Introduction Vocabulary Explanations

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.

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).

Public

[Latin, publicus, of the people] see private.

Linda Woodhead

Although holding an honorary doctoral degree (by Uppsala University, in Sweden), Linda Woodhead is today among the most influential sociologists of religion in the UK, having studied religion and theology at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating in 1985. She has worked at Lancaster University since 1992, where she is a member of the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion. She was also a member of the Church of England's Doctrine Commission (1997-2003) and she is also the President of the UK's theologically liberal Modern Church (which traces itself to the Churchmen's Union for the Advancement of Liberal Religious Thought [established in 1898]). Her interests, which some characterize as an example of the so-called new sociology, include the study of secularism, people who claim to have no religion (such as the Nones), as well as the effect of a variety of modern factors (such as digital media) on changing religious identity and affiliation. She has served as the principal investigator in major grant-funded research projects (such as the £12 million 'Religion and Society Programme' [from 2007-12], which included 240 scholars, coming from almost thirty different academic fields) and has also played key roles in determining how governments allocate such funds to British scholars (such as her prestigious appointment to the European Research Council's grants evaluation panel). In 2013 she was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE)—established in 1917 and awarded by the Queen, it recognizes contributions in the arts and sciences. Woodhead is a widely published author and is also a well-known speaker/writer in public venues. Among her scholarly books (whether authored or co-authored) are: An Introduction to Christianity (2004), The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality (2005), A Sociology of Religious Experience (2012), and co-edited Religion and Change in Modern Britain (2012) and Everyday Lived Islam in Europe (2013). Her interest in the change in religion over the past few decades is the main topic of her work—the move from the dominance of self-identification as Christian, as least in Britain, to the increasingly common self-identification as non-religious or Nones (as evidenced by the surveys she has conducted). She notes that though atheism is also on the rise, slightly, during this time period, the people she's interested in studying do not claim to be non-believers, hence her preference for the notion of spirituality, going so far as to describe what we had previously just called religion as 'a toxic brand', as she has phrased it, now coming to signal something that certain people see as improperly authoritarian and intolerant. Hence the conflict between individuality and religious identity are among her interests.

Inference

to derive a conclusion from something known or assumed to be the case, knowledge which was itself gained by means of either induction or deduction.

Agent

term commonly used to refer to a being assumed to be intentional, that is, a being who acts, has motivations that inspires such actions, and can therefore be held accountable for these motives and actions. Human beings are therefore thought to possess the quality known as agency. The term is also sometimes used to describe non-intentional things, such as a 'chemical agent', which nonetheless are thought to be able to cause certain outcomes. A traditional way of defining religion is that it is a system in which agency is attributed to super- or non-human powers (e.g., gods, ancestors, spirits, etc.).

Public intellectual

term used increasingly across the later twentieth century to name scholars who address their work to wider audiences beyond their colleagues and students. Today, one would associate the term with scholars who make a point of appearing in mass media, commenting on or interpreting current affairs.

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.

Conscience

[Latin conscientia, shared knowledge] term that, in the later Middle Ages, comes to signify in Europe an interior disposition that was the presumed center of moral knowledge. Each person is eventually assumed to have their own conscience, or inner voice, therefore closely linking this to the developing idea of the self. Also linked to emerging systems of governance during this time period, such that dissenters eventually can choose to retain their dissent with their conscience and not act on it as opposed to acting it out in practice and risking severe punishment (thus we get the modern notion of being a conscientious objector). See belief, sincerity.

Church/state

a dichotomy whose origins date to about seventeenth-century Europe, commonly used today in the United States to stand for the legally mandated separation between the workings of any church or religious group and the state; this notion of separation is traced to the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Commonly, US political theorists and legal scholars refer to the 'wall of separation' between church and state, although this widely used phrasing is not in the Constitution. Instead, it derives from phrasing found in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) while he served as the third president of the United States (1801-9).

