Ch. 3 Vocab

Sigmund Freud

Although no longer considered at the forefront of theoretical developments in the field of psychology, Sigmund Freud nonetheless remains important as the father of psychoanalysis. Along with the work of Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, his research on the interactions between individual and group has contributed to a field today known as social theory. Born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia (today a region in the Czech Republic), his family later moved to Vienna, the city where he would spend almost the rest of his life. Trained as a medical doctor with an interest in neurology, he was forced to abandon the medical profession when his method of treating patients by means of hypnosis was deemed unscientific by his colleagues. Wanting to develop a more scientific approach to the study of the mind, he applied principles from the natural sciences, especially physics, yet he concluded that the complexities of the mind required more sophisticated and comprehensive explanations. To develop such theories, he studied, among other things, his patients' reports of their dreams. Freud theorized that human minds not only have a conscious component but also an unconscious aspect, the content of which manifests itself when the conscious mind is not in control, such as in dreams, fantasies, and most importantly, in neuroses (that is, abnormal behaviors such as those classified as obsessive compulsive disorders or uncontrollable fears of such things as water or public places). His psychoanalytic theory names the individual components of the human psyche as: the id (Latin for 'it' meaning the unconscious and uncontrollable primal instincts), the superego (Latin for 'I above' meaning those social influences from the outside world that are imposed upon the human personality from birth [making toilet training a fascinating moment for some Freudians to study since it is among the earliest moments when the social group forcibly imposes its will on the young individual]), and the ego (Latin for 'I' meaning the mediator between the superego and the id). For Freud, the inevitable competition between what he termed the pleasure principle (embodied by the id's drive for self-gratification) and the reality principle (embodied by the superego's self-policing activities) was the primary cause of neuroses in the human psyche. Society, with its rules and laws, was one of the main sources of censure; repression of the pleasure principle/id—which he deemed to be instinctual, primal, and the source of uncontrollable though natural urges and desire—was therefore the basis of social life. Because all humans are both biological individuals with natural needs and desires as well as actors in society, Freud concluded that each human needed to engage in repression and thus possessed some form of neurosis. Freud on religion Although Freud's theory initially dealt with the individual, he eventually included society in his studies, such that myth functioned on the social level as dreaming did for the individual. Freud argued that a culture's myths, fairy tales, art, legends, rituals, etc., were manifestations of society's collective psyche; religion being a site where socially dangerous urges and desires could be expressed in socially harmless ways. Freud therefore identified religion as one of the main sites of conflict and repression for human beings. He explained that religion was an illusion, something we wish to be true, which helped humans to cope with feelings of helplessness, weakness, and the inability to gratify the self in all instances—much like the fantasies we know as dreams help the individual to cope with antisocial desires which can therefore not be acted upon in reality. Freud's theory of religion especially applied to the Judeo-Christian worldview that consists of a patriarchal god-figure. For Freud this 'father-figure' god represents a childlike faith in the biological father's ability to protect us. Therefore, religion functions as a protective device to help humans cope with a hostile physical reality which daily frustrates their natural desires. Yet, at the same time, we experience a love/hate relationship with our 'father-figure' because their nurturing and protective capacity also places rules and limitations upon the id. Much as humans are conflicted in their feelings toward authority figures, so too they are conflicted toward their gods—which are, he concluded, merely symbols of actual authority figures. It should therefore be clear that Freud's theory understands religion in a non-sui generis manner; his work shifts the focus from identifying some essential core element to studying religion's function as a coping mechanism for individuals living within social groups.

James G. Frazer

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated at the University of Glasgow with a second baccalaureate at Trinity College at Cambridge, James Frazer is a noteworthy British anthropologist and historian and is among a group of late nineteenth-century scholars known as intellectualists (a group generally interested in using evolutionary theory to study early humans in light of their mental abilities). He was also concerned with studying cultural phenomena through the lens of the comparative method, assuming that collecting descriptive information on many variations of, for instance, a particular institution, would help to shed light on the origins of the institution. Looking solely within one culture was therefore not sufficient to explain the origins and role of actions or beliefs. Instead of doing fieldwork himself, Frazer (like all early anthropologists) relied on the letters, journals, and manuscripts from missionaries, explorers, and military personnel (indicating the intimate, though sometimes unrecognized, link between European colonial expansion, on the one hand, and gains in scientific knowledge, on the other). Frazer wrote, in his highly influential book The Golden Bough, about the behaviors of the participants in a Hellenistic ritual and then compared their actions to that of modern 'primitives'. The Golden Bough examined an ancient ritual that is said to take place in the city of Aricia, near Rome. The ritual involves a priest whose duty it was to guard the grove near Lake Nemi. If a slave happened to escape from his master and kill the priest, he would win his freedom but also take on the responsibility of guarding the grove. Frazer was fascinated by this story for its insights into what he called the 'primitive mind'. Through his research Frazer hoped to shed light on the current behaviors of those involved in 'primitive' religions by using his method of comparative studies. Frazer's thesis (similar to that fellow intellectualist E.B. Tylor's) was that the mental capacities of humankind developed in the same evolutionary way as did the human body. Further, Frazer hypothesized that magic was the behavioral predecessor of religion just as religion was the intellectual predecessor of science, therefore, modern 'primitives' could have much in common with the classical Hellenistic mind. Frazer has played a major role in the study of religion through his impact on modern scholars. Although The Golden Bough grew into a vast, multi-volume work that few people might read in its entirety today, it is one of the first scholarly books that consistently employed the comparative method. Frazer on religion Throughout The Golden Bough, Frazer builds a theory of magic (the effort to manipulate, in a non-physical manner, objects in the historical world) and its role in the eventual formation of religion, and subsequently what we today know as science. For Frazer, magic (the attempt to manipulate events in the natural world) can be divided into the two categories of homeopathic and contagious magic, both of which are contained under the heading of sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is based upon what Frazer refers to as the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact. Homeopathic magic is understood by the magician to function under the Law of Similarity. The magician uses his magic to produce certain situations by mimicking their behaviors. An example would be a magician who pours water on the ground to induce rain, or someone who manipulates a doll expecting the same actions to be performed on the actual person. Contagious magic, on the other hand, is based on the Law of Contact. Frazer believed that magicians who used this kind of magic believed that items had great associations with one another, and even after the items had been separated from their source they could still have an effect on each other. The example that Frazer gives for this type of magic is when a portion of a person's body is severed; there remains the belief that the body part still has a connection to the body such that if something is done to the part the person will feel the results regardless of the physical distance from the estranged hand, foot, hair, etc. By classifying and studying magic in this way, Frazer aimed for his work to be applicable to many different cultures, all of which were thought to use these various types of magic. Moreover, he argued that magic was the evolutionary precursor to religion (which involved the belief that supernatural beings could be persuaded to influence events in the world), and that all cultures that now have religion must have had a previous period of magic. Furthermore, Frazer argued that societies that now possess science must have gone through previous periods of religion and magic. By applying the biological evolutionary theory to the study of societies Frazer was also able to hypothesize about some of the 'primitive' groups with whom nineteenth-century European travelers had come into contact. In fact, Frazer believed that the Australian Aborigines could be understood by means of his theory. Along with many of his peers, Frazer believed that they were the most primitive culture in existence at that time; they were thought to have been virtually frozen in time, and therefore to have no form of religion whatsoever (given earlier, largely Christian-influenced definitions of religion as 'belief in a God and an afterlife'; of course this view has largely been discredited), thereby relying exclusively on magic in their attempts to influence the world around them.

Diana L. Eck

Diana Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, graduated from Harvard University with her PhD in 1976. Although her early work was devoted to religion in India, she has increasingly devoted her attention to issues of religious pluralism, advocating tolerance, mutual understanding, and acceptance of difference by means of inter-religious dialogue, especially as these all manifest themselves in contemporary US politics. She has been active in the United Methodist Church, the World Council of Churches and, since 1991, has been the Director of the Pluralism Project. This collaborative project, funded initially through the Lilly Endowment and now also funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, coordinates a network of sixty local affiliates, involving approximately 100 scholars working on affiliated projects that chronicle the changing shape of religious diversity both in the US and elsewhere in the world. Eck on religion As with others in both the liberal theological and humanistic traditions, Eck understands religion to concern a domain of personal experience of deep meaning and significance thought to be uniformly shared by people despite their different historical, geographic, and cultural locations. Her preference for such terms as 'experience' and 'faith' indicates the priority her work gives to understanding religion as an inner sentiment that defies categorization and which is expressed publicly in such historically conditioned forms as narrative (myth), practice (ritual), and institutional systems (traditions)—all of which are often considered static by many of their participants but which are, Eck argues, the constantly changing and growing outer form of a uniform inner faith. Thus, acts of categorization (such as the attention given to distinguishing denominations from each other, let alone the distinction between different religions and between religion and other aspects of daily life) are themselves part of the difficulty to be overcome, along with overcoming differences among the merely secondary manifestations of this faith.

Edward Burnett Tylor

Edward Burnett (E.B.) Tylor, one of the founders of the modern academic discipline of anthropology, belongs to a generation of academics known as the intellectualists which includes Müller, Spencer, and Frazer, all of whom helped pave the way for the modern academic study of religion. Raised and educated among Quakers (known also as the Society of Friends) and possessing no formal higher academic education, Tylor left his father's business in his early twenties and began his scholarly career doing fieldwork in the mid-1850s in Mexico under the guidance of the amateur British ethnologist (a scholar of cultural origins and functions) Henry Christy (1810-65). In 1875, Tylor received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University where he was keeper of the Oxford University Museum (1883) and later became Britain's first (indeed, the first in the English-speaking world) Professor of Anthropology (1896), until his retirement in 1909. Tylor on religion Tylor—who famously defined culture as 'that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society'—held an evolutionary view concerning the development of culture and religion (sometimes also known as social Darwinism), arguing that animism (belief in spiritual beings) was the earliest stage of what we today know as religious behavior. Despite his interest in what was then commonly known as 'primitive religion' (an interest motivated by the common nineteenth-century quest for the origins of religion), unlike some of his European contemporaries, who understood others as uncivilized savages, Tylor argued for a 'psychic unity of mankind', assuming instead that, despite differences in the stages of their evolutionary development, all humans (past and present) shared common cognitive functions (such as a curiosity to explain unexpected events in their environment). The goal of anthropological study, for Tylor, was therefore to develop a cross-culturally useful framework in which the evolution of culture could be explained and the nature of its origins understood.

