Oxford University Press

The Classics

The earliest scholarly studies of religion as a distinct subject occurred in and were shaped by the broader conditions of Western modernity—the philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment, the engagement of Western thinkers with religious otherness, and the sociopolitical contexts of the American and French revolutions. These intellectual, cultural, and political conditions challenged the established traditions of knowledge and social institutions, religion and religious authority in particular.

Although the dominant religious institutions in Western societies, and many of their respective theologians, rejected the earliest cha(lle)nges of modernity philosophically and politically, a number of theologians entered a dialogue with it. They conversed with and responded to the [End Page 194] philosophers of the Enlightenment, worked to reconcile the (theological) notions of permanence and truth with the (historical) notions of change, and came at the forefront of the use of historical and textual analysis in their study of religious traditions. It is important to note these earliest conversations of theology with the increasingly specialized humanities and social sciences, as the nature of the "proper" relationship between theology and religious studies has remained the subject of dispute among scholars of religion until today.

For the founders of sociological thought, a major—and sometimes the major—concern was the place of religion in the transformation of traditional societies into modern societies. Sociologists were interested in the role of religion in these changes as well as in the consequences of these changes for religion, seeing the latter on the losing side of the struggle between tradition and modernity. Indeed, it was the classics of sociology who articulated the mantra that shaped the conceptual and methodological framework for one whole century of scholarship on religion—the more a society will become modern, they declared, the less it will be religious.

The (discovery of the) psychological approach to religion established the individual and religious experience as the focal point of the study of religion, as opposed to religious institutions and rituals. The implicit element of this new focus of analysis for many representatives of the psychological approach to religion was a critique of the institutional form of religiosity and religious authority. Some saw religion as the universal neurosis of humanity; others established the idea of the (moral) usefulness that religiosity as spirituality can have in the individual's life.

The phenomenologists' concerns centered around the nature of the religious experience and the possibility of defining religion universally and as a very distinctive set of phenomena. Some phenomenologists separated the moral and ethical contents of what we know as religion, arguing that the idea of the holy is something that cannot be fully comprehended; others defined what religion is and is not by juxtaposing two Durkheimian categories—sacred and profane.

One could argue that religious studies started becoming a distinctive field of study at the moment when Western scholars began examining and comparing the relationships between different systems of beliefs, on the one hand, and their respective texts, cultures, and social and historical contexts, on the other hand. Or, as some contemporary scholars of religion point out, religious studies had its beginning in the moment when religion was defined as a subject of study by being separated from the totality of social life. [End Page 195]

References

Durkheim, Emile
[1912] 1995
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
1973
On Morality and Society: Selected Writings. Ed. by Robert Bellah. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Eliade, Mircea
[1958] 1996
Patterns of Comparative Religion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
1959
Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace.
[c1959]
1985
Cosmos and History: Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Garland Pub.

Feuerbach, Ludwig
[1841] 1957
The Essence of Christianity. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co.

Frazer, James G.
[1890] 1990
The Golden Bough. New York: St Martin's Press.

Freud, Sigmund
[1927] 1961
The Future of An Illusion. New York: Norton.
[1929] 1994
Civilization and its Discontents. New York: Dover Publications.
1939
Moses and Monotheism. London: The Hogarth press and the Institute of psycho-analysis.

Vico, Giambattista.
[1725] 2002
The First New Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hegel, Friedrich
[1827] 1988
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hume, David
[1757] 1976
The Natural History of Religion. Ed. by A. Wayne Colver. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

James, William
[1902] 1990
Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Vintage Books/Library of America.

Jung, Carl G.
[1959] 1968
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kant, Immanuel
[1793] 1998
Religion Within the Bounds of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [End Page 196]

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels
1964
On Religion. New York: Schocken Books.

Müller, F. Max
[1870] 1978
Introduction to the Science of Religion. New York: Arno Press.
[1879–1904]
2000
Sacred Books of the East. Richmond: Curzon Press.

Otto, Rudolph
1923
The Idea of the Holy (1917 Das Heilige). Trans. by John W. Harvey. London; New York: H. Milford, Oxford University Press.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich
[1799] 1996
On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Troeltsch, Ernst
[1912] 1981
The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Van der Leeuw, Gerardus
1967
Religion in Essence and Manifestation. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

Von Harnack, Adolph
[1900] 1986
What is Christianity? Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Wach, Joachim
1944
Sociology of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1958
The Comparative Study of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

Weber, Max
2002
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury Pub. Co. [1904–1905; English translation 1930].
[1922] 1993
The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.