Scripture

[Latin scriber, to write, but also scriptura, something written or specifically a writing from the Bible] though traditionally and more narrowly used to signify the entirety of, or even just a passage from, the Christian canon (the closed set of separate narratives, poems, laws, and letters, that, taken together, constitute the Bible) today it is often used as a cross-culturally applicable term for any set of texts seen by a group as being especially authoritative or set apart, that is, sacred. Thus, one might understand not just the Hebrew (in Judaism) or Christian bibles as being scripture but also the Qur'an (in Islam), the Rig Veda (in Hinduism), etc. Using the term in this manner can reflect an element of some scholar's way of defining religion inasmuch as it may see certain elements as more or less likely to be present for something to count as a religion, such as an authoritative text.

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.

Daniel Dubuisson

Of a group of scholars who, over the past twenty years or so, have given significant attention to the practical uses for the category of religion, Daniel Dubuisson stands out as being one of the few in France to contribute to this still growing body of work. For while many of the other contributors to this now active sub-discipline carry out their work in either Britain (consider the work of Timothy Fitzgerald, Richard King, Malory Nye, and Suzanne Owen) or North America (for instance, Tomoko Masuzawa), few scholars in other settings are as active a contributor as is Dubuisson (though, among this small, international group, Teemu Taira in Finland certainly also comes to mind). Dubuisson—formerly the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique's Institut des sciences humaines et sociales (at the Université Charles de Gaulle in Lille, France)—was awarded his doctorat ès lettres in 1983 and works in a broad range of areas, but has made his mark by focusing tightly on the work that scholarly categories do, for the people who use them, allowing them to shape and organize the world in particular sorts of ways. When Dubuisson writes on religion (or such other topics as those things classified as magical) he is pretty much always writing on our idea of religion and the very word religion itself, aiming to shed light on what he might call our peculiar habit of thinking that part of the world of human actions and associations ought to go by this name. So it is fair to say that he does not have a theory of religion, as some other scholars might, but, instead, a theory of the category religion or a theory of the category magic—that is, a socio-political theory of the work being done when we see a domain of human affairs as being somehow unique and distinctly set apart from all others (such as is often claimed when someone asserts that religion is sui generis). Though seen as a scholar of religion it might therefore be more correct to rename him as a political theorist (given his focus on the political implications of how we divide and name our world) or just simply a scholar of classification systems, since his interest is not in studying religion as much as studying those of us who call certain things religious and the practical effects of arranging our world in just that manner.

Eddie S. Glaude

Recent President of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, 2016-17), Eddie Glaude is Professor of Religious Studies at Princeton University and (founding) chair of Princeton's Center for African American Studies. Glaude, who is from Moss Point, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, earned his undergraduate degree in political science in 1989 (with a minor in religion) from Morehouse College in Atlanta (founded in 1867, it is a noted historically black men's college in the US), while later earning an MA in African American studies from Temple University (1992) and his PhD in the study of religion from Princeton (1996). His research interests include American pragmatist philosophy (in particular the writings of John Dewey [1859-1952]), African American religious history, and its place in American public life. He currently hosts a podcast, AAS 21 (the title refers to carrying out African American studies in the twenty-first century), and has become a prominent public intellectual, contributing opinion pieces to such magazines/sites as Time and the Huffington Post while also regularly contributing to television news and opinion shows. He is the author of such books as Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (2000), In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (2007), Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016), and An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion (2018), as well as co-editing, with Cornell West, African American Religious Studies: An Anthology (2003). Working in a tradition indebted to the influential US scholar, Cornell West, Glaude's early interest in the study of religion (having obtained an MA in African American studies) was linked to West's invitation, extended at a conference that they were both attending early in Glaude's career, for Glaude to come to Princeton to pursue doctoral studies with him. Glaude's aim, then, was to consider how thinking more about African American religious communities could assist people today to reimagine how politics is carried out and spoken about in the US—such as his dissertation (and eventual first book) which examined how a narrative framework provided by the idea of Israel as a 'chosen people' was used by African American authors across the nineteenth century to provide a way of thinking about their situation and organizing to address it. His interests, then, had much to do with the relationship between what he would describe as black Christianity and black politics in the US, though his work now has progressed to address far wider concerns at the intersection of race and power in the US.