Gerardus van der Leeuw

Gerardus van der Leeuw is today one of the best examples of an early to mid-twentieth-century scholar applying some of the methods of philosophical phenomenology to the study of religion, conceived as something distinct from theology. As with many of his—and even subsequent—academic generation of religious studies specialists, he began with the study of theology, earning a Doctor of Theology degree at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, in 1916, with a dissertation on the gods of ancient Egypt. After working briefly as an ordained minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, van der Leeuw was appointed in 1918 to a newly created position in the history of religions at the University of Groningen—a position that also entailed teaching liturgy [Greek leitourgia, meaning public service to the gods; the study of how to carry out the proper rituals of worship]. Arrested briefly by the Germans in 1943, during their occupation of Holland, he later served as the first post-World War II Dutch Minister of Education, and, shortly before his death in 1950 was elected the first president of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR)—which remains the primary international organization of scholars of religion. Although the phenomenological method is still largely employed in the field—despite a number of criticisms of (i) the presumption that someone's experiences can be understood by another and (ii) the presumption that it is sufficient to study something merely 'as it presents itself', without inquiring into its natural causes—today, van der Leeuw's work is likely read mostly as an example of an early attempt to distinguish the study of religion as a cultural, historical practice from long-established theological studies that sought to assess the adequacy of each religion and religious practice. Given his life-long interest in Christian theology and the phenomenology of religion, the success of establishing this distinction has been questioned by commentators. Van der Leeuw on religion In his search for the essence or irreducible inner structure of all religion—which he, like many of his contemporaries, thought was particularly well represented in what was often called 'the primitive mentality', information which was gained through ethnographies of others—van der Leeuw settled on the term 'power', rather than Rudolf Otto's more common term 'the holy' or, after him, Mircea Eliade's 'the sacred'. For van der Leeuw, power is the more fundamental and therefore cross-culturally useful term, capable of naming the subjective experience of both early and modern peoples, to which they each then assign various names and qualities, along with methods for recognizing, acquiring and exchanging it. The set of beliefs, practices and institutions we name as religion (each of which requires its own phenomenological classification, such as mysticism, sacrifice, worship, soul, church) are, therefore, for van der Leeuw those aspects of culture that operate together to assign the most basic and all-encompassing significance to things by placing them in relation to what the participant sees as a total system of the whole, or the universe—what he characterizes near the end of his 1933 book, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (the original German edition was titled, Phänomenologie der Religion), as 'the last word' that is neither uttered out loud nor ever fully understood. Although this closing section of his book—entitled the 'Epilegomena' [Greek epi, meaning at, on, upon, besides + legein, to speak, to declare: a saying besides or a supplemental discourse]—provides one of the most systematic and therefore useful statements of the phenomenological method, it also contains a number of almost poetic, theological conclusions. Despite his efforts to understand religion as a cross-cultural universal—efforts far different from many of his more traditional theological peers in the European academy—in the end van der Leeuw's phenomenological method is more intent on developing a theology of world religions rather than engaging in their historical study.

William James

Older brother to the famous US novelist Henry James, William James attained fame of his own, in North America as well as Europe, as a psychologist and as an early theorist of religion. Educated as a young man in Europe, James received his medical degree from Harvard in 1869, taught anatomy and physiology there, established an experimental psychology lab, was the first to teach psychology in a US university (1875), and within a few years was also lecturing in philosophy. By the time he was invited, for 1901/2, to Edinburgh University, Scotland, to deliver its famous lecture series (established in 1888 by Lord Gifford, the Gifford Lectures continue to this day to 'promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God'), James had already become a noted philosopher of religion, publishing in 1897 a collection of ten essays entitled The Will to Believe (some dating to the late 1870s on such topics as morality and faith). Topics that had preoccupied him up until this point became the topic of his Gifford Lectures, published the following year under the title, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Drawing on his work in psychology, James focused on the various types of religious experience that, according to him, predated any expression of religion as found in narrative, behavior, and institution. Unlike the early naturalistic theorists of his time, James makes clear in these still very famous lectures that religious experience is not a mistaken apprehension of some element in the natural world, distorted by consciousness, but is, instead, a unique sort of experience not to be dismissed or explained away; the theology in these lectures is therefore most evident as is his defense of religious faith—found in his earlier writings—from the explanations of what was at that time called medical materialism. Today, James is also remembered as an early advocate of pragmatism—the philosophical view, prominent among some US philosophers, that, according to James's interpretation, beliefs are tested by the observation of their consequences. James on religion James is perhaps best known today for his famous definition of religion, found in his 1901/2 Gifford Lectures, which makes clear that he was concerned to study religion as a subjective, individual phenomenon, rather than as part of a social system. In fact, for James social life was part of a secondary, external world in which one's primary feelings and experiences were expressed, always inadequately and to the detriment of the feeling itself (as evidenced in the common phrase, 'I can't quite put it into words'). Accordingly, the religious person in her or his solitude—and most importantly, the so-called 'religious genius' whose experiences initiate and animate followers and, eventually, entire social movements called religions—ought to be the proper object of focus when studying religion, for everything else is merely 'second-hand religion', as James the idealist would phrase it. James goes on to distinguish between two types of religious experience (and thus systems built upon these experiences): the 'healthy-minded' (those optimists whose outlooks exclude considering the existence of evil) and the 'sick-souled' (those whose outlooks take into account the reality of evil). Although the former works to a point, James concludes that only the latter is capable of adequately providing a basis for existing in the world, since evil must be confronted and accounted for. In addressing mysticism James makes evident his pragmatic bent, noting that mystical experiences are to be judged not medically (in terms of, for example, delusional states) but in terms of their results; 'mystical states', he concludes, 'may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of life.'

Wendy Doniger

Originally trained as a dancer, Wendy Doniger completed her undergraduate work at Radcliffe College in 1962 and completed two doctoral degrees, at Harvard and Oxford Universities, specializing in Sanskrit and Indian studies (what is sometimes called Oriental studies). She has held teaching positions at Harvard, Oxford, the University of London, and UC Berkeley and has taught at the University of Chicago since 1978, where she is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, in the Divinity School, as well as holding appointments in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations as well as the Committee of Social Thought. In 1985 she was the president of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the field's primary professional association in North America. She has written extensively (publishing earlier in her career under the surname O'Flaherty) on the religions of India, in particular the study of ancient Hindu myths but she has also translated into English a number of key ancient Hindu texts (including the Rig Veda as well as the Kamasutra) along with modern works of scholarship (such as the multi-volume French work of Yves Bonnefoy, Mythologies [1981]). Her interest in cross-cultural, comparative work extends well beyond the myths of India; her general interest in such topics as gender, sexuality, and personal/social identity enables her to do comparative work in a wide range of historical periods and cultural settings, evident especially in her later works. Doniger on religion Although as a comparativist the themes of difference and similarity (what could also be termed the particular and the universal, the strange and the familiar, or the far and the near, as in Clifford Geertz's sense of experience-distant and experience-near; see emic/etic) circulate through much of Doniger's work, difference tends eventually to take a back seat in her effort to illuminate a deeper degree of similarity that persists despite differences in context and content. For example, in myths—a particular type of narrative that she holds to function similarly to a number of other narrative types, such as legend, folklore, etc.—she finds specifically religious and thus universal questions of deeply held belief and human meaning raised, suggesting a uniformity beneath myths' variable contents and different themes. She presumes that there are levels of human experience that come before such things as the changing conventions of language, culture, and history—making such pre-linguistic experiences, she argues, the basis upon which our shared human nature is based. Scholarship on myths that avoids reducing them to something other than the expression of such pre-cultural meanings (that is, scholarship such as Freud's reduction of myth to a social mechanism used by groups to vent, in a harmless manner, socially dangerous anxieties), can therefore recover, and in the process nurture, this shared humanity as it is expressed in the religious imagination of humankind (somewhat akin to Mircea Eliade's notion of a 'creative hermeneutics' that, as he argued, could lead to a new humanism). As such, Doniger's body of work provides an excellent example of a humanistic approach to the study of religion—one that invests much energy in describing the specificity of, and thus differences among, the various objects under study, attempts to avoid reproducing a specific theological viewpoint, yet one that nonetheless attempts to recover their shared, deeper meaning (rather than simply their social, psychological, or economic function).

David Hume

The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, was born in Edinburgh, studied at the University of Edinburgh, and, upon graduation in 1725, intended to practice law. However, his interest in philosophy, political theory, history, and literature soon became his focus. While in France in the mid-1730s, he wrote his A Treatise of Human Nature, and throughout the late 1730s and early 1740s he wrote on such topics as moral theory and politics. Denied an academic position at the University of Edinburgh in 1745 (due to his growing reputation as a skeptic), Hume took a position as the secretary to a British Army general, traveling throughout France, and, over the course of the next decade, published books for which he is still famous today: Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Hume held positions as a librarian and had an appointment at the British embassy in Paris, though he resigned from his government position in 1769. Hume on religion Although still studied by philosophers and political theorists, in the academic study of religion Hume is, perhaps, best known as the author of two works that contributed much to establishing the basis for a naturalistic theory of religion: A Natural History of Religion (1757) as well as his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779; written in the dialogical style, somewhat similar to a dialogue by Plato, in which speakers representing distinct philosophical viewpoints investigate a topic). Hume made a break with a theological approach to the study of religion, asking not what it meant to be religious or inquiring in the proper way of being religious but, instead, enquiring into the causes of religious beliefs. Although his work was carried out early in the history of this alternative approach—evidenced in such things as Hume's apparent assumption that a creator obviously exists—he stands out from his contemporaries for his interest in explaining the natural causes of human knowledge about God. Observing that religious belief is not universal (and that even when it is found it differs dramatically), Hume reasons that the cause of such beliefs cannot be something innate or essential to human nature; instead, he argues that beliefs in supernatural powers must themselves be caused by something more basic. He finds this basis in what he terms the 'hopes and fears' of human beings who have no choice but to live in a world in which the future is unknown and the actual causes of events are often unknown. Speculating on the experiences of early human beings interacting with a sometimes threatening natural world he concludes that the belief in a powerful, superhuman being controlling events is a device human beings have long used (much as anthropomorphism is such a device) to make sense of their inhospitable environments. Religion, thus, is not basic to human nature; instead, Hume helps to lay the basis for a naturalistic approach by arguing that knowledge about the gods can be explained by reducing it to 'hopes and fears'.