The Contemporary Classics

Anthropologists of religion after World War II were interested in the rituals and myths of traditional societies and the ways in which they related to life and death, and everyday life of these societies. They resuscitated the study of other people's religions from the colonial view of "primitive" peoples and their "magical mentality" (by those such as Frazer). At the same time, the dominance of the functionalist and structuralist approaches implied an attempt to unpack the universal elements of human religious (and cultural) experience. For some anthropologists, the universal patterns of human experience were hidden in "the logical structures" that underline [End Page 197] the variety of mythical expressions (which then embrace all specific historical developments); for others, that was the ethnographic quest and theorization about the ways in which societies incorporate and frame their liminal experiences and the experience of freedom by ritualizing and building them in the symbols and institutions that enable the functioning of social life.

Some dissonant voices in the postwar anthropology of religion argued that anthropological study is not a scientific endeavor and that its main work is the work of translation. Nevertheless, these studies were characterized by the strive to articulate the generalizable patterns in the role of religion in societies, particularly in the centrality of religion—rituals and myths—in transforming and maintaining the social order.

Anthropologists shared this striving for universality of categories and questions with the postwar sociologists of religion. The main difference was their focus: for anthropologists, this was the traditional, and for sociologists, the modern societies. Consequently, whereas anthropologists were locating the matrix and dynamic in the role of religions in traditional societies, sociologists were identifying the declining authority of religion and the problematic relationship between freedom, the questions of meaning, community, and social order. Theologians often translated such concerns into questions about the ways in which religion can (and does) reestablish itself as central for the individual and social life, while keeping the sense of its moral calling in modernity.

Although the study of religion after the 1960s carried a recognition of the limitations of the grand theories in dealing with social realities, it may be argued that in the "contemporary classical" period of religious studies the grand narratives and the universal understanding of analytic categories are very much intact.

References

Becker, Ernest
1973
The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.

Bellah, Robert
1957
Tokugawa Religion; The Values of Pre-industrial Japan. Glencoe, IL: Free Press
[1964]

"Religious Evolution." In Sociologists At Work; Essays on the Craft of Social Research [by] Robert N. Bellah [and others]. Ed. by Phillip E. Hammond. New York: Basic Books.
1967
"Civil Religion in America." Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, [End Page 198] from the issue entitled "Religion in America," 96/1, 1–21.

Berger, Peter
1967
The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Cox, Harvey
1965
The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective. New York: Macmillan.

Douglas, Mary
1966
Purity and Danger. London and New York: Routledge.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E
1956
Nuer Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Foucault, Michel
1988
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault. Ed. by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
1999
Religion and Culture. Ed. by Jeremy Carrette. New York: Routledge.

Geertz, Clifford
1973
The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
1968
Islam observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Levi-Strauss, Claude
1966
The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
c1963
Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

Lienhardt, Godfrey
1961
Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lindbeck, George A. c
1984
The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw
1922
Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: G. Routledge & sons, Ltd.

Martin, David
1979
A General Theory of Secularization. New York: Harper & Row.

Niebuhr, H. Richard
1960
Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. New York: Harper & Row.

Ricoeur, Paul
1995
Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Trans. by David Pellauer. Ed. [End Page 199] by Mark I. Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
1967
The Symbolism of Evil. New York: Harper & Row.

Smith, Huston
[1958] 1991
The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. San Francisco: Harper.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell
1963
The Meaning and End of Religion. New York: Macmillan.

Turner, Victor
1967
The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
1969
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co.

Religious Studies as We Know It

The questions raised in the last thirty years of scholarship in religious studies have prompted a critique of the grand narratives and universal understanding of analytic categories that characterized modern thought. Scholars are attempting to reconcile the ideals of modernism with the critiques of postmodernism by weighing the universality of experience against a concern with particularity. Examples of these areas of concern include feminist and postcolonial critiques and a reflection on the methodology of the study of religion.

Methodology of the Study of Religion

What is religion? Can we define it at all and, if we can, why do we define it in a particular way? Is religion really nothing but a "term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes" (Smith 1998: 281)? Can we separate it from culture?