Sincerity

[Latin, for purity or completeness] the term used today to name someone whose motives are considered to be pure; the quality of truthfulness, purity, or truthful and genuine, such as someone offering a sincere apology or signing a letter 'Sincerely yours . . .'. In US law it is now commonly used as a marker of legitimate religious belief, that is, the court values when 'sincerely held belief' is cited as the cause for someone's actions or inactions (such as a prisoner requesting privileges in a prison system), but it has no set of standard criteria (such as the Lemon test) to determine which beliefs count as sincere and which do not, opting instead for such things as frequency of attendance at worship ceremonies, length of time the beliefs have been held, as if these are somehow indicative of the authenticity of a claim someone might make. See belief, conscience.

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.

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).

Anxiety

[from a Latin term meaning anguish or solitude] in the work of Sigmund Freud this term identifies the byproduct that accumulates within a person's psyche when they fail to act on natural impulses (such as various ways in which we each desire self-gratification). Given that not all such desires can be satisfied (due to the social requirements and expectations of the groups in which we live and on which we each depend), such theorists conclude that all human beings show signs of anxiety, to one degree or another. Mental as well as social health is then argued to rely upon people finding ways of expressing and thereby venting this accumulated anxiety that do not threaten the well-being of the group or the individual's place within it. One way, such scholars conclude, is through practicing rituals, inasmuch as these controlled, rule-oriented behaviors provide a routinized structure in which anxiety can be worked out.

Mosque

[Arabic term, masjid, adapted by various European languages, notably the French mosquée] place where Muslims meet to pray (usually segregated by gender), including an open prayer hall with an indentation in one wall, indicating the direction of Mecca (called the mihrab), and often with an adjacent minaret—the tower from which people are called to pray five times daily by the muezzin who recites the adhan (which includes: 'Allah is great. There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah'.) This statement of faith (called the Shahada) also constitutes the first of the so-called Five Pillars of Islam (the set of basic doctrines and practices of a devout Muslim).

Anthropomorphism

[Greek anthropos, meaning human being + Greek morphé, meaning shape or form] as in personification, to ascribe a human form or human qualities and traits to non-human things; prosopopoeia [from the Greek, prosopopoiia, to make a mask or face] is a related term, naming the poetic technique of having a dead or imaginary person speak, as well as the technique of giving human qualities to inanimate objects such as mountains or the sea. 'The sea was angry' could be considered an anthropomorphic claim; seeing faces in the moon, or faces in the patterns found in wood grains, could also be considered evidence of anthropomorphism. Central to David Hume's early theory of religion, a modern theory of anthropomorphism is that of the anthropologist and cognitivist, Stewart Guthrie, who argues in his book, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (1993), that humans—among many other species—possess brains that are 'hard wired' to project onto the world the traits that they perceive themselves to possess, all in an effort to make sense of, and thereby navigate, an otherwise unknown environment. For Guthrie, much as with Hume, religion (the widespread belief that the universe is a living agent that cares for human beings) is but one instance of this anthropomorphic strategy.

Ethnic

[Greek ethnikos, and later from Latin, of a people, sometimes considered an alien people; a group or tribe thought to be related in some fashion; related to the late Middle Ages term race, as in a group presumed to have a common lineage] term widely used today to identify what are thought to be distinct subgroups within the broader human species. Debates continue on the nature of ethnic identity, whether, for example, it is a biologically inherited trait (as was once presumed in so-called race science—a field whose scientific status is now understood as highly questionable) or, instead, a socially created identity that results from comparison and classification of human beings in light of a specific set of criteria chosen by those doing the classification. In support of the latter, it is not difficult to find dominant groups who fail to understand themselves as having an ethnicity (for example, 'ethnic food' generally names unfamiliar food) while they attribute an ethnic identity to others, much as those who are in more dominant positions might maintain that only other, non-dominant or marginal people have an accent when they speak.

