Notes
Notes introduction. modern dilemmas in writing on religion 1. For a fine example of this type of work, see Peter Homans, The Ability to Mourn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 2. The novel is available in English as Bengal Nights, trans. Catherine Spencer (London: Carcanet, 1993). For Eliade’s work on yoga, see Mircea Eliade , Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 1958). 3. See Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), chaps. 1 and 4. 4. See Geertz’s “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture ,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. On Geertz’s life, see his autobiographical essay, “Passage and Accident, a Life of Learning,” in his Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–20. 5. See the essays in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds., Guide to the Study of Religion (London: Cassell, 2000). 6. See, e.g., Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford, 2000) together with its reviews by Benson Saler, Gustavo Benavides , and Frank Korom and a response by Fitzgerald in Religious Studies Review 27, no. 2 (Apr. 2001): 103–15. chapter 1. fascinated scientists and empathizing theologians 1. This program has been admirably presented by J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). 239 2. See, e.g., ibid., chap. 5; and Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 168–83. 3. This is a Deist vision. See Manuel, Eighteenth Century, chap. 2. The work of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, whom Thomas Halyburton called “the Father of English Deism,” has been recently translated by John Anthony Butler: Pagan Religion : A Translation of “De religione gentilium” (Ottawa, Canada: Dovehouse Editions, 1996), citation from p. 21. Also preceding Hume were Euhemerists, finding the origins of myth in historical persons and events, often through complex historical and scientific argument. The most famous of these was the scientist Isaac Newton; see Manuel, Eighteenth Century, chap. 3. For Newton’s religion see Frank E. Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1974). 4. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver and John Valdimir Price (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1976). 5. For the world as known in the eighteenth century, see P. J. Marshall and Glyndwyr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 6. Several diffusion theories are treated below in chapter 9. For some of the cultural contexts of Müller’s solar mythology, see J. B. Bullen, The Sun Is God: Painting, Literature, and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1989). Steven Connor’s article in that volume makes an interesting comparison: “Conclusion: Myth and Metamyth in Max Müller and Walter Pater,” 199–222. Müller’s views on myth derive from his theory of the degeneration of language and are discussed at length in his Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. (London: Longman Green Longman and Roberts, 1861–64), esp. vol. 2. 7. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (1873; reprint, Gloucester , Mass: Peter Smith, 1970). 8. For a short version of the story, see Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abr. ed. (1922; reprint, New York: Collier, 1963), 1–2. This edition has no notes but reveals Frazer’s theses more sharply than the twelve-volume 3d edition of 1913–15 (London: Macmillan). 9. See Richard Crouter’s introduction to his new translation of Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xi. Crouter’s translation (to which my in-text citations refer) presents the first edition of Schleiermacher’s text—the rhetorical force of which had been toned down in the third edition, on which the earlier standard translation was based: Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper and Row, 1958). One of the most readable expositions of Schleiermacher is a set of university lectures by probably his most ardent twentieth-century theological adversary : Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen...
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