Émile Durkheim

There may be no more influential figure in the study of religion than the late nineteenth-century French scholar, Émile Durkheim—considered to be one of the founders of the modern academic discipline of sociology. Although not all scholars today study religion sociologically, along with the political economist Karl Marx and the social psychologist Sigmund Freud, Durkheim is certainly among a very small group of writers who have had a tremendous impact on the modern field. Prior to scholars such as Durkheim, the now-taken-for-granted role that society plays in shaping individual consciousness and behavior was not so apparent to scholars. For this reason, his 1897 sociological study of the causes of European suicide helped considerably to legitimize sociology as a science. In that work, Durkheim argued that, unlike previous studies that argued that suicide resulted from individual decision or malady, the suicide rate was inversely correlated to the cohesiveness of a person's social group; that is, the higher rates of suicide among Protestants, as opposed to Roman Catholics and Jews, could be explained as a result of the former group's emphasis on the lone individual as opposed to the greater sense of social unity evident in the latter two (of which Jews were, for Durkheim, the strongest example since their communities in Europe were, historically speaking, set apart and, of strict necessity, much more self-reliant and cohesive). This leads to a crucial sociological insight contributed by Durkheim, one that is still provocative of thought: religion, he concluded, functioned as a 'prophylactic' against suicide not because of what it does or does not preach or teach to its adherents (in other words, not because of its content) but, instead, because of the role its all-consuming rituals and institutions play in bringing individuals together as a group, thereby providing them with not only a sense of belonging but also a sense of what it is to be a particular sort of individual. Durkheim on religion Durkheim's explanatory theory of religion, to be distinguished from an interpretive approach that investigates what religion means, provides an excellent example of scholarship that reduces theological claims to science—in his case, to the language of sociology. In Durkheim's analysis, the rituals and institutions of religion are fundamental sites where social groups are formed; in the midst of the common behaviors (rituals) and heightened emotions characteristic of large social groups (what Durkheim termed 'collective effervescence', the so-called crowd phenomenon that can be found today anywhere from family celebrations to sporting events and nationalistic celebrations), the individual directly experiences the group and him-/herself as a member. It is at such times that otherwise scattered members experience themselves as a group for, in reality, the group exists nowhere but in the minds of its isolated members. Accordingly, they have no place and no time to experience (and thereby re-create) the group but during those ritual occasions when the members assemble, engage in the so-called sacred rituals (whose value of sacredness is, for Durkheim, simply the product of the group's collective behavior and thus focus, not an expression of some inner quality in an act or an object), and leave confident of their identity. Durkheim therefore concludes that religion is the name given to a collection of social behaviors and social institutions; God-talk is, in fact, group members symbolically talking about an ideal sense of the group itself. This analysis of the social function of la vie religieuse (the religious life, as he phrased it), then, is rather different from prior and subsequent essentialist scholars, either theologically essentialist or, as in the intellectualists, naturalistically essentialist. In fact, the speculations on timeless origins (such as E.B. Tylor's work on the origins of animism) would strike a Durkheimian scholar as untestable (since time travel does not exist) and therefore unscientific.

Mircea Eliade

Throughout much of the mid- to late twentieth century there was no more influential scholar of religion than Mircea Eliade, the Romanian expatriate. After attaining some fame in Romania as a novelist after World War I, Eliade spent the World War II years abroad, and wrote books in the late 1940s and early 1950s for which he would later become famous throughout the world—volumes on comparative religion, shamanism, and yoga. In the late 1950s he held a brief visiting appointment at the University of Chicago's Divinity School and, following the unexpected death of the program's then chair (the well-known German sociologist of religion, Joachim Wach), Eliade stayed on and, along with the scholar of Japanese religions, Joseph Kitagawa, played a central role in leading Chicago's program to a place it continues to hold as one of the field's most important graduate programs. Eliade was classically trained as a comparativist and is today best known for his efforts to establish what at Chicago is called 'history of religions' as an autonomous, academic discipline, distinct from anthropological, psychological, or sociological studies of religion. His largely successful approach to accomplishing this, adopted by others both before and after him, was to argue for the sui generis nature of religion, thereby requiring distinct methods for its study and distinct institutional locations for carrying out this research. Because of the unique character of religious phenomena (each being the site where 'the sacred' manifests itself), along with his views that religion was at its essence concerned with establishing meaning in otherwise potentially meaningless human lives and societies, Eliade was also known for his advocacy of what he termed a total hermeneutics (that is, the study of religion being a complete interpretive science of human beings, what might be called 'the Queen of the Sciences', a term once reserved for theology), what he also called the new humanism; the historian of religions, by studying symbolic expressions of what they held to be deeply meaningful existential situations common to all peoples, was able to re-experience in their own life—and thereby become the interpreters of and guardians for—the meaning that these symbols, narratives, and practices once had for archaic peoples long ago. Apart from a tremendously impressive amount of writing and editing (including his role, toward the end of his life, as the editor-in-chief of what has become the field's primary reference work, The Encyclopedia of Religion [1987]), Eliade is also known today for the manner in which, after his death in 1986, his life (some of its details were made public through his four published volumes of journals and his two-volume autobiography) and his extensive body of work have generated a substantial body of critical secondary literature, concerned with re-examining his arguments in favor of religion's irreducible character as well the way in which—like many European intellectuals who matured between the two World Wars—his personal politics may have impacted his scholarship. Eliade on religion Eliade argued that an essential component of all human beings was their need to make their worlds meaningful, which was carried out through their interconnected systems of symbols, myths, and rituals—all of which provided human beings with orientation in an otherwise chaotic world of historical existence (which implies a linear movement from a known past to an utterly unknown, and therefore terrifying, future). One could say, then, that the human condition, according to Eliade, was coming to grips with what he termed the 'terrors of history'. Hence Eliade's interest in studying tales of cycles and returns (the myth of the eternal return), belief systems involving rebirth, geography and architecture oriented toward a center (as in a central tent pole), and rituals that marked a point as the center of the village or the world (Latin: axis mundi, the central pivot point of the world or the entire universe). What he termed Homo religiosus (Latin, religious man) was best exemplified, he believed, in archaic or primitive peoples, since for them—unlike modern, secular people—the cosmos was entirely sacred; nonetheless, even secular people have no choice but to create meaning, so they too shared this (sometimes suppressed) aspect with their archaic counterparts, making them also attuned to the times and locations where meaning ruptured into the otherwise ambiguous historical world, thereby providing humans with a point of reference, a center point. Such points—what he termed hierophanies (from Greek hiero, meaning holy; a showing or a manifestation of the Sacred)—could be anything, from a rock to a tree, from the moon, to the tides or a mountain, even movies and literature, not to mention the so-called traditional elements of religion such as pilgrimage, worship, fasting, etc. The collection of symbols, narratives, practices, and institutions we call religion were, for Eliade, the preeminent site where meaning-making took place, ensuring that he saw any approach to the study of religion that was not hermeneutical (such as the explanatory analysis of reductionists) to be highly problematic for it 'explained away' the very thing he thought to be of most importance; because such meanings are camouflaged, only the careful interpreter could uncover them.

Martin Marty

Although now retired from the University of Chicago's Divinity School, where he taught in the area of American religious history since 1963, Martin Marty continues to be active in the field. Quite apart from his role in training new generations of American religionists and his many publications, Marty has a national US presence through his many media appearances as an interpreter of issues that fall broadly within the area of contemporary US religion and politics. He is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church and is the past president of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association. He has served on US presidential commissions and has received many honorary doctoral degrees—all indications of the influential role his work has played in the late twentieth-century US academy. Along with R. Scott Appleby, Marty co-directed the Fundamentalism Project—a multi-year, collaborative research project under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 1998 the University of Chicago's Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion was renamed the Martin Marty Center (currently under the directorship of Wendy Doniger)—to which Marty regularly writes a web column for its feature, 'Sightings'. Marty on religion Although he has written a number of descriptive, historical works on such Christian theological topics as baptism and the Lord's Supper, as with many recent scholars of US religious history, the perennial problem of 'the one' and 'the many'—how national uniformity is possible despite cultural plurality—has been a recurring theme in much of Marty's recent writings. For many such writers, the history of the United States of America holds a special place in their efforts to investigate how to build a pluralistic society, for the history of the US is easily understood as one of migration and thus a blending of differing populations, each bringing with them a host of competing values. Defining religion broadly as any belief system that addresses issues of meaning and purpose—that is, any issue taken by groups to involve what Paul Tillich termed an 'ultimate concern'—Marty argues that religions do not simply build group identity but make possible a sense of well-being and thus a sense of community. Taking religion into account—that is, taking religion seriously as an essential element of human nature, engaging not in reductive explanation but, instead, in conversation and inter-religious dialogue—is therefore key for anyone hoping to tackle the problems faced by pluralistic societies. It is precisely this concern that animates the multi-volumed publications of the Fundamentalism Project—an effort to document the manner in which some religious groups have responded to the twentieth century's spread of modernity (that is, the rapid success of specific forms of economic and political organization).

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans

Latin phrase coined by the German Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto to name the awe-some (fascinating, full of awe) mystery that, he argued in his German work on comparative theology, Das Heilige (1917; translated as The Idea of the Holy, 1923), was the object common to all forms of religious experience.

Paul Tillich

The German-born Paul Tillich was an ordained minister who is known today for his work in the US as one of the most influential Protestant systematic theologians of the early to mid-twentieth century. He studied at the Universities of Berlin, Tübingen, Halle, and Breslau (where he was awarded his PhD in 1910), and served as an army chaplain during Word War I. Subsequent to that, Tillich held university appointments in Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Frankfurt, though his position was terminated by the Nazi government in early 1933. By that fall, Tillich had been invited to travel to the US to hold an appointment at Union Theological Seminary, in New York. Eventually, he also held appointments at Harvard University as well as the University of Chicago's Divinity School. Tillich's fame is the result of his efforts to create a theological system that took into account a series of early and mid-twentieth-century intellectual currents, including the influence of European existentialism, the growing awareness, and thus interest, in cultures outside the Euro-North American world, as well as an interest in reconsidering the long-assumed split between religion and contemporary culture. Like many who have put their stamp on the field, he delivered the Gifford Lectures (at Scotland's University of Aberdeen), which resulted in one of the works for which he is best known today: the three-volume Systematic Theology (an effort to present a complete and coherent theological system). Tillich's normative scholarship (his interest in articulating the 'truth' and the 'meaning' of the Christian witness) distinguishes him from the modern study of religion, as does his attempt to define religion, which employs the common strategy of lodging religion within the individual by equating it with vague, subjective value judgments. Nonetheless, given the historical development of the academic study of religion from largely (Protestant) Christian theological concerns, Tillich can be seen as a transitional figure whose interest in contemporary culture, whose willingness to work with historians of religions, and whose efforts to understand religion 'in a wider sense', as he phrased it, prompted a generation of humanistic scholars to expand their interests to include cross-cultural analysis of religious symbols. Tillich on religion The modern popularity among theologically influenced scholars of religion of discussing 'religion and culture' (as opposed to conceiving of religion as but an item of or within human culture) owes much to Tillich's influence, as does the still widespread use of the category 'ultimate concern' when attempting to define religion. Regarding the first, Tillich betrays the influence of existentialism—one of the most influential philosophical movements of his time—by attempting to create a Christian theology that bridged the gap between what he characterized as the unchanging infinite and the ever-changing finite. He did this by means of his retooled notion of 'Christ', which, for him, embodied the unification of enduring essence and historical existence (somewhat akin to early Christian attempts to articulate the presumed divine and yet human nature of Christ), thereby trying to avoid the contradiction between the two that was so apparent to existentialist philosophers of his time. For Tillich, then, the conjunction 'and' in 'religion and culture' (a phrase that today names both entire departments as well as courses within many religious studies curricula) could, in a way, be understood as functioning in the manner of what he called 'Christ'—that which unites otherwise distinct spheres. In this attempt to overcome the critique of existentialism, a sui generis understanding of religion is used, inasmuch as religion is thought to interact with culture, in specific and limited ways; to rephrase, in Tillich's system culture (and its constituent parts, such as political systems, economic practices, social structures, etc.) certainly does not cause religion; rather, religion is that which makes culture meaningful. Regarding Tillich's second lasting influence on the field, his proposal of defining the essence of religion as 'a dimension of depth', a 'faith in an ultimate concern', has proved appealing to a number of scholars. Despite the obviously Christian nature of Tillich's work—evidenced in his use of 'God' for that which he also called an ultimate concern—the popularity of this definition of religion is linked to its apparent ability to be applied to a variety of social actors and cultural settings—for, unlike other theological attempts at definition, it does not merely emphasize faith in a particular sort of religious experience, symbol, or institution but, instead, emphasizes 'God' as the basis of all Being. It is therefore thought by some to make it possible to hold the position that all human beings are religious, whether in conventional terms or not (a position he shared in common with his Chicago colleague, Mircea Eliade), for inasmuch as human beings are meaning-makers, they are presumed to have a faith in an ultimate concern that grounds and motivates their behaviors and commitments. Therefore, much as his notion of Christ expanded the concept from some of its previous understandings, so too his notion of religion pressed well beyond more traditional understandings that employed it to signify membership in specific sorts of institutions (e.g., shrines, mosques, synagogues, etc.) or belief in supernatural beings.

