Ch.4 Vocab

Willi Braun

After receiving his PhD in 1993 from the University of Toronto, in Christian origins, then holding a postdoctoral fellowship there and after that working briefly at Bishop's University, in Quebec, Braun spent the rest of his career at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, where he taught undergraduate students while also supervising doctoral students in a broad range of areas, all generally focused on religion in the ancient world. His interests range from social theories of origins and the socio-political function of myth and rhetoric, to theories of history as well as an emphasis on studying the tools scholars use when they go about studying religion. He was the longtime co-editor of the scholarly journal Method & Theory in the Study of Religion as well as being past president of both the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) and the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies (CSBS). Braun has exerted a significant though subtle influence on the modern study of religion through his collaborative relationships and patient engagement with international scholars from a broad range of specialties. Braun on religion Braun is among a small group of textual specialists in one data domain who also have far wider interests in the field itself (a rare combination), exemplified by his own work in Christian origins (consider his first book, Feasting and Social Rhetoric in Luke 14 [1995; reissued in 2005]—a detailed study that combines the analysis of New Testament texts with work on Greco-Roman social practices of the time) combined with his now close identification with work on methods and theories that scholars from all specialties use when going about their studies (which, in part, resulted from the significant role he played editing the above-mentioned international journal as well as his involvement in a number of field-wide projects, such as co-editing the Guide to the Study of Religion [2000]). For Braun, religion is a mundane element of human communities that can be studied in the same fashion as any other social practice, something evident from his long participation in a collaborative scholarly working group whose aim was to redescribe the beginnings of Christianity, doing so as scholars and social theorists would rather than as might early participants of the groups themselves (as recorded in those texts known as the New Testament as well as in the various documents from that era that were not included in the canon). The basic premise of such work is that insiders have rather different motives and goals, when telling tales of their own group's origins, than do non-participants (notably scholars)—a fact evident both when listening to elder family members compete among themselves when each telling their version of the family's past (their myths) as well as when reading different or alternative versions of any one nation's history. Given that religion is a contingent, human institution like any other, scholars such as Braun reason that explaining the establishment of a group (such as those we today refer to as the earliest Christians) requires scholars to take group members' own origins narratives not as neutral statements of historical fact (as we sometimes do) but, rather, as strategic attempts at persuading listeners to join the speaker's cause.

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.

Empirical

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

Counter-intuitive

to go against so-called common sense or what someone might claim to know intuitively and thus without needing evidence or practical examples. See anomaly.

Bruce Lincoln

After obtaining his PhD in 1976 at the University of Chicago, studying the history of religions under the direction of, among others, Mircea Eliade, Bruce Lincoln held an appointment at the Center for Humanistic Studies at the University of Minnesota before returning to the University of Chicago where he is today the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of Religions. As with many classically trained historians of religions trained during the height of Chicago's influence in the field, Lincoln's work emphasizes the acquisition of ancient languages and a focus on texts to study myth and ritual; his data is derived from broad historical and cultural areas: from ancient Iran and India to Native American traditions, Norse mythology, the colonial era in Africa, and the Spanish revolution of the late 1930s. However, unlike many of his peers, he is interested in studying cultural practices as elements of systems in which power and privilege are being contested (rather than studying symbols, myths, and rituals as the phenomena that are merely public expressions of essential, deep meanings). As such, the influence of Marxist social theory is apparent in his work, as is the role played by discourse analysis (as associated with the field of semiotics). Lincoln on religion Unlike classical Marxist theorists of religion, Lincoln studies religious discourse not so much as an opiate, dulling working-class sensibilities and thereby oppressing them, but as the name given to one among many rhetorical strategies upon which groups—whether dominant or marginal—routinely draw to normalize their various claims to authority. This approach has led him to focus his scholarship on how social boundaries are contested, inverted, and legitimized, through narratives, behaviors, and the manipulation of symbols. This focus enables him to move well beyond the traditional data examined by previous generations of scholars of religion—apparent in his study of how authority is contested and reproduced at a variety of historical and social sites. Although much of his work continues to comprise a close reading of texts in their context (in the tradition of his earlier work on the ideology of the Hindu text known as the Veda), Lincoln is also widely known for studying the social and political contexts of scholarly texts on religion and myth, demonstrating the manner in which scholarship itself is the product of national and class interests. Most recently, Lincoln has entered the realm of public discourse by writing a series of op-ed pieces in US daily newspapers, in which he examines the techniques and the geo-political effects of contemporary political rhetoric.

