In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to...
In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targe...
Jacques Waardenburg's Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, first published in 1973 and updated in 1999, was groundbreaking in establishing religious studies as an independent academic field. The volume consists of two parts. The first is Waardenburg's magisterial essay tracing the rise and development of the academic study of religion from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, outlining the establishment of the discipline, its connections with other fields, religion as a subject of research, and perspectives on a phenomenological study of religion. The second...
Jacques Waardenburg's Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, first published in 1973 and updated in 1999, was groundbreaking in es...
Although many would today argue that the onetime dominance of the phenomenology of religion has receded, and with it the traditional approach to studying religion as a unique and deeply-felt experience that defies explanation, the essays collected here take quite the opposite stand: that this approach has merely been re-branded and continues to characterize much work being done in the field today. Offering a different way forward-one that is based on experiences gained by the members of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, a program that has successfully...
Although many would today argue that the onetime dominance of the phenomenology of religion has receded, and with it the traditional approach to study...
