Religion and the Discourse on Modernity

ISBN-13: 9781441172341 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 170 str.

Paul-Fran Tremlett;Paul-Fran+ Ois Tremlett

Opis

The point of departure for this book is the debate about whether religious studies should privilege explanation or understanding. Engaging with contemporary scholarship in the field, Tremlett argues that the study of religions has always involved the conflation of facts and values and indeed has been structured in advance by the value-saturated discourse on disenchanted modernity. He argues that phenomenological and post-modern approaches to religions lack both theoretical and methodological coherence, and in their stead proposes a Marxist approach to religions that is at once empirical and informed by values pertaining to social justice, freedom and autonomy.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

1. The discourse on modernity

2. The aesthetic critique of modernity

Part I

3. The phenomenology of religion

4. Nietzsche

5. Marx

6. Freud

7. Facts or values?

8. Rational history, rational speech

9. Of writing, representing and evoking

10. The aesthetics of the sacred

11. Summary  

Part II

12. On madness: Michel Foucault

13. The possession at Loudun: Michel de Certeau

14. Religion and the absence of God: Jacques Derrida

15. Summary

Part III

16.Phenomenology and post-modernism revisited

17. A return to ideology

18. Summary

Part IV

19. Conclusions

Bibliography

Index