Myth

[Greek mythos, meaning word, story or narrative] term whose current popular understanding can be traced back to an argument of Plato's in his ancient Greek dialogue entitled The Republic; 'myth' today, at least in popular discourse, often designates fanciful, false, or fictional narratives that are to be distinguished from historical narrative or rational discourses (Greek, logos). Sometimes used instead to refer to narratives that are transmitted orally and tell of supernatural beings that can accomplish deeds that humans cannot, with the origins myth (known as a cosmogony [the origin/genesis of a system of order]) sometimes proposed as the prototypical example. For idealist scholars, myth, conceived as the expression of certain modes of thought, was traditionally understood to come before, and thus inspire, ritual. 'Myth' as a classification is now often used by functionalist scholars of religion to refer to any narrative that is used by a group of people to satisfy any basic need that a society or an individual may have.

Synagogue

[Greek synagogue, place to gather people together] term used to name the place of worship for Jewish people (segregated by gender in orthodox groups), though the ancient Hebrew term keneset might also be used (the latter is also the name of the national legislature in Israel) as well as the Yiddish shul (related to the German Schule, from which English derived 'school'). Synagogues typically contain an ark, where one finds copies of the Hebrew Torah scroll stored (Torah = the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, also known collectively as the Pentateuch), a lamp that is kept burning, and the bimah or platform on which the Torah is unrolled and read.

Tautology

[Greek tautos + logos = tautologia, repetition, explain by merely saying over again] saying something again but in different words, somewhat akin to the notion of a circular definition that defines something in light of itself, such as Paul Tillich's famous definition: 'in true faith an ultimate concern is a concern about the truly ultimate' (chpt. 1, Dynamics of Faith [1957]). To say something is tautological is usually a critique that identifies unnecessary repetition that fails to illuminate.

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.

Rhetoric

[Greek, from terms for speaker, speech, or words] specifically, the art of doing things with words but, more broadly, the act of shaping situations or expectations for effect. Narrowly, the instance of a rhetorical question exemplifies how some questions can be posed with no intent that they be answered, since just asking them has already had the speaker's desired effect (such as aggressively and argumentatively asking someone 'Are you stupid?!'). Rhetoric, then, is a term that can more generally name how it is that people fashion things to achieve desired outcomes (not just questions but perhaps their style of dress or perhaps the design of buildings or even the way they classify and thereby arrange the items in their world). Although often opposed to the assumption that words can instead have substance and thus meaning rather than just being decorative, this position itself could be considered rhetorical in support of a certain way of seeing the way we make and legitimize certain meanings.

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.

Identity

[Latin idem, denoting the same, a word still used in citations to indicate a quotation that derives from the same place as the previous one] term used to name that which is thought to define and distinguish a person, group, or thing from others: its identity. Whether this trait or feature is an essential or necessary item or something that is accidental or contingent (that is, arbitrary or merely the result of conditioning or learning), that is used for a variety of possible reasons, is where the debate on identity has remained for some time. For example, is Japanese identity based on an essential feature common to all those who are Japanese or, instead, are those who are defined as Japanese united by a collection of arbitrary traits that, if seen differently, would prompt us to conclude that the group was not as uniform as it at first appeared? See also family resemblance.

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.