Comparison

[Latin comparare, to liken things to one another] the act of placing two or more items alongside one another (that is, to juxtapose), after having described each, in an attempt to identify their similarities or differences. Historically, it was the method favored by early scholars of religion (in the late nineteenth century, when the field was sometimes known as comparative religion) but then used mainly to identify similarities, in search of either the common source or essence of religion. Today, comparison is just as likely an exercise to determine the differences by which we distinguish items from each other, such as claiming that this person is Dutch while that person is Danish. In addition, scholars now recognize that the comparison of any two items requires a third (but often unstated) element: the way in which they will be compared (nationality, in the just-used example), indicating that items in the world do not naturally compare themselves but, instead, comparison is always the result of the comparativist's prior choices and curiosities (whether explicit or not).

Karl Marx

Although he was not primarily concerned with studying religion, as a political theorist Marx was interested in the social function religion played and how it made certain political and economic systems possible. Born in Prussia and originally trained as a philosopher, the young Marx turned from philosophy toward the study of economics and politics. In the early 1840s, he formed a life-long friendship with Friedrich Engels (1820-95), with whom he co-wrote a number of his most famous works and who often financially supported Marx and his family. Historical materialism—the name given to Marx's theory of history—is based on the idea that the systems that organize and make possible human productive power (what he termed the modes of production) create the conditions in which human consciousness takes shape. As a materialist, Marx phrased it as follows: 'it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness'. His interest in political economy, therefore, had much to do with studying both systems of social rank and privilege, on the one hand, and systems of value and exchange, on the other, along with the types of thought and forms of identity they made possible. Marx paid particular attention to what he considered to be the harmful effects of the economic system known as capitalism; his critique was premised on his assumption that human labor ought to provide an opportunity to meet our inherent need for creative, fulfilling work. Inasmuch as capital (the profit that results from exchanging a product [what we could term a commodity] for more than it cost to produce) remains in the hands of those who own the production process (that is, those who own the means of production), and not necessarily in the hands of the person whose labor actually made the product (the worker), Marx concluded that workers in capitalist systems were exploited; he termed the working class 'the proletariat', from the Latin proles, meaning offspring; in ancient Rome, the proletarius was the lowest class of citizens. The proletariat, or wage laborers, do not own their own means of production (that is, they own no property and therefore have no access to accumulated wealth, or capital) and therefore have nothing to exchange but their own labor (that is, their bodies and their creativity) in order to make a living. The proletariat therefore live in a constant state of alienation—alienated from the results of their labor (whose purchase price had little to do with the wages they were paid to produce it) as well as from their own essentially creative human nature which has itself become little more than a commodity. Marx on religion In his efforts to explain how oppressive political and economic conditions were perpetuated, and how people lived within such systems, Marx turned his attention to religion—understood by him as an ideological institution premised on the belief in a god and in an afterlife. According to Marx, religion—like all belief systems—is a product of material realities (that is, who owns what) and thus a product of economic and political conditions. Thus, the problems of religion (such issues as salvation, suffering, redemption, punishment, guilt, etc.) are ultimately expressions of practical problems that exist within society; more explicitly, the problems of religion are merely a projection of problems with how social relations are organized. Religion—the belief in a better life to come—is therefore a symptom of oppressive social conditions. It is used by oppressors to distract people from the economic conditions in which they are forced to live and it is used by those who are exploited to cope with their lot in life—a form of coping with exploitation and alienation that, ironically, prevents them from ever changing the actual social conditions under which they live, for change is always removed from today to tomorrow, from this life to the next. Hence, for Marx, religion is famously identified as the 'opium of the masses'—it distracts and soothes people whose lives have been reduced to commodities. But by distracting and soothing them, by allowing them to put up with their lot in life, religion perpetuates the actual source of the problem—which lies in the realm of politics and economics, not theology.

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). Woodhead on religion 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.

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.