What is the relationship between religion and collective identity? What is the relationship between normativity and objectivity in religious studies? Does theology belong in religious studies? Does the rise of religiosity across the globe—which counters the expectations of most major classics in religious studies—demand a critical assessment not only of the conceptual apparatus of our field but also of the whole social imaginary of enlightenment upon which the field is instituted? What can we learn from our predecessors, from a more charitable rather than just a critical reading of their work?

The present phase in the studies of religion is marked by many questions. It is marked by the authors who write in religious studies about religious studies, reflecting in different ways on the questions of the purpose and the methodology of their field. For some, this most recent development in religious studies is a sign of the maturity of the field. For others, this is a sign of its crisis. [End Page 200]

References

Derrida, Jacques, and Gianni Vattimo, eds.
1998
Religion. Oxford: Polity.

Fitzgerald, Timothy
2000
The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gold, Daniel
1988
Comprehending the Guru: Towards a Grammar of Religious Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
c2003
Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Griffiths, Paul J.
1999
Religious Reading: the Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Heelas, Paul, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris, eds.
1996
Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Idinopulos, Thomas A., and Brian C. Wilson, eds
1998
What is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations. Leiden: Brill.

Masuzawa, Tomoko
1993
In Search of Dreamtime: the quest for the origin of religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McCutcheon, Russell
1997
Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press.

Proudfoot, Wayne, ed.
2004
William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing the Varieties Of Religious Experience. New York: Columbia University Press.

Smith, Jonathan Z.
1982
Imagining Religion: from Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1978
Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions. Leiden: Brill.
1992
To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [End Page 201]
1998
"Religion, Religions, Religious." In Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Ed. by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wasserstrom, Steven M.
1999
Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gender and The Study of Religion

Although pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton had long urged a feminist approach to religion, the first wave of feminist scholarship within religious studies included those who began critiquing sacred texts using the hermeneutics of suspicion such as Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza and Phyllis Trible. Those involved in the first wave of feminist scholarship sought to expose the androcentrism of Judeo-Christian traditions and pointed to the use of women's experiences as a legitimate hermeneutical tool which might be offered as a corrective to the disembodied scholar of traditional scholarship. Has the study of religion taken place from an unexamined male scholar's perspective? Are feminist models of divinity included within the normative religious traditions? Is there a relationship between the analytic structures of the dominant intellectual discourse and the attitudes and structures of violence within that culture? In what ways can the scholar be reconceived as embodied and situated within history?

A second wave of feminist critique emerged in the 1980's in the form of womanist theology, which largely addressed the concerns of African-American women. It challenged the first wave feminist movement, suggesting that it was dominated by the concerns of White middle-class women. Womanism attempted to broaden its critiques to address the matrix of oppression of Black women and lesbians.

Most recently, gender concerns have given rise to the area of queer theory, and in dialogue with the postcolonial critique of religious studies, gender theory works to examine the connection between intellectual discourse and violence and oppression.

References

Ahmed, Leila
1992
Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Butler, Judith
1990
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. [End Page 202]

Castelli, Elizabeth, and Rosamond C. Rodman, eds.
2001
Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. New York: Palgrave.

Christ, Carol c
1987
"Towards a Paradigm Shift in the Academy and in Religious Studies." In The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy, 53–76. Ed. by Christie Farnham. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Daly, Mary
1973
Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press.
1968
The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper & Row.

Donaldson, Laura E., and Kwok Pui-Lan, eds.
2002
Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge.

Dube, Musa W.
2000
Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St Louis: Chalice Press.

Gimbutas, Marija c
1989
The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Harrison, Beverly Wildung
1985
Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hayes, Diana
1995
Hagar's Daughters: Womanist Ways of Being in the World. New York: Paulist Press.

Jantzen, Grace
1995
Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, Elizabeth A
1992
She Who is: the Mystery of God in a Feminist Theological Perspective. New York: Crossroad.

King, Ursula, ed.
1995
Religion and Gender. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Loades, Ann, ed.
1990
Feminist Theology: a Reader. London and Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press.

Oduyoye, Mercy Amba
1986
Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Plaskow, Judith, and Joan A. Romero, eds.
1974
Women and Religion. Chambersburg, PA: American Academy of Religion [distributed by Scholars Press, Missoula, MT]. [End Page 203]

Russell, Letty M. et al., eds.
1988
Inheriting our Mothers' Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective. Louisville: Westminster Press.

Ruther, Rosemary Radford c
1983
Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press.