Hinduism

[Sanskrit sindhu, meaning river, especially the body of water known today as the Indus River (in northeastern India), hence the region of the Indus, which today also names the entire nation-state of India] the name given to the mass social movement found originally in the sub-continent that is today known as India and dates to up to 1,500 years prior to the turn of the era; those who practice Hinduism refer to it as sanatana-dharma; it is a term for indigenous Indian religions, and is characterized by a diverse array of belief systems, practices, institutions, and texts. It is believed to have had its origin in the ancient Indo-Aryan Vedic culture, though this thesis is open to scholarly debate. Texts in Hinduism are separated into two categories: shruti (inspired [revealed scripture]) and smriti (remembered [epic literature]). The Veda, a body of texts recited by ritual specialists (brahmins) is considered shruti, whereas the Bhagavad Gita is considered to be smriti. Other smriti texts are the major epics: the Ramayana and the massive text known as the Mahabharata. Some of the commonly known deities are Vishnu, Brahma, Kali, Ganesha, Shiva, and Krishna. Studies of Hinduism will often focus on the role played by the dharma system (social system of duties and obligations), the caste system (similar to a class system but inherited), beliefs in karma (social actions result in future reactions), atman (the name for one's soul or self) and samsara (the term for the almost limitless cosmic system of rebirths), and the central role of brahmins (a caste of ritual specialists).

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.

Culture

[adaptation of Latin cultura, meaning cultivation, to tend, hence involving the notion of domestication] that portion of thought and behavior used by social groups that is learned and capable of being taught to others; culture can include: language, customs, worldviews, moral/ethical values, and religions. For those who believe that religion (or at least some elements of it, such as so-called religious experience) is somehow set apart from all other aspects of the historical world (making religion sui generis), the concept of culture is sometimes set apart from that of religion and they are thought to interact in specific ways—hence the 'and' that joins the popular designation 'culture and religion', a phrase found in the work of many scholars of religion. For yet others who are more anthropologically inclined, and who therefore see religious practices as but a sub-set of cultural behaviors, that can be explained in precisely the same manner as all other cultural attributes, it would be more appropriate to talk about 'religion in culture'.

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).

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

Intention

quality said to be possessed by agents; ability to have motivations, goals, and desires that direct one's actions. Traditional literary critics approached the study of texts in the effort to recover the original intentions of their authors, though a number of contemporary scholars now question the direct linkage once generally assumed to exist between the meaning of a text and the intention of its author.

Magic

term with Latin and, before that, Greek precursors that is used today both popularly and among scholars, with the latter group (at least in the late nineteenth century) being very interested to distinguish it from religion (inasmuch as both could be understood to be concerned with, among other things, influencing or manipulating events from a distance through cause/effect relationships different from day-to-day life (e.g., incantations, intercessory prayer, etc.). Among the intellectualists some speculated that magic formed an earlier stage in the eventual development of religion. Even the later sociologist, Émile Durkhiem, was interested in distinguishing religion from magic when he famously concluded that 'there is no church of magic' (that is, for him magic was not a social phenomenon). Today, though it is still used by scholars as a term to name a distinct set of claims and actions deserving of study, some would instead see it as a pejorative or at least rhetorical term whereby groups attempt to distinguish claims they see as alien and illegitimate (called by them magic) from those that are familiar and seen to be authoritative (understood as religious). See superstition.

Buddhism

the name given to a collection of beliefs, practices and institutions that developed from (sometimes said to be in reaction to) Hindu/Indian institutions and that revolve around the importance placed upon the teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, thought to have lived and taught in northwestern India between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Gautama is known by the honorary title of 'the Buddha' (which, in the language of Pali, means 'awakened one'). The Buddha is said to have awoken to the true nature of reality, thereby experiencing nirvana (to extinguish one's presumption of having a distinct, enduring self). His teachings involve understanding that all appearances are misleading and that impermanence, or change, is the basis of all reality. Several dominant branches of Buddhism exist today and it has distinctive shapes in different geographic locations (such as in southeast Asia as opposed to Tibet, China, Japan, Europe and North America). Studies of Buddhism will often begin by narrating the life of Gautama (given that it illustrates certain key ideas that come to symbolize basic Buddhist doctrines), and then focus on its critique of Hinduism's caste system as well as the doctrines known as the Four Noble Truths (credited to Gautama's first teaching after attaining enlightenment) and the Noble Eightfold Path (entailing a systematic behavioral system of detachment or mindfulness). Although 'Buddhism' is an outsider's term (coined under the earlier European presumption that this Asian mass movement is centered on the worship of the Buddha, just as Christianity was understood by them to be centered on the worship of the Christ), a more apt term for this tradition may be 'the Middle Path' (between the two extremes of craving and complete renunciation).