Sociology

[Latin socius, meaning companion + logos, meaning word, speech, discourse, reason] the science or the study of the origin, development, organization, and functioning of human society; the science of the fundamental laws of social relations and institutions. The sociology of religion is but one subfield of the academic study of religion.

Tradition

[Latin traditio, to hand down or to pass something on, as well as to surrender] the name given to the collection of what are sometimes seen as authoritative past practices that often are claimed to determine present action. In legal theory it would be comparable to precedent [from Latin, to go before, as in to precede something or someone]. Often 'tradition' or 'the weight of tradition' is cited as the answer to questions concerning why someone did something a certain way, though such an answer is hardly an explanation for the action, since an explanation would try to determine why past practices were authoritative rather than simply assert that they are (since many past practices are not authoritative at all). In the study of religion the term 'religious tradition' has, across the twentieth century, become increasingly popular, in part due to the influence of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who, in the second half of the century, popularized the distinction between faith, on the one hand, and its various secondary, public expressions, which constituted the so-called cumulative tradition of each religion (its practices, institutions, laws, symbols, creeds, etc.).

Utility

[Latin utilis, to be usable] names the quality of being of use to someone for some purpose. As proposed in this volume, it may be more helpful to think of definitions, inasmuch as they are tools that scholars (among others) use to go about their work, as more or less useful rather than right/wrong, true/false, or good/bad. Rather, given one's goals and interests, a definition of religion as, for instance, belief in spiritual beings (made famous by E.B. Tylor) may or may not be useful to you. Such a utilitarian approach to definition may therefore assist in clarifying the role that definitions play in our work.

Public

[Latin, publicus, of the people] see private — [Latin privatus, not part of or owned/controlled by the state, unofficial, individual or personal, set apart from governing authorities] term used today to denote a zone that is separate from the public, with private/public forming a classic example of a binary pair. In this case, privacy is understood as a social product whereby a group decides what will exceed its knowledge or grasp—though groups can always suspend such rules, such as the police entering a domestic dwelling with no warrant so long as their entry meets a specific series of requires (invited in, reason to believe a crime is being committed, in pursuit of someone to be arrested, etc.). Seen in this way, privacy becomes a social phenomenon open to debate, such as governments debating what constitutes online privacy in the digital age.

Soul

[Old English, from assorted other roots, that which animates a person] a common term in English for the part of a person (and, perhaps, other animals as well, though this is open to debate among some) thought to outlive the body; earlier scholars might have talked about 'the ghost in the machine' to name the way they considered animating soul and inanimate matter to combine to form a person. Coupled with this notion of a soul, for many who use the term, are such specifically Christian assumptions of its life after death, its eventual judgment, and thus ideas of either Heaven or Hell where the soul is said to reside after death. Should these ideas necessarily be associated with the term then it is questionable whether the term can serve as a cross-disciplinary term, as some try to use it, thereby aiming to subsume other culture's beliefs about the afterlife. For although beliefs concerning bodies being constituted of, and animated by, ahistorical essences are found worldwide,

Charisma

[a term from the Greek (meaning divine gift)] favored by Max Weber and others, to name an powerful, infectious, and thus efficacious charm possessed by some authoritative social actors which needed to be taken into account when offering explanations for their influence on others.

Cause

[derived from late Middle Ages Old French] names the source of an effect, the action or circumstance claimed to have had some result or consequence. Though widely assumed to be a matter of fact, David Hume famously argued causes were actually inferences and not empirically observable situations.

History of religion(s)

although it may imply one studying the historical development of the world's religions, the term history of religions most often names an academic discipline or approach thought by its practitioners to be distinct from other approaches to the study of religion (in North America it is often associated with scholars trained at the University of Chicago). In the German tradition, the field is known as Religionswissenschaft, or the systematic, rational study (Wissenschaft) of religion, although turn-of-the-century generations of German scholars were part of what was then called the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (the history of religions school of thought). This tradition was concerned with tracing the development of religion from its earliest stages to its modern form as well as turning methods previously used to study the scriptures of 'others' onto the texts of Christianity (known as the historical critical method, which approached the study of texts much like an archeologist might study artifacts: identifying and then sifting through their various compositional layers of a text, in an effort to understand the worlds of their various composers and their original audience). Although the North American field is indebted to these two traditions, no adequate English translation of Religionswissenschaft and Religionsgeschichte was apparent, hence the term religious studies was coined. For yet others, the term history of religions was preferred, insomuch as it emphasized the historical (that is, empirical, contingent) nature of the scholars of religion's data, in contradistinction from theological approaches to the same material. It is in perhaps this sense that the term is used in the name for the field's only international scholarly association, the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). For some, notably those influenced by the work of Mircea Eliade, history of religions came to designate a hermeneutical and phenomenological approach to the material, which gathered data by means of cross-cultural comparison yet assumed that all religious artifacts, symbols, behaviors and beliefs contained a common, deeply meaningful element that ought not to be merely reduced to their psychological or social elements. Perhaps for this reason one might place great significance on whether 'religion' appears in the singular (that is, history of religion, which names the study of a cross-culturally stable, analytic concept) or in the plural (history of religions, which names a variety of different and thus empirically distinct instances). See comparative religion.

Monothetic/polythetic definitions

deriving from Greek for either one, alone (mono—) or many, much (poly—) that are 'capable of placing', as in one-placement and many-placements. Monothetic definitions, which can be essentialist or functionalist, presume a limited set of necessary characteristics or purposes whereas polythetic (or what might also be termed multi-factoral) definitions identify a range of traits or functions, none of which is sufficient in order for the object to qualify as a member of a class. See family resemblance.

Eusebia

ancient Greek term for the quality one was thought to possess if one properly negotiated the various social expectations and duties required based upon such factors as one's social rank, gender, birth order, generation, occupation, etc. Often translated as 'piety' (from the Latin pietas), it is not to be confused with the modern sense of 'religion', insomuch as the quality of eusebia resulted from one's proper behaviors toward the gods (such as performing a ritual in the prescribed manner at the appropriate time and place) but also from those behaviors involving one's social superiors, equals, and inferiors. Therefore, piety in the Greco-Roman world was a fundamentally social, and not a faith, designation. See din and pietas.

Intellectualism

the name given to a late nineteenth-century scholarly movement in which it was not only presumed that all human beings were comparable problem solvers (though what they understood as evolutionarily early humans were assumed to lack the capabilities of modern people) but also that contemporary data could be understood best in light of its origins. F. Max Müller, E.B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer would be examples of earlier scholars who we'd place within this school of thought.

Mary Douglas

Born Margaret Mary Tew in Italy (while her British parents were on their way back to Burma, where her father worked in the Indian Civil Service for the British government), Mary Douglas was one of the twentieth century's most influential anthropologists and scholars of classification systems and institutions. She obtained her PhD from Oxford University in 1951, has carried out fieldwork in, among other places, the Congo, and has held teaching positions in both the UK and the US. Although she is also known for her work on how institutions function, and, in more recent years, she turned her attention to studying biblical texts as literature, Douglas is perhaps still best known for her influential 1966 book, Purity and Danger, which was a cross-cultural study of ritual systems of cleanliness, pollution, and taboo (a term that entered English in the late eighteenth century, as a result of Captain James Cook's travels in the Polynesian islands, meaning 'specially marked', as in set apart, forbidden, or even consecrated). Douglas on religion Assuming that systems of purity or cleanliness, rather than being primarily concerned with establishing hygienic conditions, functioned instead to put into practice a system of order on an otherwise non-ordered world, Douglas studied systems of allowable and disallowable behaviors—such as the famous dietary codes as found in the Hebrew Bible's books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Her conclusions, well in line with developments at this time in such other fields as linguistics and semiotics, concerned the manner in which relationships articulated by means of human symbol systems helped to establish meaningful conditions in which human life could take place. Religion, for Douglas, was therefore the name given to but one collection of beliefs, behaviors and institutions that helped to orient and regulate social life, ensuring that certain behaviors could be understood as meaningful, memorable, and thus repeatable. Her early work on dietary codes was therefore but one occasion to demonstrate how human communities actively constitute their environments. It also provided an opportunity to examine what happens when human map-making inevitably fails, for, as a human system that reflects contingent preferences, this map-making activity is presumed never to be entirely adequate. Thus, reality continually presents cases unanticipated in our classification systems, puzzling cases that cannot but be understood as anomalies. This in turn ensures that all well-functioning classification systems require such categories as taboo (reserved for objects or actions that defy or conflate the usual categories, such as a bird with feathers that cannot fly). It is for this reason that all classification systems are understood as provisional and tactical, for in their application they are continually being reinvented and thus under construction.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