Rodney Stark

Although recognized as one of the leading contemporary US sociologists of religion, Rodney Stark initially studied journalism at the University of Denver and began his career as a reporter for the Denver Post in 1956. After a brief stint in the US Army, Stark enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his PhD in sociology in 1971. From 1971 to 2003, Stark was professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington. Recently, he accepted an appointment as University Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University. Stark's extensive writing in the field of Christianity, which he has used as a domain to test his work in rational choice theory of religion, culminated in his book, The Rise of Christianity, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. Stark on religion Collaborating with William Sims Bainbridge, Rodney Stark proposed a series of deductions in order to uncover the two key components that both felt propelled religious participants: motives and exchanges. Using the model of rational choice theory, Stark and Bainbridge published A Theory of Religion (1987), in which they base the crux of their theory on seven basic axioms: (1) Human perception and action take place through time, from the past into the future. (2) Humans seek what they perceive to be rewards and avoid what they perceive to be costs. (3) Rewards vary in kind, value, and generality. (4) Human action is directed by a complex but finite information-processing system that functions to identify problems and attempt solutions to them. (5) Some desired rewards are limited in supply, including some that simply do not exist. (6) Most rewards sought by humans are destroyed when they are used. (7) Individual and social attributes, which determine power, are unequally distributed among persons and groups in any society. Employing the form of a deductive theory of religion, Stark and Bainbridge attempted to create a theoretical framework for the social-scientific study of religion. In his book, The Rise of Christianity (1996), Stark works within this sociological framework to argue that historically significant events (such as Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity) were secondary to the benefits realized through people's rational exchange of paganism, with its limited benefits, for Christianity, which was understood to hold greater promise of future benefits. For example, Stark demonstrates that the poor treatment of women under Roman law and culture significantly contributed to many women becoming believers in Christianity. By positing the Christian God as an 'exchange partner' capable of offering immense benefit to those who believe—both in this life and the one believed to come after—Rodney Stark further explicated the trajectory of polytheism to monotheism from the ancient world to the modern era in his more recent work, One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism.

Ninian Smart

Born in Cambridge, UK, Ninian Smart was classically trained at Oxford University in languages, history and philosophy, after first having served as a young man in Ceylon (now named Sri Lanka) in the mid- to late 1940s as a member of the British Army Intelligence Corps. But it was as a scholar of religion that he made his lasting international mark, notably at (among the many other universities at which he taught) the University of Lancaster, in the UK, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, in the US. Beginning in 1967 at Lancaster, and 1976 at UCSB, he played a pivotal role at both institutions in helping to establish thriving programs in the academic study of religion—a role that had much to do with not only his many writings on the proper method for conducting the public study of religion, as well as his well-known cross-cultural research on many of the world's religions, but also the long list of graduate students he trained throughout the years. To signify his tremendous impact on the international field, the Ninian Smart Annual Memorial Lecture was established after his death, with the location rotating each year between Lancaster and Santa Barbara. The first such lecture, delivered in Lancaster, was presented by Mary Douglas in 2002, followed by Jonathan Z. Smith in 2003. In 2005 the lecture was presented by Wendy Doniger. Smart on religion Smart is, perhaps, best known today as a phenomenologist of religion. Many of his works—some of which are known to the contemporary student as world religions textbooks—were descriptive in nature, chronicling the traits that he argued constituted those things we commonly name as 'religions'. What he called his 'dimension theory of religion' named a collection of aspects or family of traits that typified religions. These dimensions—which include such traits as a narrative and behavioral component (that is, myths and rituals), an institutional component, and an aesthetic component—could, he argued, be found in many other human institutions; therefore, Smart favored using the broader term 'worldviews'—thereby admitting nationalism, for example, to the group of phenomena studied—so as not to arbitrarily limit the scholar's work only to what we had traditionally known as religions. His early advocacy for what was once called a 'secular' study of religion, in contradistinction from a theological approach, placed him at the forefront of those who developed the modern institution known as religious studies, though he also retained an interest in such topics as inter-religious dialogue, which animated his late-in-life support for what he termed a 'World Academy of Religion' in which scholars of religion would interact with learned theologians from the world's many religious traditions.

Rational choice theory

a modern form of social theory applied to the study of religion, and derived from theories of economics that attempted to account for the means by which consumers made their selections among alternatives. Rational choice theory, favored by a number of US sociologists of religion, such as Rodney Stark, argues that such things as church membership are based on a series of sensible decisions made by participants, based on their assessment of costs and benefits (or gains and losses). For those benefits that cannot be had immediately (or in this life, such as justice), a series of compensators are drawn upon that make up for the lack of the primary goal.

Kim Knott

Having worked at the University of Leeds from 1982 to 2012, and carried out her earlier work in the study of Hinduism and new religious movements, Kim Knott is now a member of the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, in England, and leads the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threat, which devotes itself to examining how ideas, beliefs, and values are transmitted—though her longstanding interests have concerned such topics of sacred place, secularism, religious diversity, immigration, and inter-religious dialogue, carried out in such research areas as the present of Asian religions in the UK. Among her books are: Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction (1998), My Sweet Lord: The Hare Krishna Movement (1986), The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis (2005) and Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred: Representation and Change (2013). Knott on religion Her current work addresses how religion as well as those socio-political frameworks that we today call the secular (and even what some term the post-secular) are arranged and the roles they each play in wider public conversations (as in media and politics). Accordingly, she is interested in both religion but also the context in which we come to know things as religious vs. secular, aiming to, as she has phrased it, break open the secular so as to explore the boundary between religion and non-religion and the way other so-called non-religious deeply held beliefs and values contribute to establishing and contesting people's worldviews.

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.

Materialism

a philosophical viewpoint that prioritizes matter or the physical world over mind or spirit, the latter being derived from the former; to be distinguished from philosophical idealism.

Hans Penner

Longtime scholar of religion at Dartmouth University (retiring in 2001), a Department Chair and also a former Dean of Arts and Science there, Hans Penner earned his PhD in the history of religions at the University of Chicago (1965), studying with Mircea Eliade—of whose work Penner became critical later in life. His own work ranged widely, with contributions on religions in India, the study of myth and ritual, as well as what has come to be known as method and theory in the study of religion (work on the tools and techniques used by scholars in going about their work). Among his major works are: Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion (1989) and Rediscovering the Buddha: The Legends and Their Interpretations (2009) as well as his edited volume Teaching Lévi-Strauss (1999), and his co-edited Language, Truth, and Religious Belief (1999), as well as his early contributions to the English edition of Gerardus van der Leeuw's classic, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1963). Penner on religion Eliade is right without doubt about the birth of the history of religions coming out of the well-known traditions of 'orientalism' and the classical treatises on 'primitive religions'. There is, however, a third tradition that is curiously missing in Eliade's analysis: the tradition of theology. It may well be the case that the influence of this tradition on the history of religions is so obvious that it need not be mentioned. If this is not true, then it becomes all the more urgent to account for why it was repressed. Why, for example, are we constantly perplexed about the influence of a small book called The Idea of the Holy? The sign of what is wrong is that theologians like Otto are relegated to footnotes in monographs on the history of religions. It is almost as if we were in a state of amnesia in our perplexity about Otto's influence in the publications of historians of religion . . . . The ghosts of Otto, van der Leeuw, Wach, and other theologians will simply not be put to rest by generous quotes from Freud, Malinowski, Durkheim, Frazer, and Tylor.

Burton Mack

Now retired from the Claremont School of Theology, in California, Burton Mack carried out his doctoral studies in Germany and has played a leading role in helping the modern field of New Testament studies reinvent itself as the historically grounded field of Christian origins. The texts of the earliest Christians are therefore of relevance to Mack neither for the meaning they convey nor for their accuracy in depicting the origins of the movement, but because they are understood as artifacts (or better put, subsequent copies of long lost originals) from a series of particular historical worlds out of which a social movement began and grew. Although many contemporary scholars of religion studying the New Testament continue to do so in a traditional manner (engaging in hermeneutical studies), Mack helped to pave the way for current studies which examine the texts as evidence of self-perceived marginal groups contesting social boundaries and experimenting with alternative ways of building social identity in the turn-of-the-era Greco-Roman world. As such, the texts are understood by Mack as myths—not in the sense of lies or innocently fanciful tales but in the sense of narratives that reflect and advance specific ways of representing the world and, along with it, one's place in it. For example, his study of the Gospel of Mark concludes that one would be mistaken to read it as a historical narrative that can be judged accurate or not; instead, the text comprises a myth of origins conducive to the interests and needs of its writer and his community. Mack's work therefore also closely examines non-canonical texts (texts from the same era as those subsequently included in the Bible but which early Christian leaders excluded from their authoritative collections, or canon [from the Latin for rule or measuring line]) as well as the 'Q' document. Such non-canonical resources are useful for those attempting to gain information on the earliest forms of the social movement rather than simply reading authoritative texts which portray the origins of the movement as later generations understood it to have taken place. Mack on religion For those who consider writing the history of a religion to require special methods capable of communicating their essence and enduring meaning and value, Mack's work is likely controversial for it locates the beginnings of early Christianity within a mundane, but no less interesting, Hellenistic social world. Yet for those who understand Christianity to be a social movement like any other—with a variety of beginning points and a complex history of efforts to unify group members' perceived identities, interests, and their representations of both—Mack's work is welcomed as an attempt to account for the rise of this movement in a way that does not take for granted the historical accuracy of participants' own attempts to represent its origins (bringing to mind issues associated with the insider/outsider problem). Seeing the earliest texts as data in need of analysis, Mack brings a number of social theoretical tools to his readings, concluding that the texts provide evidence of their authors' attempts to construct and legitimize particular social worlds in which their group's interests could be accomplished. When it comes to questions concerning the identity of the historical Jesus (as opposed to what theologians might term the 'Jesus of faith'), Mack concludes that we might be able to understand this historical actor better if we use as our model the itinerant (that is, wandering) Cynic teacher easily found in this era, in this part of the world (Cynicism names a loosely organized yet influential turn-of-the-era Hellenistic philosophical movement characterized by its critique of wealth, emphasis on living a modest and virtuous life, as well as specific types of persuasive argumentation). This model, Mack argues, is helpful in understanding Jesus and the early Jesus movements, especially in light of his reading of Q as having originally contained a collection of wisdom sayings attributed to Jesus. It should therefore be clear that, for Mack, religion is the name given to a collection of social and rhetorical techniques and institutions that accomplish what he refers to as mythmaking and social formation—the intertwined means by which the conditions favorable to collective life are made possible and reproduced over time and place. As such, he draws on the work of a variety of theorists in his studies of the New Testament, from Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim to Jonathan Z. Smith and a number of current anthropological theorists. Mack's own influence among scholars both within and outside the field of Christian origins (an example of the former would be William Arnal), therefore, can be linked to his willingness to suspend the common assumption that the texts we come to know as scriptures constitute a distinct domain or a special case, requiring unique methods for their study; instead, his scholarship has worked toward studying such texts as a social theorist would study any text.

