an M.Ed in adult education and a BS in psychology and a BS in management systems. The stress on the distinction between the descriptive and normative approaches is becoming more frequent among scholars of religion. From its approach, we understand that Sri Aurobindo begins his work clearly within religious prospect, particularly his own relation with yoga, he explains; the practice is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; The intent is to find occupation of good in the world, to outcome a spiritual conversion and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. These two neighboring countries have different legal systems and, of course, their own unique characteristics. Last November, Chris had the pleasure of chatting to Professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi about the psychological approach, how one applies it to . It is present in varying forms in the religions of the lower races up to the civilized races of mankind. Religious rituals are behaviors or practices that are either required or expected of the members of a particular group, such as bar mitzvah or confession of sins (Barkan and Greenwood 2003). Psychology of religion is the application of the different psychological theories and methods to explain religious phenomena, which include the belief in God, religious experiences and behaviors, and spirituality. Continuum International publishing group .2006. This idea led Calvinists to engage in activities that would increase their wealth, paving the way for the development of capitalism. In this post, I briefly set out three distinct approaches to the study of religion: criticizing religion, upholding religion, and disaggregating religion. Under religious studies is a deep and significant continuity between the scientific the! 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