Born in Breslau (the Germanized name for what is today the city of Wrocław in Poland; as of 1871, it was part of the German empire), Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was the son of a Prussian army chaplain, and is today remembered as a influential Protestant theologian who devised a manner to defend belief in God from the criticisms leveled by the skeptics of his day. He was educated initially in schools administered by the Moravian Church—a Reformation denomination that originated in the mid-fifteenth century in ancient Bohemia and Moravia (what is today part of the Czech Republic) that emphasized the role of piety (from the Latin, pietas), an inner experience of the Gospel's saving power, over dogma and the so-called trappings of ritual and institution. Against his father's wishes, Schleiermacher left a Moravian seminary in 1787 and, instead, moved to the University of Halle, in east central Germany. Founded in 1694, the University of Halle is considered to have been among the first so-called modern universities in which religious orthodoxy and church control over the curriculum gave way to free rational inquiry. There, Schleiermacher was thoroughly schooled in, among other topics, philosophy, especially the work of influential Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant is today among a very small group of deeply influential writers from this period, remembered best for his attempts to bridge David Hume's arguments in favor of empiricism (the position that sensory experience is the basis of knowledge) with those of rationalism (the position that the innate ideas, or 'categories', of human reason, not experience, are the basis of knowledge). In 1794 Schleiermacher was ordained, then served as a hospital chaplain in Berlin, and went on to represent the Romantic movement (a philosophically idealist movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) by writing a number of important works that sought to defend religious faith against the attacks of Enlightenment skepticism (prompted both by empiricism and rationalism). Schleiermacher on religion Although a Protestant theologian who made a significant contribution to the study of systematic theology—and thus certainly warranting the attention of those interested in the history of Protestant theology in Europe—Schleiermacher is remembered by scholars of religion for the manner in which he argued that faith (aside: he significantly employed the German word Glaube, meaning faith or justified belief, in the title of his major work, Der christliche Glaube [The Christian Faith]) operated not in the realm of reason but, instead, was akin to an aesthetic sense or feeling that could neither be supported nor criticized by reason. True religion, he therefore argued in his widely read On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (first translated into English in 1893 and still in print) was a 'sense and taste for the Infinite'. His efforts to conceptualize religion as a private sentiment or intuition—efforts that were well in step with the manner in which previous generations of Protestant Reformers had successfully critiqued (and thereby subverted and eventually replaced) the authority of the Roman Catholic institution—continue to have influence today, most notably among writers who presume that religious practices, narratives and institutions are mere expressions of a presumably universal experience or faith. Because many such writers are intent on doing cross-cultural work, they do not necessarily follow Schleiermacher's lead in concluding that the object of this feeling is one's awareness of a complete and utter reliance (what he termed an 'absolute dependence') upon the Christian conception of God as revealed in the life of Jesus Christ, as communicated in the Gospels; nonetheless, many agree that the object of religious discourse is an affective (that is, emotional or aesthetic) sense that cannot be adequately grasped or studied by means of observation and rational argumentation. It is therefore quite possible, it would be argued, to be fully rational and religious at one and the same time.

Herbert Spencer

Born in Derby, England, Herbert Spencer was raised in an atmosphere of religious dissent and staunch individualism. During his childhood and adolescence, Spencer was influenced largely by the Quakers and the Unitarians of the Derby Philosophical Society. His father and uncle also held strong anti-clerical and anti-establishment views. Spencer was formally trained as a civil engineer but soon began to be interested in those intellectual pursuits that we today might term the social sciences. It was Spencer who first published a theory of evolution and coined the term 'survival of the fittest'—not Charles Darwin as many people today assume. Spencer's early works, such as Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness, were concerned with the notion of civil liberties and the progression of human rights viewed through the lens of early evolutionary theory. Spencer's work was therefore largely influenced by his ideas on the evolution of human beings' physical body as well as their mind. In his largest work, A System of Synthetic Philosophy, Spencer applies his evolutionary theory to account for many aspects of human culture and its development over time. For instance, human nature, according to Spencer, is not contained within a group of essential characteristics; instead, it is based upon an ever changing and evolving set of social circumstances. Several of his volumes are included within A System of Synthetic Philosophy, which discusses such topics as biology, psychology, sociology, and ethics—all of which, Spencer believed, can be explained by appealing to one unifying theory (that of evolution)—a prime example of nineteenth-century reductionism. Spencer on religion Much of Spencer's scholarly work was based on nineteenth-century scientific tenets and the theory of evolution—a theory that Spencer applied to the study of religion. Spencer was a firm believer in the necessity of empirical data; if a theory could not be supported or explained through the use of what Spencer determined as empirical facts about the world, then the theory was unknowable and speculation about it was unfounded. In holding this view, Spencer advocated a viewpoint commonly known as agnosticism. He believed that, although it was impossible to prove that the fundamental foundations of religion were wrong, it was equally impossible to prove that they were correct. Spencer therefore believed that it was of no use to debate such topics as the existence of God because it was beyond our scope of knowledge. Because of Spencer's agnosticism he was uninterested in a theological reading of religion. Instead, he chose to approach the study of religion through such naturalistic fields as sociology, psychology, and biology. In one of the volumes of A System of Synthetic Philosophy (a volume entitled The Principles of Sociology) Spencer builds a thesis on the evolution of religious beliefs in humankind. He begins by postulating that primitive human beings first formed a belief in the supernatural through a system of magic, used to manipulate their natural environment. After apparently seeing their long lost dead in dreams and visions, Spencer postulates that primitive humans would have believed that these ghosts were ethereal manifestations of family members, which hence led to ancestor worship. This ancestor worship was a predecessor to later 'higher' forms of organized religion as demonstrated by the 'higher races'. Although Spencer was once considered to be one of the foremost authorities on the evolution of religious beliefs, in recent years his work came under much criticism due to his views on 'primitives' and their cultures.

Rudolph Otto

Born in Piene, Germany, Rudolf Otto was one of the foremost German systematic theologians of the late nineteenth century. He was educated at the University of Erlangen and the University of Göttingen in liberal theology and history of the Bible. Although originally having planned on entering the ministry, Otto's arrangements were forced to change due to staunch resistance from the conservative German Lutheran Church and their hesitance to give him an appointment. Instead, Otto took a teaching position at the University of Göttingen and began studying the work of Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843)—an influential German philosopher who worked to rationalize Immanual Kant's philosophy. Otto was so taken with Fries that he helped to begin a neo-Friesian movement within his academic circle and wrote one of his first books on the philosophy of Fries and Kant. Otto is probably best known to scholars of religion for what is considered by most to be his best work, The Idea of the Holy. In this book, Otto contends that religion—or better put, religious experiences and sentiments—is a phenomenon complete unto itself, or sui generis. For this reason religion cannot be reduced and thereby broken up into its constituent units, according to Otto (this supposition has come under scrutiny by modern scholars who disagree with Otto and instead use the theory of reductionism to provide insight into the nature of religion). Otto also thought that religion was knowable a priori (or independent of, or prior to, experience) and therefore its study comprises a completely different sphere of knowledge from other academic disciplines. Assuming this religious sentiment to be universal among human beings, Otto was also interested in the history of religions and traveled to India in 1911-12 to study Sanskrit and Hinduism. It was through this journey that he began to struggle with the theological problems of the presumed Christian superiority in the face of his growing knowledge of what we now refer to as the 'world religions'. Otto on religion Although not necessarily read today to the extent that his work once was, Rudolf Otto's contribution to the study of religion has been tremendous and enduring; it can be attributed to his strongly argued thesis about the internal, participant-only, spiritual, non-empirical nature of religion. Otto argued that religion was sui generis and therefore a category completely unto itself. Religion—much as argued by Friedrich Schleiermacher before him, and Mircea Eliade after him—could therefore not adequately or wholly be understood through other disciplines like psychology, philosophy, or sociology. Instead, it was only the individual who has had a distinctly 'religious' experience who could express what it is that characterizes religion. It is for this hypothesis that Otto can be classified with scholars who devote their time in the study of religion to the theory of essentialism. For Otto, there are one or many attributes that are contained within the experience we call 'religion' and all religions contain these elements although in varying degrees. Otto coined a term to name a category of feeling that he believed corresponded to a purely religious sentiment—the numinous (from the Latin numen, meaning a force or power often identified with natural objects; sometimes understood as meaning holy). The numinous, for Otto, was therefore a religious category of value that could be discussed, but could not be strictly defined because it was irreducible in nature. The feeling that an individual experiences, known as the experience of the numinous, is of something he termed the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Otto defines this feeling as one that contains elements of utter awe, might, power, energy, and urgency. The mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the significant, compelling (and thereby attractive), and yet repelling mystery of it all—is what religious participants experience while they are engrossed in religious ceremonies or in a particularly 'religious' state of mind. That each religious participant names the object of this experience differently, from religion to religion and from place to place, does not lessen what for Otto is the essence of these seemingly varied experiences.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Born in Toronto, Wilfred Cantwell Smith graduated in 1938 with his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, studying oriental languages. He carried out theological studies in England working with, among others, the famous Islamicist, H.A.R. Gibb (1895-1971)—one of the editors of the famous multi-volume, Encyclopedia of Islam. During most of the years of World War II (1940-5), Smith was in India working with the Canadian Overseas Missions Council, teaching on such topics as the history of India and of Islam. (He was also ordained in 1944.) After the war he returned to school, earning his PhD in 1948 at Princeton University. Widely known for his early work on Islam, especially his commitment to cross-cultural comparison and the role played by empathy in one's studies, Smith is also known for his work on methodology (that is, his studies on how one ought to go about studying religions), his interest in developing a global theology of religious pluralism (premised on inter-religious dialogue), as well as his administrative work in helping to establish centers for pursuing the academic study of religion in general, or Islam in particular (e.g., at McGill University, in Montreal, at Harvard University, and at Dalhousie University, in Halifax). W.C. Smith on religion Although his interests were clearly driven by theological assumptions, Smith is remembered as being among the first to study the history of the category 'religion'—a term that, he argued (in the tradition of Schleiermacher), was inadequate because it is used to name what are, he argued, two utterly different things that ought not to be conflated: the outer, 'cumulative tradition', on the one hand, and, on the other, the inner experience of what he termed 'faith in transcendence'. For Smith, it was the latter, this faith, that prompted various outward expressions that eventually came to be institutionalized and, because they were easily observed, came to be mistaken by scholars for the core of religion. In this regard his work could be characterized as an example of an essentialist approach to defining religion, insomuch as Smith presumed that the observable, public elements that we associate with such things as ritual and symbol were but derivatives of a prior, inner experience that was distinct from all other sorts of experiences. Moreover, assuming this faith to be the common core to all religion, Smith understandably developed considerable interest in working toward what he termed a global theology in which the differences among those public elements that he considered secondary and derivative could be overcome so as to bring about a cooperative pluralism among the world's religions, or, better put, the world's religious traditions—a term that Smith preferred because it focused attention on the traditions that built up around, but were not to be confused with, the faith that inspired them. In fact, it is in large part due to his influence that we today so commonly refer to religions as religious traditions.

BCE/CE

Unlike the explicitly Christian calendrical system known to most people in North America and Europe and which is based on the Gregorian calendar—with BC standing for 'before Christ' (in the English version, based on the older ACN, which is Latin for ante Christum natum, meaning 'before the birth of Christ') and AD (standing for the Latin phrase anno Domini, 'year of Lord', short for anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi, meaning 'in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ')—BCE and CE are favored by some scholars, especially those who study other cultures which have their own entirely different calendrical/dating systems (e.g., the Islamic calendar begins in what readers of this book might call the year 622, when the first fully integrated Muslim community was founded in the Arabian city of Medina). Although this alternate dating system uses precisely the same numbers, their initials stand for 'before the Common Era' and 'Common Era', referring to the adoption of a common calendar in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Scholars often adopt this alternative notation to avoid the explicitly theological assumptions of the so-called Western dating system, which roughly revolves around the time when Christians traditionally believe Jesus to have been born.

Anthropology

[Greek anthropos, meaning human being + Greek logos, meaning the systematic study of] the modern, comparative and cross-cultural science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind. Practiced as a component of the human sciences, the academic study of religion is considered distinct from the discipline known as anthropology though religious studies (as it is known in North America) could be said to be anthropological in its outlook (or what is sometimes termed 'anthropocentric': centered on the study of human behavior); that is, when practiced as something other than theology, the study of religion is focused on human beings and their practices and does not study the gods and their will; see human sciences.