Judaism

the name given to a collection of beliefs, practices, and institutions that date at least to several hundred years prior to the turn of the era (though much further according to some members) and whose significant historical events transpired in the area of the world now known as the Middle East; although today considered a religious designation, to some it has always been merely an ethnic designation and—especially since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948—for yet others it designates a national identity (sometimes designating all three at once). The terms 'Jew', 'Jewish' and 'Judaism' derive from the ancient Hebrew y'hudi which is itself a derivative of the proper name Y'hudah or Judah, which means 'celebrated' and was the name of the fourth son of one of the group's ancient patriarchs, Jacob, as well as the name for the familial line (that is, tribe) that is said to have descended from him. Although one might talk of ancient Hebrew religion (involving twelve ancestral tribes, a distinctive role for the members of a priestly tribe, the centrality of temple worship, the ritual of priestly animal sacrifice, a period of enslavement in ancient Egypt, and a belief in a divine mandate to settle 'the promised land'), after the Exilic period (in which it is held that, for much of the sixth century BCE, Hebrews were conquered by the ancient Babylonian empire [specifically, a group called the Chaldeans] and forcibly removed from their land) the centrality of textual interpretation, the role of the rabbi (Hebrew: master) and the place of the synagogue (Greek: assembly, as a translation for the late Hebrew, keneseth) came to supplant the prior place of the temple and priests. Along with legal traditions and traditions of rabbinic commentary, the main scripture is known as TANAKH, an acronym standing for the letters that signify the three main bodies of work that constitute what is sometimes called the Hebrew Bible: Torah (the Law, which comprises the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), Neviim (the writings attributed to the Prophets), and Ketuvim 'the writings' (such as the more poetic book of Psalms that is attributed to the patriarch and one-time Hebrew king, David). Today, Jews are found worldwide, and the modern state of Israel (the so-called 'promised land') plays a particularly important role in the social identity for many Jews.

Christian/Christianity

the name given to a collection of beliefs, practices, and institutions that developed from out of the ancient Jewish, as well as the Greco-Roman, world of antiquity. Focused on the life and teachings of a turn-of-the-era Jew named Jesus of Nazareth, it began as an oppositional movement that was persecuted and, by the early fourth century CE, it had become tolerated throughout the Roman empire. Its teachings, found in its scripture called the Bible (from the Greek for paper, scroll, or book), include much of the previously existing Jewish scripture, including the Torah, along with the New Testament comprising the Gospels (from the Greek for 'good news'), which present various narrations of the life and significance of Jesus (including his resurrection from the dead after being executed by the Roman authorities), along with the Epistles (Latin epistola, meaning letter), comprising communications between early Christian leaders (such as the influential early converts from Judaism to Christianity and its most important early missionary, Paul [or Saul] of Tarsus) and various isolated early Christian communities or house churches. Jesus, considered early on to be the messiah ('anointed one of the Lord', a Hebrew designation originally of relevance to Jewish tradition) was soon understood by his followers to have been 'the son of God', and later in Christian doctrine is understood to have been one of three aspects of God (the trinity, also including God the Father and the Holy Spirit). The honorary title of 'Christ' (from khristos) derives from the Greek translation of the Hebrew mashiah; Christians are therefore followers of the one believed to be the Messiah. Currently, Christianity involves three major sub-types, some of which differ significantly from the others on issues of doctrine and ritual: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism (which contains a large number of sub-types), and Greek Orthodoxy.

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.

Functionalism

the view that, rather than some internal quality, things are defined by what they do and can be studied in terms of the purposes that they serve or the needs that they fulfill. Functionalists can study the social, political, or psychological role played by, for example, a myth or a ritual, examining how it functions either for the individual or how it contributes to maintaining an overall social structure into which the individual is placed. See essentialism, family resemblance.

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.