Schüssler-Fiorenza, Elisabeth
1983
In memory of Her: a Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad.

Trible, Phyllis
1984
Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Walker-Bynum, Caroline
1987
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Postcolonialism

In his critical work, Orientalism, Edward Said offers a critique of European colonial representations of religion and introduces a concern with "strategic location" as a corrective to the unexamined position of the Western scholar. Recent postcolonial scholarship has focused on the need to describe religion in indigenous terms in order to recover the subjectivity of the formerly objectified colonial "other." Two analytical concepts central to this effort are that of indigeneity and hybridity. These concern themselves with place and self-determination versus displacement and migration, respectively. Postcolonialism continues to interact with analytical trends in gender theory and postmodernism.

References

Appadurai, Arjun
1996
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Asad, Talal
1993
Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh
2000
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [End Page 204]

Chidester, David
1996
Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds.
1986
Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dubuisson, Daniel
2003
The Western Construction of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Fabian, Johannes
1983
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

King, Richard
1999
Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East. New York: Routledge.

Kippenberg, Hans
2001
The Discovery of Religious History in the Modern Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lopez, Donald
1998
Prisoners of Shangri-La. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mahmood, Saba
2005
The Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Said, Edward
1995
Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Moving Forward

The questions that are shaping and will continue to shape the contemporary study of religion are simultaneously formed by the global concerns and global perspective in the study of religion and by the perspectival character of individual scholarly work. In attempting to respond to challenges from both modernism and postmodernism, scholars of religion are trying to be self-reflective—to know and acknowledge where they stand, where they come from, and what is shaping their scholarship—but also to offer a portrayal—description and analysis—that is faithful to the subjects of their studies. Scholars are approving the need for the "detraditionalization" of religious studies, but they do not want its dehistoricization (Braude 2004: 278). They are aware of the ways in which their own ontologies shape their study of religion, but they are also concerned with the manner in which their study of religion is shaping religions themselves. [End Page 205]

References

Beyer, Peter
1994
Religion and Globalization. London: Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Braude, Ann
2004
"Response to Paul Heclas." In The Future of the Study of Religion. Ed. by Slavica Jakelić and Lori Pearson. Leiden: Brill.

Csordas, Thomas J.
1994
The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Doniger, Wendy
1998
The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ford, David M. et al., eds.
2005
Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Griffiths, Paul
2001
Problems of Religious Diversity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Milbank, John
1991
Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Patton, Kimberley, and Benjamin Ray, eds.
2000
A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schweiker, William
2004
Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: in the Time of many Worlds. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Stoller, Paul, and Cheryl Olkes
1987
In Sorcery's Shadow: a Memoir of Apprenticeship Among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tanner, Kathryn
1997
Theories of Culture: a New Agenda for Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Turner, Edith, William Blodgett, Singleton Kahona, and Fideli Benwa
1992
Experiencing Ritual: a New Interpretation of African Healing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

The difficulties of, and the need for, the (philosophically) self-reflective, (historically) informed, (sociologically) interpretative, and analytically generalizable approach to religion are evident in many subfields of the study of religion. We concentrate here on comparative religious ethics, [End Page 206] studies of religion and dialogue, studies of secularization and secularism, evolutionary-psychological and cognitivist approaches to religion, and economic and rational choice theories of religion.

Comparative Religious Ethics

The work in comparative religious ethics raises some of the most burning questions of the global world of late modernity—questions about the relationship of religion, pluralism, freedom, authority, democracy, and civic responsibility. It also raises the question of comparison in complicated and powerful ways.

References

Burrell, David B
2004
Faith and Freedom: an Interfaith Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Flood, Gavin
2004
The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva et al., eds.
2000
Christianity in Jewish Terms. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Grelle, Bruce, and Sumner Twiss, eds.
1998
Explorations in Global Ethics: Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

Hawley, John Stratton, ed.
1987
Saints and Virtues. Berkley: University of California Press.

Little, David, and Sumner B. Twiss, eds.
1978
Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method. New York: Harper and Row.