Phenomenology

[Greek phainomenon, to appear] the descriptive and systematic study of that which appears or that which presents itself; to be distinguished from ontology [Greek ontos, being], the philosophical study of being or ultimate reality, as well as metaphysics. Although first developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy (notably the work of the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl [1859-1938]), early on scholars of religion adapted phenomenological methods to develop a technique for studying claims, symbols, practices, and institutions that seemed to defy rational explanation (such as belief in an afterlife or rebirth). The term 'phenomenology of religion' is credited to the Dutch scholar, P.D. [Pierre Daniel] Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848-1920). This approach avoids assessing the truth or reality of such claims (because their truth is thought to reside in the subject's interior sentiments), studying instead what is assumed to be the public forms taken (that is, that which appears to the observer's sense) by what is often termed a symbol's essence or a text's meaning. Phenomenologists of religion, many of whom would also be termed comparativists, therefore suspend judgment (that is, are methodologically agnostic; see agnosticism]) and work to describe what appears to them rather than judging it or criticizing it. They are therefore well known for advocating empathy as well as the bracketing (or setting aside) of assumptions and preconceived notions when one confronts unfamiliar data. Phenomenolgocial method therefore presupposes both the objectivity of observers as well as their ability to identify with the experiences and meanings of the people they study. See experience, hermeneutics, lived religion, positivism, reductionism.

Theory

[Greek theoria, meaning to look at, implying to observe, to consider, to speculate upon] a term that presupposes a distinction between reflection upon principles and causes as opposed to a form of practice; sometimes used as synonymous with philosophy, viewpoint, or speculation, it can, however, be defined in a technical, scientific manner to signify a series of logically related and testable propositions that aim to account for a certain state of affairs in the observable world. Meta-theory (see metaphysics) generally signifies rational reflection upon the principles that underlie theoretical work. For Marxist scholars (some of whom are members of a school of thought known as critical theory), the apparent separation between theory and practice is problematic, for they hold that theory too is a form of practical labor, and theory relies on practice which is itself directed by theory; they therefore often employ the term 'praxis' to signify the correlation of, and dialectical relationship between, these two seemingly distinct domains.

Theology

[Greek theos, meaning god + logos, meaning word, speech, discourse, reason] taken from the Greek, this term designates the academic discussion and study of God or the gods; 'theology' is commonly used today to signify the systematic study of Christian dogmas and doctrines, as carried out by a member of the group, but can be applied to any articulate and systematic discourse by members of a particular religion concerning their own tradition's meaning or proper practice or their tradition's view of others. It is to be distinguished from an anthropological approach to the study of religion in which human behaviors, not the actions of the gods, are the object of study.

Philosophy

[Greek, philo + sophia, the love of wisdom], though today it names a specific academic field or department, in prior times it was often used as more broadly synonymous with all efforts to gain wisdom, hence the name of higher education's highest degree that people across all fields can earn: the PhD (doctor of philosophy). But naming an academic discipline, it is often divided into a series of subfields or regional areas, such as analytic philosophy (much associated with Britain and the US), Continental philosophy (to name approaches adopted across Europe over the past centuries), as well as epistemology (the study of the conditions of knowledge itself), moral philosophy, the philosophy of religion, etc. De-colonizing philosophy, as with a number of academic fields, is a challenge inasmuch as it can, for many, be mainly concerned with European and North American scholarship, though there are now significant efforts to engage in a cross-cultural philosophy in general, and in philosophy of religion in particular; for systematic efforts to study, for example, the conditions that allow actors to make claims about the world can be found across cultures and across historical periods.

Animism

[Latin anima, meaning life, soul] a term popularized by the late nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor to name the belief he thought to be held by evolutionarily early people (what Tylor would have named as 'primitive' or 'tribes very low in the scale of humanity') concerning natural phenomena (e.g., trees, the ocean, people, etc.) possessing spirits or souls. This term, and his theory of animism, was developed to help answer the question: 'What is the origin of religion?' making Tylor an early example of a scholar developing a naturalistic theory of religion.

Cult

[Latin cultus, meaning care, cultivation, and by extension, a system of ritual] originally a merely descriptive term for the ritual component attached to any social group, as in the phrase 'the cult of the saints' (implying routines of Roman Catholic devotion focused on Christian saints), it is today a term most often used today in popular culture to name marginal groups considered by members of dominant groups to be deviant and thus dangerous (somewhat akin to the pejorative term 'fanatic' and 'fanaticism'). In the sociology of religion, 'cult' is classically used as a technical term, in distinction from both 'church' (or 'denomination') and 'sect', to signify differing groups' varying degrees of social integration. Traced to the work of the German sociologist, Max Weber, 'church' and 'sect' were technical terms he used to identify what he took to be significant differences among religions, the former meaning a religion into which one was born whereas the latter named one in which membership was the result of a conscious decision. This pair of terms was then reformulated by the German theologian, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923)—such as his book, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches—'church' was distinguished from 'sect' in terms of the latter being a group in greater tension with the dominant social world whereas the former are a group that more easily accommodates itself and, thereby, lives in greater harmony with the wider social world. For Troeltsch, 'mysticism' was the term he used for a third, far more private and individualized variation that likely did not lead to any form of social organization. In the early 1930s, the sociologist Howard Becker termed this latter group 'cult'. The modern, popular use of the term to name groups that deviate too far from accepted conventions can be understood to develop from these uses. See new religious movements.

Society

[Latin societas, union of peers, group, community, implying an organization of allies] term commonly used for a group of people who understand themselves to share something in common (whether traits, practices, or aspirations), such that, to whatever degree, they feel some form of affinity for one another. Usually used to name larger-scale associative units but could also name small-scale units, such as the family. Scholars may fine-tune this now popular, even commonsense understanding to instead signify the set of practices in which people engage that produce in them these feelings of affinity, seeing this thing called society not as primary or self-evident but, rather, as a secondary effect of these prior and often overlooked actions, such as engaging in routinized behaviors (that is, rituals, such as repeatedly facing a flag and singing a national anthem as a child) that assist in creating a sense of membership in and identification with a common cause.

Translation

[Latin translatus, to move from one place to another or carry over] the act of aiming for an equivalence when saying or writing something in one language that had already been said or written in another. The thing being 'carried over' from one medium to another, or so many might observe, is the meaning. But those more familiar with the challenges of translating recognize that a stable meaning is not being conveyed (in other words, language does not simply carry or convey meaning) for, instead, the rules of each language make different sorts of meanings possible (much like different games are constituted by their differing sets of rules—change the rules and the game changes). So if the rules of language create meaning, then the challenge of translation is to understand the meaning entailed in one language's statement and to then try to create something similar, though still different, in another, given that the differences between the source and target systems more than likely prevent a one-to-one correspondence between any two statements.

Taboo

[Tongan (the Polynesian language spoken on the the island of Tonga)] term that first entered English via Captain James Cook's voyages in the later eighteenth century. Variants of the term were used by people throughout this region to denote something that was specially marked, or set apart, thus translated commonly in English as sacred, and thus as naming something that was presumably venerated and respected, even feared. In English, the term eventually comes to name a condition of something being forbidden or out of bounds. See also mana and totem.

Belief

[a term that dates to the late Middle Ages] now central to the study of religion where, in distinction from faith, it names a more rational than affective state in which one claims confidence in one's position. It is, however, commonly used in distinction from claiming to know something, such that the word 'believe' can be used as not just an alternative to knowledge but as its competitor, such that one might continue to hold a position, despite evidence to the contrary, because of one's beliefs. In liberal democracies the term plays a key role, given its emphasis on the individual believer, and can therefore become a term of legal consequence, such as one's so-called freedom of belief—a freedom significantly different, some would point out, from the freedom to act or organize. See conscience, sincerity.

Church

[derived from Old English and earlier from precursors to German (possibly even Greek)] a term with cognates all across European languages, for the meeting place where Christians carry out their worship ceremonies. Churches typically have an altar at the front and pulpit from which a member of the clergy would deliver a sermon (types of pulpits can vary widely, from subtle and small to large and ornate) along with benches or pews for members to sit and often an area for a choir. Given the predominance of Christians in some places it is sometimes used to name the entire family of religious meeting places, such that a mosque or synagogue are sometimes thought to be instances of churches (such as for the US's Internal Revenue Service). In US history there is the use of such terms as churched or churching, used to name the manner in which one is brought to or initiated into a religious community (specifically Christianity, as in 'the churching of America' to name increases in church affiliation and attendance).

Classification

[from Latin, a group of division of the military, and then later French, for group, as in a group of students] to name something but, more specifically, to name it as part of a group or system of relations to other items, such that an identity is derived from a series of controlled relationships of similarity and difference. Often done by implementing a taxonomy (a ranked classificatory scheme, such as arranging all elements of the natural world into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species), classification could be argued to be the basis for all knowledge, inasmuch as even the most mundane claims about the world (example: 'My mug is full') depends upon the speakers ability to identify and arrange items (me and mugs) as well as states (fullness and the ability to possess something) in terms of their distinction from other items (you and everything that is not a mug) and states (to be empty, or even less than full).

Folk knowledge

[from folc, Old English for common people] term used to distinguish how a group of people might talk among themselves about something in the world from the manner in which scholars, using a technical language, could talk about the same item. A descriptive phase of one's work would, presumably, aim to reproduce the participant's commonsense way of acting or understandings in a manner in which they would recognize it, but, in subsequent stages, scholarship translates this information into new vocabulary given that it now serves different purposes. For example, while we may drink water a chemist studies H2O. The distinction between folk and technical approaches can appear to be ranked, as if one is superior to the other, but, rather, should merely be used to signify the different purposes and interests of the groups in question.

Ritual

a system of actions that, according to their practitioners, is used by a group of people to interact with the cosmos and/or directly relate to superhuman beings; these actions may consist of worship, sacrifice, prayer, etc. Commonly understood as any set of actions that is supposed to facilitate interaction between humans and superhuman beings. For materialist scholars, ritual is often presumed to predate myth insomuch as routinized behaviors are thought to provide the physical and cognitive conditions in which meaning systems (and hence mythic narratives) can take place. Scholars study ritual behaviors in terms of their psychological, sociological, political, even their economic causes and implications. That some behaviors one might classify as a 'habit' (for instance, regularly brushing one's teeth) could just as easily be classified as a 'ritual' suggests that there is a great deal at stake in how one classifies behaviors as well as in the particular theory of behavior that one uses to guide one's classifications.

