Religious Studies Ch7 Studying Religion in Context - Recent perspectives (From Jose Casanova)

Illustrate some recent approaches to the study of religion.

-Secularisation Theory -estethics, economics, geography of religion -feminist approaches -post-colonial approaches -Criticism of religion by the so called New Atheism...

Ivan Strenski ? And his book of Understanding Theories of Religion ?

-University of California Riverside -Examines the development of religious theories through the work of classic and contemporary figures from the history of anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology

Anthony B. Pinn ? (curiosity)

-What is African American Religion? (2011) -Appropriation of Mircea Eliade -Phenomenological approach: What is black about black religion? What is religious about black religion? -The nature of Black religion in all its parts: Is it a special kind of religion, a unique category or class of religion? Distinct autonomous kind of religion originating from 'formative rituals of reference' like slave auctions and threat of lynching

In the "Theorizing Religion with Race in Mind", what is the main method in this article ?

-basis = shared common humanity -religion = human universal -"coloured [i.e. white] theories of religion" used to justify colour-conscious racism -If the theories of the evolutionist theorists were (deliberately or not) coloured, does that mean that all evolutionist theories of religion are? -E.g.: What would a 'black' theory of religion look like? --> ask critical questions about categories (e.g. Albert Raboteau: "slave religion" = new concept) --> "Theories are 'colored' if the questions they pose embrace matters of race or color." (Strenski, 173) two different styles of inquiry: prophecy = world change curiosity = quest for understanding two methods: social research and history

Cornel West!!! (prophetic)

-criticizes Du Bois -prophetic advocacy of liberationist stance: not just free from, but free to -guided by Christian moral ideals 'theologized study of Black religion' -"theological commitments and practical relevance are central to what African-American scholars do" (West/Glaude (eds.), African American Religious Thought: Anthology, Durham NC: 2003, xii) -Black practising / participant observation vs. White armchair mentality

What is the literal meaning of the term Secularization ? [Casanova]

1.Literarily, Secularism is a Latin word Seaculum, as in per seacula saeculorum that only meant an indefinite period of time, but eventually it became one of the terms of a dyad, religious/secular, which served to structure the entire spatial and temporal reality of medieval Christendom into a binary system of classification secular-temporal-profane world. To secularize means to 'make worldly', to convert religious persons or things into secular ones, as when a religious person abandons the monastic rule to live in the world or when monastic property is secularized.

Albert Raboteau

Albert Raboteau (*1943) -Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum -"I have tried to investigate slave narratives, Black autobiographies, and Black folklore in order to gather, literally out of the moths of former slaves, the story of their religious experiences during slavery" -Hard historical facts (e.g. that some slaves were Muslims, that remnants of African indigenous religion survived) and their critical analysis lead to theoretical questions: What aspects of African religions were retained by the slaves? What was the nature of the religion to which the slave was converted? What, if anything, was distinctive about slave religion? Does slave religion make a good cross-cultural comparative category? Are there other, compatible 'slave religions'? Do they have similar specifics, like 'orality'?

What is the contribution of Charles Taylor, A Secular Age to the discussion? [Casanova]

Charles Taylor's contribution in his work A Secular Age to this discussion was to show how modernization has brought about secularism in western European societies and he rightly observed that European Secular developments are not an universal nor for the rest of the world and that, as the rest of the world modernizes, its people are not becoming more secular but are becoming more religious, or actually they are becoming simultaneously both secular and more religious.

What is Casanova's own opinion?

For Casanova, his own opinion in this whole issue of secularization, he refers to it as an inevitable process the world cannot escape, he writes "one must admit that the whole world is becoming simultaneously both more religious and more secular since western Christianity binary classification system of religious versus secular reality has been adopted globally. Indeed, the categories of religious and secular have recently become globalized for the first time in all non-western cultures.

What is the function of secularism as a philosophy of history? [Casanova]

For Tylor, the function of secularism as a philosophy of history was to be more modern i.e. phenomenological experience exclusive humanism as the positive self-sufficient and self-limiting affirmation of human flourishing and as the critical rejection of transcendence beyond human flourishing as self-denial and self-defeating.

What does it mean as a term of the Anglo-Saxon post-Reformation cultural area? (USA) [Casanova]

In the Anglo-Saxon Calvinist post-Reformation cultural area, particularly in the United states it meant to spiritualize the temporal and to bring religious perfection out of monasteries into the secular world. It tends to transcend dualism blurring the boundaries between religious and secular, by making the religious secular and the secular religious.

What does it mean within a French-Latin-Catholic paradigm? [Casanova] (continental Europe)

In the French-Latin-Catholic paradigm (continental Europe), unlike in the Protestant path, the boundaries between religious and secular are rigidly maintained, but those boundaries are pushed into the margins, aiming to contain, privatize and marginalize everything religious, while excluding it from any visible presence in the secular public sphere, now defined as the realm of Laicite, freed from Religion.

W.E.B. Du Bois ? (prophetic)

The Negro Church (1903) -used sociological empirical methods (questionnaires) -was not recognized by mainstream colleagues "We never 'belonged'; we remain unrecognized in learned societies and academic groups. We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes, and after all what had Negroes to do with America or science?" (H. Aptheker (ed.), The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A soliloquy on viewing my life from the last decade of its first century, New York: 1968, 278) -In the retrospect his activism eclipses his academic work -Shift to historical method after Du Bois: for black scholars and people the knowledge of one's own past ('where we came from)' is critical for establishing self-esteem ('who we are')

What is different in the narrower meaning of the term "secular"? [Casanova]

The narrower meaning of the term secular, that of self-sufficient and exclusive secularity, when people are simply 'irreligious', that is devoid of religion and closed to any form of transcendence beyond the purely secular immanent frame.

What is the content of recent theories of secularization? [Casanova]

The recent theories of secularization according to Tylor's phenomenological account of secular "conditions" of belief is meant to explain the change from Christian society around 1500CE in which belief in God was unchallenged and unproblematic, indeed naïve and taken for granted, to a post-Christian society today in which belief in God not only is no longer axiomatic but is becoming increasingly problematic, so that even those who adopt an engaged standpoint as believers tend to experience reflexively their own belief as an option among many others, one moreover requiring an explicit justification. So the more modern a society the more secular, i.e. the less 'religious' it is supposed to become.

In what respect do these two main dynamics of secularization culminate in out secular age? [Casanova]

These two main dynamics culminates in our age according to Tylor in a phenomenological experience he calls the 'immanent frame'. All three orders, the cosmic, social and the moral are understood purely immanent secular orders, devoid of transcendence and thus functioning etsi Deus non daretur "as if God would not exist".

What puts such theories into question according to Casanova?

What puts such theories into question according to Casanova is that modernization per se does not necessarily produce the progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices, the news need a better explanation for the radical and widespread secularity one finds among the population of Western European societies.

William D. Hart (curiosity)

William D. Hart: doubts Pinn's theory of the existence of a Black religion and questions the formative role of „rituals of reference" -Afro-Eccentricity: Beyond the Standard Narrative of Black Religion (2011) -Black religion has too long been exempt from criticism: "Neo-Pentecostal [style makes] the loudness of one's celebration, and the ostentation of one's gestures an index of authentic Christianity" (Black Religion, p. 198) =>>Black religion cannot be uncritically celebrated as good