Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith

ISBN-13: 9780199657872 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 272 str.

Timothy Larsen

Opis

Named Book of the Year by Books and Culture

Throughout its entire history, the discipline of anthropology has been perceived as undermining, or even discrediting, Christian faith. Many of its most prominent theorists have been agnostics who assumed that ethnographic findings and theories had discredited religious beliefs. E. B. Tylor, the founder of the discipline in Britain, lost his faith through studying anthropology. James Frazer saw the material that he presented in his highly influential work, The Golden Bough, as demonstrating that Christian thought was based on the erroneous thought patterns of "savages." On the other hand, some of the most eminent anthropologists have been Christians, including E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Edith Turner. Moreover, they openly presented articulate reasons for how their religious convictions cohered with their professional work.

Despite being a major site of friction between faith and modern thought, the relationship between anthropology and Christianity has never before been the subject of a book-length study. In this groundbreaking work, Timothy Larsen examines the point where doubt and faith collide with anthropological theory and evidence.

Recenzje

Larsen provides a most satisfying study ... Beautifully written and carrying lightly an immense amount of historical and literary research well placed in the extensive footnotes to each chapter, one is impressed with the fullness of Larsens explorations ... By bringing so many strands together in a remarkably complete documentation of all sources, Larsens work stands as difficult to refute by those intoxicated with the fable that anthropology is of its nature secular, that all religion is illogical and beyond analytical remit, save to destroy it and that faith is incompatible with the good works of the discipline.

O autorze

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has been a Visiting Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge, and some of the research for this volume was undertaken while a Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford. His previous monographs published by Oxford University Press are Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England and A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians.