Approaches to the Study of Religion:

Important Names and Ideas


Religious Studies as an academic field:
Max Müller (1823-1900)

  • Religionswissenschaft (science of religion)

  • comparative method

  • Sacred Books of the East

Ninian Smart (1927-2001)

  • dimensional analysis (7 dimensions)

  • numinous / mystical

  • methodological agnosticism ("bracketing")

Donald Wiebe

  • need to separate theology and religious studies

  • The Politics of Religious Studies (1999)

Margaret Miles

  • religious studies should include theology

Jonathan Z. Smith

  • critique of Eliade

  • religious aspect of religious studies

Anthropology:

Edward Tylor (1832-1917)

  • animism

James George Frazer (1854-1941)

  • magic (homeopathic and contagious) and religion

  • totemism

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939)

  • "primitive mentality"

  • "law of participation"

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

  • magic, religion, and science

Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957)

  • rites of passage

Victor Turner (1920-1983)

  • rites of passage

  • liminality, communitas

Cliffod Geertz (1926- )

  • religion as a cultural system (and his definition)

Claude Lévy-Strauss (1908-)

  • structural theory of myth
Phenomenology (or "History of Religions," but not to be confused with history of religion in the conventional sense):
Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)

  • The Idea of the Holy (1917)

  • numinous

Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950)

  • phenomenology: categories and meanings

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)

  • sacred space, sacred time, centers, circles, axis mundi, etc.

  • history of religions (or religious studies) as a "new humanism"

Sociology

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

  • sacred and profane

  • mana (impersonal power)

  • magic and religion

  • gods (and totems) as projections of society (clan)

  • functionalism

Max Weber (1864-1920)

  • magic and religion

  • prophets: ethical and exemplary

  • "mysticism" and asceticism

  • world-rejecting (other-worldly) and "inner-worldly" (this-worldly)

  • rationalization

  • charisma

  • routinization

Psychology

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

  • id, ego, and superego

  • unconscious

  • Oedipus complex

Carl Jung (1875-1961)

  • • collective unconscious

  • archetypes

  • ego, anima, animus, shadow, Self

  • dreams and myths

William James (1842-1910)

  • religion as a private, interior affair

  • "healthy-minded" and "sick soul"

  • definition of mysticism

Erik Erikson (1902-1994)

  • psycho-history or psycho-biography (Luther, Gandhi)

  • eight stages (psycho-social crises)

Ecology/Biology

Åke Hultkrantz (1920- )

  • ecology of religion

  • "integration" of environment (natural and cultural) in religion

Walter Burkert (1931- )

  • ubiquity of religion rooted in biology

  • evolutionary adaptive value of religion

Eco-Feminism

Rosemary Ruether (1936- )

  • eco-feminism

Delores Williams (1936- )

  • "womanist" theory

Feminism

Mary Daly (1928- )

  • inclusivism vs. exclusivism

  • new language

Carol Christ

  • "androcentric veil"

  • ethos of objectivity vs. ethos of eros and empathy

  • prehistoric Goddesses

  • patriarchal notions of god, time, and text

Rita Gross

  • religious studies and the "value-free" model of science

  • paradigm shift to "bisexual model of humanity"

  • patriarchal power as model of all power relations

  • "prison" of gender roles

  • power should be earned

Philosophy (not covered in this course)

Ninian Smart (1927-2001)

John Hick (1922- )

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

Alvin Plantinga (1932- )

David Hume (1711-1776)

many others