Modernity

although commonly used as a synonym for 'contemporary' or 'current', such terms as 'modern', 'modernism', and 'modernity' are used as technical terms to name a period in European, and later North American, history that could be said to develop from sometime in the seventeenth until the late twentieth century, characterized by certain intellectual, governmental, legal, economic, social, artistic, and architectural movements. Given the different usages of the terms modern, modernism, and modernity, a precise definition is difficult to provide; it generally denotes a period whose climax comes in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century, characterized by assumptions concerning how meaning and representation function as well as how social organization ought to take place. The rise of the scientific method, realist painting (based on perspective), the correspondence theory of meaning, industrialist and capitalist economies, and the nation-state all represent moments in the development of modernity. Contrary to postmodernism, understood as a mid- to late twentieth-century European movement associated with an emphasis on disjunction, difference, perspective, context, and the gap between a signifer (such as a red octagon with white trim and the letter S, T, O and P written inside it) and that which it is presumed to signify (come to a stop), modernism is associated with a confidence concerning the direct links between intentions, words, and meanings.

Positivism

although for some 'positivism' is used along with 'reductionistic' to name an attitude toward the study of culture that—at least for those who fall in the theological, hermeneutic, and humanistic traditions—is seen as overly reliant on the effort to reduce the meaning of a participant's testimony to observable, and thus predictable, facts, more properly it is termed 'logical positivism'—a term derived originally from the work of the early French social theorist, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), and which refers to an originally Austrian and German philosophical school of thought (which exerted great influence in North America as well) that dates to the early decades of the twentieth century. Members of the so-called 'Vienna Circle' of philosophers developed a system of rules for establishing which propositions were and were not meaningful and thus the proper topic of scientific discourse; their system thereby classified many of the traditional topics addressed within the field known as metaphysics (e.g., does God exist?) as meaningless. Their 'verifiablity principle' ensured that only those propositions that could conceivably be tested empirically or logically, and thereby found either to correspond to some observable state of affairs in the natural world or to obey the rules of logic (that is, were verifiable), were meaningful—all others were classified as nonsensical or, as in the case of statements on morality, merely emotive. Experience and the use of human reason to organize experience and generalize from experience, were, therefore, the only basis for knowledge, and facts were understood to be independent of human consciousness and intention, thereby ensuring that objectivity was an attainable goal. Reaching the peak of their influence by the mid-twentieth century, it was realized that logical positivists' criterion of verifiability itself did not obey their own rules (the rule itself did not correspond to any empirically observable fact); this presented an empirical and logical problem that could not be overcome—although the philosopher of science, Karl Popper (1902-94), revised this principle as the falsifiability criterion, whereby scientific propositions were those that could, conceivably, be empirically tested and, at least potentially, disproved. Until such a time as a proposition was disproved (such as 'All dogs have four legs'), it could be used 'as if' it was true, recognizing that one can never arrive at certain knowledge based on induction. Although few scholars of religion would today classify themselves as positivists in the earlier sense of the term, the goal of distinguishing participant claims from claims about participants—relying, to varying degrees, on the distinction between values and facts—yet remains for many scholars of religion.

World religions

although taken for granted today, this term came to prominence only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is today used to organize information for what are arguably the most popular courses and classroom resources in the study of religion. However, as made evident by such scholars as Jonathan Z. Smith and Tomoko Masuzawa, prior to the rise of this term, and the assumption that a diverse collection of beliefs, behaviors, and institutions across the globe share a specific number of similarities, making them all members of the same family, one might expect to find Europeans using the term 'world religion' (note the use of the singular), referring to Christianity as 'the true religion' that spans the world—a designation that implicitly contained a theological judgment concerning its superiority. Earlier designations grouped the information in terms of: ours and theirs, such as 'we' being Christian and 'they' being 'heathens' (those outside the city, who inhabit the heaths, that is, rural areas); religions were also distinguished based on those that were revealed (those claiming divine revelation as their source) as opposed to those that were natural (in which people inferred the existence of god[s]); later, there were those that were national, as in those that were limited to a specific ethnic group, as opposed to those that successfully spread to other regions (making them, as noted above, a world religion). Once the plural term 'world religions' arises, the number of traditions included within the family starts out rather small but steadily grows over time, such that today one can easily find a fairly long list of world religions, which includes Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc. The movement for inter-religious dialogue is based on the assumption of cross-cultural similarities among members of this family.

Essentialism

an approach to definition that maintains that membership within a class or group is based on possessing a finite list of characteristics or traits, all of which an entity must necessarily possess to be considered a member of the group, as opposed to the merely accidental or contingent characteristics a thing might or might not possess (sometimes also known as the substantive approach). An essentialist view of religion asserts that there are many different characteristics to be found among religions, but argues that these characteristics are merely secondary and superficial; instead, there are a small number of primary characteristics, possibly only one (its so-called essence or substance), that encompass all the religions of the world within one category; see existentialism, family resemblance, and functionalism.

Naturalistic theories of religion

as opposed to theological approaches to the study of religion that presume that the basis of religion is to be found in a supernatural source (such as God, the gods, etc.), naturalistic approaches presuppose that those beliefs, behaviors or institutions classified as 'religious' are in fact mundane elements of the so-called natural world—that is, the historical, cultural world. In this sense, 'natural' does not necessarily carry the connotation of 'inevitable' or 'the way it ought to be' but, instead, is linked to an earlier sense of 'natural science' in that it is the systematic study of the empirical (observable with one of the five senses) world. Of course this is to be distinguished from what was once called 'natural religion'—the category used for those who infer the existence of God from the observation of the natural world, such as the so-called design argument (that is, the complex workings of the natural world betray the existence of a design and a design necessitates the existence of a designer, much as the complex workings of a watch found on an isolated beach signifies the existence of a designer [or so first argued by the Christian theologian William Paley (1743-1805)]; contemporary intelligent design efforts to undermine evolutionary theory presume this very argument). Although early contributors to a naturalistic approach to religion can be dated to several centuries ago—notably the Scottish philosopher David Hume's book, A Natural History of Religion (1757)—they began to flourish in the late nineteenth century and today involve the work of, among others, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, political economists, and cognitive scientists.

Inter-religious dialogue

following the colonial age of Christian missionizing, in which the conversion of so-called 'heathens' was the goal, a more theologically and politically liberal movement began within Christianity in which some differences that came to be seen as merely secondary were put aside in favor of a search for more fundamental, essential, similarities among the world's religions. Mutual understanding, respect, and appreciation therefore took over from a previous era's attempt to judge and convert. As practiced by some (particularly by humanists), the academic study of religion is seen as one component of the effort to identify and nurture such supposedly shared commonalities. For those who see the study of religion as part of the human sciences, such versions of the field are indistinguishable from liberal theology.

Experience

many humanistic scholars of religion argue that religion is grounded in a unique type of experience, conceived as an inner, personal sentiment that can only be expressed publicly by means of symbolic actions (e.g., language, ritual, etc.) that are themselves derivative and thus flawed copies of the original (a position represented by the work of William James). As made evident by the British literary critic, Raymond Williams, in his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), there are two senses of the term experience, distinguishable in English literature from around the late eighteenth century: historically related to the word 'experiment', its first sense can denote the accumulation of empirical facts and the results of such an accumulation, such as one having 'work experience' (Williams terms this sense 'experience past'); the other, which he describes as 'experience present', denotes a form of ever present consciousness that resides within the individual and to which one appeals when making judgments concerning the authenticity of a person. It is this latter sense of experience present, understood as a subjective quality, that is most often found in the study of religion, insomuch as the outward behaviors and institutions are assumed merely to reflect an inner disposition that is beyond words. See phenomenology.

Spiritual But Not Religious (SBNR)

see Nones — a recent term developed to name those who, on polls, reply that they have no religion (by answering None or None of the Above). Pollsters and scholars alike have therefore begun, in recent years, to treat the so-called Nones as a relatively coherent group, inquiring of their voting patterns, buying habits, etc. That some people report having no religion does not necessarily mean that they are atheists or agnostics, of course; it could, instead, either be a protest over the manner in which such polls frame their questions about religion (for instance, what could be seen as limited or biased options presented for those taking the poll) or could be evidence of the person's criticism for so-called organized religion, as is seen in the equally recent spiritual but not religious (SBNR) movement, which defines spirituality as an inner experience of some sort that is in opposition to the mere outward (and potentially empty and non-essential) rituals and institutions of religion.

Spirituality

see Nones — a recent term developed to name those who, on polls, reply that they have no religion (by answering None or None of the Above). Pollsters and scholars alike have therefore begun, in recent years, to treat the so-called Nones as a relatively coherent group, inquiring of their voting patterns, buying habits, etc. That some people report having no religion does not necessarily mean that they are atheists or agnostics, of course; it could, instead, either be a protest over the manner in which such polls frame their questions about religion (for instance, what could be seen as limited or biased options presented for those taking the poll) or could be evidence of the person's criticism for so-called organized religion, as is seen in the equally recent spiritual but not religious (SBNR) movement, which defines spirituality as an inner experience of some sort that is in opposition to the mere outward (and potentially empty and non-essential) rituals and institutions of religion.

Contingent

see necessary — as used in philosophy, necessary is opposed to contingent; the former signifies something that is inevitable or required, by strictest definition, whereas the latter signifies something that may or may not be the case, depending on a variety of other, prior factors. For example, it is a biological necessity that human beings require oxygen in order to live; however, continuing to live is contingent upon breathing, eating, sleeping, etc. Sometimes necessary is distinguished from sufficient, as in a necessary cause versus a sufficient cause: the former signifies a prior factor that is required should certain results come about (such as the need for professors to publish their research in order to be awarded tenure), whereas the latter signifies a prior factor that alone will lead to the desired results (that is, publishing research alone is not sufficient to be tenured, for teaching well is also required).

Agnosticism

term coined in the nineteenth century by combining the Greek gnosis (meaning esoteric or secret forms of knowledge) with the prefix a- which often denotes the negative form of a word; a philosophical position that admits to having no privileged knowledge concerning whether God or the gods exist; a position of theological neutrality to be distinguished from atheism and theism. Methodological agnosticism (a term associated with the work of Ninian Smart) is the name given to the neutral position some scholars of religion argue one should take when studying religion. This implies that, regardless of one's personal viewpoint, as a scholar one employs tools (that is, methods) that avoid asking normative questions of truth. See insider/outsider problem.

Fieldwork

term that gained popularity in the early and mid-twentieth century when the academic field of anthropology made its functionalist turn and began to prioritize work on studying living human communities as opposed to the prior intellectualist emphasis on origins. Spending a significant period of time living among a group one studies ('in the field'), thereby learning languages and customs, thus became (and today remains) the main credentialing or authenticating mark in modern anthropology, resulting in the idea of the scholar straddling the position of both insider and outside by working to become an adept participant-observer. See also ethnography, insider/outsider problem.

Emic/etic

terms derived from the suffixes of the words 'phonemic' and 'phonetic'; the former refers to any unit of sound significant to the users of a particular language (each such unit of sound is known by scholar of linguistics as a phoneme) and the latter refers to the system of cross-culturally useful notations that represent each of these vocal sounds (as in the phonetic alphabet found in the front of most dictionaries and used as a pronunciation guide); derived from the same Greek root, 'phonemic' designates the complex sounds themselves whereas 'phonetic' specifies the signs and systems scholars devise to represent and then compare the manner in which the basic phonemic units of a language are produced and pronounced. Adopted by anthropologists, and later by scholars of religion, the terms emic and etic come to stand for the participant's (emic) and the non-participant's (etic) viewpoints. See insider/outsider problem.