Pascal Boyer

Originally trained in Paris and then at Cambridge University, Pascal Boyer currently teaches in both the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. While his earlier work was carried out in cultural anthropology, his main area of interest is how human memory works—how ideas are acquired, stored, and transmitted—both within individuals as well as in those collections of individuals that we know as cultures. As with many who today are part of the cognitive science of religion (a relatively young field but one that has produced a surprising amount of research over the past decade), his work, which is based on the assumption that human minds have evolved over time to function as they currently do, combines traditional anthropological fieldwork with laboratory experiments, in an effort to develop explanatory theories of religion's origins and function, as opposed to interpretations of its meaning (as in hermeneutical studies). Although hardly the only naturalistic way to explain the causes and functions of religion, those scholars of religion who are today grouped together under the banner of cognitive theory have certainly proved to be among the most organized and ambitious of those working toward a theory of religion. Drawing upon findings from recent cognitive psychology (notably such fields as early childhood studies), linguistics, and theories of mind, a loosely knit group of scholars of religion, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists—working both in Europe and North America—have, since the early 1990s, rather quickly developed a coherent, collaborative research project. Although once primarily associated with the ground-breaking, co-written work of E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley (such as their Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition to Culture [1990] or their more recent Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms [2002]), today a variety of new, and largely young, scholars are now associated with what has become one of the most active and intellectually rigorous subfields within the modern study of religion. Currently, the model offered by Boyer has had the most impact among cognitivists (though the fieldwork-based theory of the Irish anthropologist, Harvey Whitehouse, has grown increasingly influential as well). Boyer on religion Boyer argues that human beings' minds are wired in such a way that a slightly counter-intuitive idea (about, say, what an agent can and cannot do) is particularly appealing to human memory systems. Deviate too far from our evolutionarily derived commonsense, or intuitive, expectations concerning such things as agency, and such novel ideas cannot compete very well in what is a pretty competitive economy of ideas and sensations circulating in the brain (that is, they are easily forgotten and thus not retained, much less transmitted). As Boyer argues in such books as The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (1994) and Religion Explained (2001), beliefs in the existence of beings who are very similar to how human beings see themselves (as in their appearance, the extent to which they can act, etc.) but who, for instance, do not die, know everything, and are not limited by the usual constraints of a body, are very appealing to our memory systems, thus making ideas about such beings easily remembered, which gives such ideas a considerable competitive advantage over other ideas when it comes to their transmission from one mind to another. To borrow from another anthropologist, Dan Sperber, who uses an epidemiological metaphor (as used in Explaining Culture [1996]), Boyer theorizes that these minimally counter-intuitive ideas stand out just enough to make them catchy. The underlying assumption, here, of course, is that, at the end of the day, those things that we study when we examine culture can be reduced to sets of ideas retained in, and transmitted between, human minds—ideas such as whether it is worthwhile to memorize and recite a particular set of texts, let alone memorize and retain the specificity of the character set in which it is encoded. Therefore, among the most basic ways of accounting for cross-cultural similarities, including those beliefs and practices we commonly call religion, is to account for the origination and transmission of these ideas, especially those ideas that fit the minimal requirements of being modestly counter-intuitive.

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.

Sacrifice

[Latin, to make sacred] thought by early scholars of religion to constitute an archaic and thus evolutionarily early religious form, in which animals were literally killed (as a stand in or representative of something else), portions of which were offered to the gods while other parts were cooked and sometimes distributed within the group in a strictly followed fashion, today a wide variety of theories of sacrifice can be found, which range from trying to understand the actual practice (sometimes also known as blood-letting) to the widely present rhetoric of sacrifice, such as the quotation of the biblical John 15:13 that can be found inscribed at war memorials in some countries or in some Christian churches: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'.

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.

Sui generis

[from Latin, designates a thing that belongs to its own kind; peculiar; unique; self-caused] this term has been used to designate the claim that religion or religious experience is of a kind wholly unique and thus irreducible. If religion is sui generis then it is a thing of a kind incomparable with any other social institution or practice and therefore cannot be explained using a naturalistic theory of religion. Arguments for the unique nature of religion were successfully used in the 1950s and 1960s to help establish autonomous Departments of Religious Studies—insomuch as the studies of anthropologists or sociologists, to name but two, were thought to overlook and obscure the irreducible element (or essence): religious experience. See reductionism.

William E. Arnal

Trained as a scholar of Christian origins and specializing in the study of 'Q'—which stands for the German word for source or origin, Quelle, used to name a source document comprised of sayings of Jesus that scholars theorize must have existed in the earliest years of the social movement that comes to be known as Christianity—William Arnal's interest in Marxist social theory has led him to write considerably further afield than many scholars who work on early Christianity. Arnal carried out his doctoral work at the University of Toronto, under the direction of John Kloppenborg, the internationally noted Q specialist, earning his PhD in 1997, with his dissertation winning the Governor General's Gold Medal. He is widely published in the field's leading periodicals and has held academic appointments at New York University, the University of Manitoba, and is currently Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. Arnal has served as Vice-President of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) and as the English-language editor for Canada's primary academic journal in the field, Studies in Religion. Arnal on religion Unlike those who classify themselves as New Testament scholars, Arnal is among a group of scholars who study the texts and the context of early Christianity in order to shed light not on the meaning these texts might have had for their early writers or for their modern readers but, rather, on the Hellenistic social world from out of which Christianity began. Hence, as a scholar of Christian origins, Arnal employs social theory to help account for the shape taken by the early community and its spread. Although trained in the traditional tools of languages and textual criticism, it is his interest in theory that has led Arnal to work more broadly in the study of religion; his interest in the political implications of the category 'religion' itself prompts one to think of him as a meta-theorist. While being among the leaders of a new generation of specialists in early Christianity, Arnal has also developed a readership among those who are not necessarily specialists in Christian origins. More than likely it is the enduring theological presumption of the privileged place occupied by Christianity in the history of the world that prompts few scholars of early Christianity to consider themselves to be contributing to the wider field of religious studies. In fact, in many university curricula the designation 'history of religions' (or 'world religions') is applied only to those who study religions outside of the so-called Western religions—those 'others' not identified with either Judaism (prominent for its role in the beginnings of early Christianity) and Christianity. We see here the remnants of the Christian (generally Protestant) seminary model on which the academic study of religion was originally founded. Countering this longstanding theological trend, Arnal's interest in social theory and critique guarantees that, despite working on a specific data domain (that is, the texts of early Christianity), his work constitutes an application of more general theories regarding how groups contest identity and resources. A suitable example is his latest book, The Symbolic Jesus (2005), which applies political and discourse analysis to modern scholarly representations of Jesus' Jewish identity, in an effort not to recover the authentic Jesus (as generally carried out in research on the historical Jesus) but, instead, to investigate one instance of how symbolic representations are employed as a strategy whereby contesting groups reproduce themselves.

Expression

[from Latin, to press out or to project outward] common term used today to name either a phrase (such as 'a German expression') or a look someone might offer ('a facial expression'), both based on the assumption of people possessing an inner identity that is only secondarily conveyed outward, into the public space, by means of language or some other symbol system. Often used in the study of religion as synonymous with the term 'manifestation', assuming that religious symbols, narrative, or practices are a secondary instance of a prior and causal sentiment, often called belief, conscience, faith, or experience. See phenomenology.