Lovin, Robin W., and Frank E. Reynolds, eds.
1985
Cosmogony and the Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mansager, Douglas, John Braisted Carman, and Mark Juergensmeyer, eds.
1991
A Bibliographic Guide to the Comparative Study of Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reynolds, Frank, and David Tracy, eds.
1992
Discourse and Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. [End Page 207]
1994
Religion and Practical Reason: New Essays in the Comparative Philosophy of Religions. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Global Religious Communities: Difference, Conflict, and Dialogue

The subfield that addresses the role of religion in (social) conflicts and violence is intertwined with the philosophical and practical concerns of interreligious dialogue, and, as such, it demonstrates the direct implications that religious studies may have for the world in which we live. Most of these works attempt to understand the critical relationship between universal and particular in religions and the consequences of that relationship for both conflict and dialogue.

References

Appleby, Scott R.
2000
The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. Lanhman: Rowman & Littlefield.

Clooney, Francis
2001
Hindu God, Christian God: How Reason Helps Break Down the Boundaries between Religions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Derrida, Jacques
2002
Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge.

Girard, Rene
1977
Violence and Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University.

Gopin, Marc
2000
Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking. New York: Oxford University Press.
2002
Holy War, Holy Peace: How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press.

Juergensmeyer, Mark.
2000
Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marty, Martin, and F. Scott Appleby, eds.
1993
Fundamentalism and the State: Remaking Polities, Economics, and Militance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Rouner, Leroy S., ed.
1999
Religion, Politics, and Peace. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. [End Page 208]

Safi, Omid
2003
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism. Oxford: Oneworld.

Schwartz, Regina
1997
The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Secularization and Secularism

The contemporary debates about the validity and possibilities of the classical secularization theory have several layers: first, they reveal the need for a critical reading of the categories used in the study of religion from its beginnings, while keeping what is analytically useful and empirically accurate in them; second, they expose the normative assumptions of the Enlightenment's social imaginaries, secularism in particular, that is built into the contemporary studies of religions; and third, they point out the importance of the general theories in the study of religions, while keeping the sense of historical and sociological particularities of what is studied.

References

Asad, Talal
2003
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Berger, Peter, ed.
1999
The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.

Bruce, Steve
2002
God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Casanova, Jose
1994
Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Gauchet, Marcel
1997
The Disenchantment of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hervieu-Léger, Danièle
2000
Religion as a Chain of Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Norris, Pippa, and Ron Inglehart
2004
Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Christian, ed.
2003
The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict In The Secularization Of American Public Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. [End Page 209]

Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke
2000
Acts of Faith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Economic and Rational Choice Theories of Religion

The advocates of the economic and rational choice approaches to religion suggest not only that the logic of the free market can be employed to understand some religious phenomena, but that economic insights can explain all of them. Thus, when applied in the realm of religious life, the principles of supply and demand answer why religion is alive in the religiously heterogenous United States and not in other Western societies. Even the motivation of the early Christian martyrs, it is argued, can be understood as the rational choice of the actors rather than as religiously shaped act.

References

Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark
1992
The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in our Religious Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Green, Donald, andIan Shapiro, eds.
1994
Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Stark, Rodney
1997
The Rise of Christianity. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

Young, Lawrence A.
1996
Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment. Routledge.

Evolutionary-Psychological and Cognitivist Theories of Religion

Combining the developments in cognitive and psychological sciences with anthropology, evolutionary-psychological and cognitivist theories of religion attempt to explain the transmission, maintenance, and transformation of religions, and the longevity and adaptability of religion as a cultural phenomenon. The proponents of these theories thus focus on the individuals' cognition and its evolution to understand culture. At the same time, they depart from the dominant anthropological emphasis on the diversity and cultural specificity of religious experiences.

The theoretical push of the evolutionary-psychological and cognitivist theories toward what is universal in religious experiences is not a nostalgic return to the grand theoretical endeavors of classical anthropology. The [End Page 210] universality here is not assumed, but it is rather located. As representatives of these theories clarify, it is not religion as such but religious ideas that are the object of theory; it is not some transcendental (or transcendent) truth but the cognitive evolution that shapes the universal modes of religious life.

References

Atran, Scott
2002
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Boyer, Pascal
2002
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Lawson, E. Thomas, and Robert McCauley
1990
Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, Daniel
1975
Rethinking Symbolism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Slavica Jakeliw

Slavica Jakeliw is at the Center on Religion and Democracy, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400178, Charlottesville, VA 22904.

Jessica Starling

Jessica Starling is at the University of Virginia, 408 Hedge St., Charlottesville, VA 22902.

Notes

1. The authors wish to express gratitude to the many colleagues whose comments and suggestions were indispensable in making this bibliographic essay as comprehensive as possible.

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