Psychology

the systematic study (science) of the mind or of mental states and processes; psychology of religion is but one among a number of subfields of the academic study of religion.

Faith

[Latin fides, meaning trust, confidence, reliance] a term today commonly used alongside 'religion', sometimes assumed to be the essential element to the religious life; sometime in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe seems to be the first time we find 'faith' used as a synonym for 'religion'. In the modern sense, faith (as in Wilfred Cantwell Smith's notion of 'faith in transcendence') is often juxtaposed to the social or institutional sense of religion (what W.C. Smith termed the 'accumulated tradition'), as in the distinction between 'spiritual' and 'religious' when the latter is assumed to denote the merely secondary, external, institutional, or ritual elements whereas the former denotes what is assumed to be the personal and core element that is merely symbolized or manifested in the institution. Given the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers' efforts to criticize, and eventually to replace, the institutions and authority of Roman Catholicism, prioritizing faith over religious institution, and criticizing the latter for the manner in which it unnecessarily stifles the former, remains a common anti-Catholic, or pro-Protestant, form of argumentation.

History

[Latin historia, meaning narrative, account, tale, story] by 'history' we today mean at least two things: (1) a narrative (that is, a tale with a beginning, middle, and end) about the accumulated, chronological past that either demonstrates development over time or established lineage and (2) a more general usage that refers to the world of cause/effect in which unanticipated events intermingle with the intentions of agents. Saying that something is 'an element of the historical world' therefore implies that the present is the result of a series of past plans as well as accidents, which were themselves the results of yet other past plans and accidents. To say that something is 'historical' therefore means that it is contingent, that is, depends on prior things happening and therefore could have been otherwise.

Origins

[Latin originem, to begin, start, or arise, as in one's family descent or ancestry] signifies the start but in rather absolute terms, as characterized by an origins myth, for instance (such as the biblical Book of Genesis's opening: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .'), technically called a cosmogony (such tales are found cross-culturally). These discourses are often seen by scholars as ahistorical, given that they attempt to narrate a time before time or before people (such as the storytellers themselves), making authoritative claims as to the definitive start of some group or phenomenon. Origins discourses can therefore be distinguished from discourses on beginnings (a distinction made by the late Edward Said in his book Beginnings: Intention and Method [1985]) whereby only the latter are seen as historical and thus the results of prior natural causes, etc. From the point of view of this latter approach, origins discourses are seen as rhetorical rather than factual or descriptive and thus ways in which current social actors do things in the present by leading listeners to believe that things have always been done in this way.

Private

[Latin privatus, not part of or owned/controlled by the state, unofficial, individual or personal, set apart from governing authorities] term used today to denote a zone that is separate from the public, with private/public forming a classic example of a binary pair. In this case, privacy is understood as a social product whereby a group decides what will exceed its knowledge or grasp—though groups can always suspend such rules, such as the police entering a domestic dwelling with no warrant so long as their entry meets a specific series of requires (invited in, reason to believe a crime is being committed, in pursuit of someone to be arrested, etc.). Seen in this way, privacy becomes a social phenomenon open to debate, such as governments debating what constitutes online privacy in the digital age.

Profane

[Latin profanus, from pro + fanus, meaning before, as in outside or in front of, the temple] considered the opposite of sacred; that which was not admitted into the temple, or done while in the temple, which extends to notions of not consecrated, ritually unclean, polluted, or improper (as in 'profanity' used to signify improper speech).

Sacred

[Latin sacer, meaning set apart, dedicated, distinguished, as in set apart from the public or mundane world]; to be distinguished from profane. Although widely used as an adjective (e.g., sacred texts) 'the Sacred' was a term of choice for Mircea Eliade, used to describe that which is shared in common among all religions and that which manifests itself in varied forms throughout the symbols of the world's religions: the experience of the Sacred. Akin to other essentialists who name the object of this experience as the Holy (Rudolf Otto) or Power (Gerardus van der Leeuw), or even religious experience (William James).

Human nature

a concept—sometimes termed the human spirit, the human condition, the human heart, or the human experience—that asserts all human beings hold some essential characteristic(s) that is universal and thus not bound by any notions of time or space. All human beings, from the beginning of time and spanning the entire present world, are therefore said to share such characteristics, making these traits the defining element, or essence, of the human species as a group separable from all others. Some scholars of religion argue that religion, or religious experience, is the preeminent or fundamental aspect to this presumed human nature.

Idealism

a philosophical viewpoint that prioritizes mind or spirit over matter or the physical world, the latter thought to derive from the former; to be distinguished from materialism.

Explanation

a stage in scholarship whereby one tries to identify the cause of some effect, such as what accounts for the existence of religion or what might be the source of some similarity or difference apparent as a result of comparision. Such work is likely reductionistic, inasmuch as it tries to explain the origins or function of religion in the light of some non-religious factor(s). It can be distinguished from interpretation (see hermeneutics).

Induction

any form of reasoning in which a general conclusion is supported by the premises, but does not necessarily follow from them; inductive logic begins with the observation of specific cases and reasons to general conclusions based on this series of discrete observations. Classical scientific method, which prioritized observation and description, was thought to proceed inductively, in that a general conclusion (for example, about the law of gravity) followed from a series of experiments (such as repeatedly dropping an object and observing its behavior). Inductive conclusions are only as sound as the number of instances that support them (that is, how many spotted dogs must one see before one is confident in concluding: 'All dogs are spotted'?), leading one to see that induction does not provide certain, but instead probable, knowledge; distinguished from deductive logic.

Discourse

most simply, the communication of thought by words/conversation; a discourse could therefore be likened to a conversation or, more technically, to a teaching or a systematic exploration of a topic; many scholars now use the term to refer to any number of fields or disciplines, the formal discussion of a subject in speech or writing, or, following the French postmodern scholar, Michel Foucault (1926-84), even the series of material as well as intellectual conditions, practices, institutions, architecture, and conventions that make specific types of thought and action possible (such as the discourse of the academy or the discourse of medicine).

Confucianism

name given by European scholars to a group of Chinese schools of thought associated with the teachings of such writers as Confucius (551-479 BCE), Mencius (372-289 BCE), and Hsun-tzu (298-238 BCE). These traditions focus upon developing proper forms of social and political behavior. During the Chinese Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), these schools became official state orthodoxy, and a authoritative collection of texts and temples were established; see li.

Empirical

term used to name something that can be observed or perceived with one of the five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing.

Religion

the precise etymology (or historical derivation) of the modern word religion is unknown. There are, however, several possible roots from which the term derives. Most commonly, the ancient Latin words religere (to be careful, mindful) and religare (to bind together) are cited as possible precursors. Whereas the Roman writer Cicero (106-43 BCE) favored the first option, the later Christian writer Lactantius (250-325 CE) favored the latter. In his book, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962), Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who is among the more noted scholars to have investigated the category's history, suggests that both streams—one emphasizing the private disposition to be mindful whereas the other emphasizes the more objective sense of social processes that build identity—may have coalesced into the Latin religio. Jonathan Z. Smith, also among the scholars to have devoted attention to this problem, observes in an essay entitled 'Religion, Religions, Religious' (in Mark C. Taylor [ed.], Critical Terms for Religious Studies [1998]) that in Roman and early Christian Latin literature the nouns religio and religiones, as well as the adjective religiosus and the adverb religios, were all employed mainly with reference to, in his words, 'careful performance of ritual obligations'—as in the modern sense of, in his words, a 'conscientious repetitive action such as "She reads the morning newspaper religiously"'. If this is chosen as our origin for the modern term, then there is some irony in the fact that today it is often used to refer to an inner sentiment, affectation (e.g., religious experience and faith) rather than within the context of ritual (that is, routinized behavior and participation in social institutions). As J.Z. Smith has pointed out, the fact that ethics and etiquette books immediately precede books on religion in the US Library of Congress catalog system may carry with it this earlier sense of religion as a form of carefully performed behavior. Regardless of which etymology one chooses, the term 'religion' remains troublesome for those who presuppose some universal essence to lie beneath the term—whether that essence is, as W.C. Smith argued, 'faith in transcendence' (in distinction from the outer, 'cumulative tradition', as he phrased it) or whether it is some more specific item, such as famously argued by the Swiss Protestant theologian, Karl Barth (1886-1968), who criticized 'religion' (that is, what he understood as inessential outward ritual and institution) as sinful (inasmuch as it was human beings trying to know God—whether those human beings were or were not Christian), as opposed to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (which, he believed, was bestowed upon humans by God). That this approach has little, if anything, in common with the naturalistic, academic study of religion should be clear to the reader. See also religions, world religions.

Cognitive science

the systematic study of the precise nature of different mental tasks and forms of cognition, and the operations of the mind/brain; this study uses elements of psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics. In recent years, it has proved one of the more active and organized sub-specialties in the academic study of religion, focusing specifically on the study of ritual. Unlike some popular forays into the interface between religion and cognitive studies, such scholarly work seeks not to isolate the part of the brain that experiences God or the sacred (such as the so-called 'god gene'); instead, as in the work of Pascal Boyer, they apply findings from cognitive psychology to develop a naturalistic theory of religious beliefs and behaviors.

Intelligent design

the term most recently given to what proponents (many of whom are in the US) see as an alternative to the theory of evolution. A view on origins that claims that some elements of the natural world are too complex to have derived from simpler prior components (the bacterial flagellum or the mammal eye are often cited as examples). Instead, it is claimed that a so-called intelligent designer must have existed who made such things, fully formed, for the purposes they are today seen to serve. Advocates of this position are careful not to call this hypothetical designer God, given that the US Supreme Court has ruled, the case of Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), that creationism or creation science are religious and thus not allowed into the public school's science curriculum. In a federal court decision from 2005, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the judge found that intelligent design was not science (inasmuch as its claims were not testable) and thus was merely a rebranded form of creation science, disallowing it from public school classes and thereby disciplining the School Board for having advocated for its use in science classes.

Description

though commonly used to name a stage in scholarship whereby the so-called facts and observable features of a situation are first recorded and conveyed faithfully and accurately, to be followed by some sort of analysis (such as interpretation [see hermeneutics] or comparison), many today see the act of description, though still an important stage in our work, as already informed by scholarly assumptions, theories, and interests (such as the choice of what to describe and what to ignore). As such, the work of describing what someone does or says is no longer as neutral or disinterested as it was once seen by some scholars. See also redescription, stipulate.

Dialectic

traditionally understood as the question/answer teaching style used by Plato's character Socrates; in later European philosophy it stands for a progressive series in which the opposition between a thesis statement ('The sky is blue') and its opposite, the antithesis ('The sky is not blue'), is resolved by means of a synthesis ('The sky is partially blue') which itself comes to be understood as but a new proposition (that is, thesis) which has its opposite that can again be resolved by means of a synthesis.