Anomaly

[Greek anomalia, unequal or uneven] an event or situation that defies expectation or is abnormal; something irregular that deviates from and thus fails to meet a rule. Classifying something as anomalous, at least for such a scholar as Mary Douglas, can therefore be a key indicator concerning the presence of a rule system that has failed to work in all cases.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Author

[Latin auctor, one who produces, creates, even parents] term used widely today to name the one who writes a text and thus the one whose meanings and intentions can be accessed by what some call 'a close reading of the text'. The so-called mid-twentieth-century 'death of the author' movement in literary criticism has examined the assumptions necessary to attribute a text's meaning to an author, concluding that, although texts were surely written by writers, the idea of the author is a product of the reader's imagination. See intention.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

Atheism

a term that combines the Greek theos, meaning god + the negative prefix a- which often denotes the negative form of a word; the philosophical position that denies the existence of God or the gods; to be distinguished from theism and agnosticism.

Ahistorical

adding the prefix a- to the start of a word in English will often denote the opposite of the term, resulting in this case in a word signifying something that is thought not to have a history, such as something that is claimed to be necessary or transcendent and therefore not contingent or immanent. See also history.

Insider/outsider problem

although termed a problem it is likely better understood as the situation in which people sometimes find themselves when challenged to understand others, since a translation is not to be confused with a word-for-word transcription. Instead, there are times when the gap between participants and non-participants is apparent and, in the case of scholars, the observer is challenged to devise ways either to overcome it or account for it. See emic/etic.

Sanskrit

an ancient Indo-European language that began on the Indian subcontinent; somewhat like Latin once functioned in the Roman Catholic church, it is today the ritual language used in the sacred texts of Hinduism and some of the texts of Buddhism.

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.

Interpretation

see hermeneutics. -- [Greek hermeneutikos, meaning translator or interpreter] the precise history of the term is unknown, though some trace it to the name of the Greek god Hermes (known by the Romans as Mercury) who served as a messenger for the gods; others trace it to Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek name for the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, said to have been the founder of alchemy and other such secret sciences. In any case, hermeneutics is that branch of study that deals with interpretation, both the act of interpretation as well as the academic study of the methods and theories of interpretation. Often associated with the interpretation of scripture, as in the long history of hermeneutics in the field of biblical studies, hermeneutics presupposes that the object of study must be understood for its meaning and that this meaning can only be adequately understood if it is interpreted and translated in precise and correct ways. See also explanation, phenomenology of religion, positivism, and reductionism.

Reductionism

an approach to the creation of new knowledge that attempts to account for one level of phenomena in terms of a more basic series of propositions, much as observations from the world of biology (such as monitoring the growth rate of cells) can be explained by reducing them to the language of chemistry, which in turn can be reduced to the theories of physics. In the study of religion, reductionism is often criticized for 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'; in other words, those who presume that religion is sui generis argue that reducing religion to, for example, sociology, and thereby explaining it completely as a sociological phenomenon, misses the irreducibly religious character of the belief, act, symbol, or institution. Although religion undoubtedly has a social dimension, as Ninian Smart would have argued, it cannot completely be reduced to sociology—or psychology, or political economy, for that matter. For yet others who consider religion to be a thoroughly human institution, there is no choice but to study it by means of reductionistic, naturalistic theories derived from such domains as psychology, sociology, etc. In fact, even scholars who favor non-reductionistic approaches have little choice but to reduce, since their cross-cultural work necessarily must use comparative categories, such as Mircea Eliade's use of 'the sacred', by means of which the language of participants is reduced to the language of the analyst. See hermeneutics, phenomenology, positivism.

Humanities

an organizational title given to that area of the modern university that usually includes such academic disciplines as the study of literatures, languages, theater, philosophy, history—all of which are often presumed to study various expressions of the enduring human spirit as it is manifested in the conscious, intentional, and most importantly meaningful, actions of agents in different historical periods and regions. Once taken out of theological studies, the academic study of religion is often placed within humanities divisions of the university because its presumed object of study—religious experience—is often held to be a key ingredient to human nature. See social sciences.

Meaning

common term used today in folk or popular discourse but, in a technical sense, it is generally used in two different ways by scholars. First, much as in the popular usage, many use it to name what is assumed to be a pre-linguistic feature that is conveyed by means of a sign system, such as language, from one person or item to another (for example, a sentence can mean something just as can a person). Second, it is used to name a post-linguistic product that is created, as opposed to merely being carried, by means of language's rules. For the first approach, meaning is often assumed to be a private and individual matter that is only subsequently expressed (as in projected or pushed outward) in public while, for the second approach, it is considered to be a public phenomenon that exists only inasmuch as speakers and listeners, or writers and readers, collaborate within the same set of symbolic rules. See also hermeneutics.

Postmodernism

contrary to modernism, postmodernism denotes a skeptical attitude that follows on the heels of a confidence that was characteristic of pre-World War I Europe, the site of the rise of industrialization, the establishment of the nation-state, and capitalism. Influenced by existentialism, postmodernism first takes hold in such areas as architecture and art, where disjunction is used to draw attention to the manufactured nature of all items of culture; because uniformity, such as windows on a building all being aligned with each other, is not natural or inevitable, but, instead, actively constructed, postmodernists draw attention to this constructive activity in a way previously unseen in art, architecture, etc. Contrary to realist art, then, postmodern works draw the viewer's eye to the composition of the artwork, aspects that had previously been overlooked. In literature and philosophy, postmodernism comes to name a movement that problematizes the previous attitude toward the inherent links between intentions, words, and meanings; meaning-making therefore comes to be seen as an ongoing activity with direct relevance for context, such that postmodernists are often criticized as relativists.

Cross-/inter-disciplinary

studies that have gained prominence over the past two or three academic generations, in which the item(s) being examined are presumed to be complex and therefore to surpass the competencies of any one academic approach (or what is now commonly termed a discipline, from Latin for instruction, training, even self-control, but also to tame and thereby make sense of some domain under study). In the study of religion the field (significantly not called a discipline by some) is often claimed to surpass traditional (and supposedly limited) disciplinary boundaries, such that, for instance, a sociological or economic approach is needed but is not exhaustive of the item(s) being studied, which might also invite a psychological approach, a literary approach, a political approach, etc.

Evolution

developed in the nineteenth century by such scholars as Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin (1809-82) to explain biological change in a population from generation to generation by such processes as random mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift. The much criticized theory known in the nineteenth century as social Darwinism names a school of thought that applied this biological theory to account for cultural and racial changes over time and place (assuming a uniform, linear development from so-called lower or primitive cultures to so-called higher or civilized cultures). Today, teaching evolutionary biological theory in public schools is controversial in some areas of the US due to the manner in which it is understood by some Christians to contradict a literal reading of the creation of the world as found in the Bible's book of Genesis. Although so-called creationism, creation science, and what is now known as intelligent design, have all been proposed as an alternative to evolutionary theory, and in some cases are taught alongside it in public schools, so far no non-Christian views on the creation of the universe (such as the Hindu view whereby the god Brahma periodically creates a new universe from raw material that remains after the god Shiva destroys the previous one, which had decayed to the point of utter corruption) have gained sufficient support in the US to prompt them also to be taught in the public school system as competitors to evolutionary theory.

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.

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.

Methodological agnosticism

see 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.

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.

Colonialism

the economic or political control or governing influence of one nation-state over another (a dependent country, territory, or people); also, the extension of a nation's sovereignty over another outside of its boundaries to facilitate economic domination over the latter's resources and labor usually to the benefit of the controlling country. Although not limited to European nations, the rapid expansion of their influence all across the globe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries today attracts a great deal of attention among scholars and has led to the development of a new field known as postcolonial studies, which focuses on the implications of, and local reactions to, the colonial era.

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.

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.

Political economy

the systematic study (science) of the manner in which systems that govern power and privilege are interconnected with systems that govern patterns of exchange and the valuation of goods; the earlier name for what is today often referred to simply as economics.

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.

Semiotics

the systematic study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative systems of behavior; a theory of how signs come to be meaningful, based upon linguistic theory which assumes that meaning is not an essential quality expressed by symbols but, instead, the result of relationships established and managed by means of structures (such as a grammar or the rules of a game). See structuralism.

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.

Human sciences

those academic studies of minds, texts, social institutions, political organization, and economic activity that seek to develop theories that explain human behavior rather than offer an interpretation of, or appreciation for, the meaning of the behavior or its various artifacts (such as texts, art, architecture, etc.). This classification of work carried out in the modern university provides an alternative to the traditional division of social sciences versus humanities insomuch as 'the human sciences' groups together fields previously studied separately in either of these other divisions, understanding all elements of human social life to be subject to the tools of observation, analysis, generalization, and explanation. Practiced as part of the human sciences, the study of religion seeks not to discover the meaning of religiosity but its causes and practical implications.

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.