Ivan Strenski

Ivan Strenski
University of California, Riverside | UCR · Department of Religious Studies

PhD (Birmingham, UK), Doctor Honoris Causa (Lausanne)

About

132
Publications
30,779
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568
Citations
Additional affiliations
July 1995 - June 2015
University of California, Riverside
Position
  • Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Publications

Publications (132)
Article
Full-text available
Unlike earlier pandemics, where a "politics of blame" was directed against those who spread infection, the COVID pandemic in the United States has created occasions for the deployment of a "politics of commendation" for performing acts of sacrifice. Frontline healthcare workers have been celebrated for sacrificing themselves in service to their pat...
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Just before Sightings' annual recess, Joel A. Brown curated a collection of essays on the implications for Christian ethics of "the George Floyd Protests." Over the summer, I became convinced that these meditations evolved into Christian validations of-the admittedly marginal-looting and vandalism attending the protests. (As Russell P. Johnson sugg...
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With so much confusion about the meaning of the word myth, how might we select a usable definition of the term?
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In general, religions across the globe reflect the dominance of patriarchal values. This belief in male superiority comes in a variety of ways. Deities are primarily male, as are religious adepts and the leaders of religious communities. So, as well, do doctrines, institutions and religious social values reflect the belief in male superiority. But...
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Tradução de Eduardo Rodrigues da Cruz (PUC-SP) gentilmente autorizada pelo autor. Texto originalmente publicado em STRENSKI, Ivan. Max Müller, the comparative study of religion, and the search for other Bibles in India. In: STRENSKI, Ivan. Understanding theories of religion: na introduction. 2nd ed. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 33-34
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Article 534 of the Lebanese Penal Code, effectively, criminalizes homosexual practices. Most commentators have claimed that its existence in modern Lebanon is a “colonial relic,” specifically of the French Mandate, 1920–1946. But since 1791, French penal codes have not criminalized same-sex relations. I argue, instead, that Article 534 was the prod...
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In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, and in ‘On the Definition of Religious Phenomena,' Durkheim famously asserted both that Buddhism was a ‘religion' and an ‘atheistic' one at that. Why he did so is a problem long-considered settled. Of two possible answers, one is commonplace, while the other is uncommon and consequential. I shall attem...
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A recent theme recurs in the writing of cultural critics, like journalist, Douglas Murray and the speculative novelists, such as Michel Houellebecq, author of Submission, and Jean Raspail, creator of the influential and controversial rightwing work, The Camp of the Saints. All agree that Europe finds itself poised on the brink of carelessly losing...
Article
This article outlines the genesis of the journal’s name as ‘Religion: A Journal of Religion and Religions’, Ninian Smart’s recruitment and formation of an international North American editorial board in the late 1970s, its early struggles to establish a distinctive niche among longer-lived, well-established, subsidized journals in the field, and th...
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Tradução (Fábio Stern) de uma palestra intitulada Does History of the Study of Religion Matter to the Study of Religion? sobre os desafios metodológicos na construção da história da ciência da religião, originalmente publicado em 1997. Visto a preocupação nos últimos três anos de pesquisadores da ciência da religião brasileira em levantar a históri...
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In the name of religious liberty, recent legislative initiatives by Christian nationalists seek broad legal exemptions from general law. This reflects an abiding antipathy to and a fear of the power of the state, the ultimate aim of which may be sovereignty for religious institutions. But, the claims of Christian nationalists are vulnerable to a se...
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In the name of religious liberty, recent legislative initiatives by Christian nationalists seek broad legal exemptions from general law. This reflects an abiding antipathy to and a fear of the power of the state, the ultimate aim of which may be sovereignty for religious institutions. But, the claims of Christian nationalists are vulnerable to a se...
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The paper critiques the prevailing liberal market economy models of religious liberty and religious encounter. In place of market models, this paper argues that values inscribed in gift exchange, hospitality, guest/host relations, in many cases, and to varying degrees, provide better alternative values to govern religious interaction than those of...
Book
Louis Dumont was a prominent anthropologist and sociologist whose work – notably on Indian society – influenced the study of religion. Dumont on Religion introduces Dumont's work on kinship studies, structural theory, and his views on idealism. Subjects of particular interest to students of religion are highlighted, including Dumont's concepts of t...
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The cohabitation of philosophy with the study of religion has such a long history that we have not been motivated to consider the terms of that relationship. This paper proposes that this relationship needs to be examined radically. That is to say it proposes to query the nature, or possible natures, of the relationship of philosophy to the study o...
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I shall argue that Durkheim does not avoid the pitfalls of ethnocentrism in attempting a cross-cultural theory of religion. Durkheim’s theory of religion does not avoid using a culturally specific, and/or derived, view of religion upon religious data. But, in a way, it doesn’t really matter, because we all do the same thing inevitably anyway. Indee...
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By this point, almost everyone is familiar with Talal Asad’s assault on the “religion” category. Despite his influence, Asad’s criticisms tend to oscillate between two mutually exclusive positions. I shall argue that Asad’s incoherence is instructive for the field as a whole. The study of religion would be better off constructing useful and revisab...
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Why Politics Can't be Freed From Religion is an original, erudite, and timely new book from Ivan Strenski. Itinterrogates the central ideas and contexts behind religion, politics, and power, proposing an alternative way in which we should think about these issues in the twenty-first century. A timely and highly original contribution to debates abou...
Chapter
When God Plays Politics - radical interrogations of religion, power and politics;asking what it is I ‘see’ when I ‘look’ at something;what I ‘see’ when I ‘look’ at these images from faraway Iran;‘seeing’ only ‘politics’ in images;theocracy in power - imposing its will, creating its own religious mirror-image;politics of Tehran June 2009, unusual po...
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Defining ‘Politics’Where There Is No Politics: Despotism and TotalitarianismAutonomous PoliticsWhere Our ‘Politics’ Makes No SensePolitics, the ConstructTwo Pernicious Views of ‘Politics’History Lessons for Professor MorgenthauWhat Constitutionalism Owes the Council of ConstanceThe Emergence of the Political…from the ReligiousMachiavelli and Luther...
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Is ‘Suicide’ Bombing Religious?Making Too Much of Religion in ‘Suicide’ Bombing: ‘Islamofascism’Dying to Make Too Little of Religion in ‘Suicide’ Bombing: Robert A. PapeNo Religion in ‘Suicide’ Bombing: Talal AsadHow Religion Helps Explain Human BombingHuman Bombing Is “Catastrophe,” but also a “Triumph” of “Secular Immortality”Human Bombing = Jiha...
Chapter
Religion Trouble‘Seeing’ Religion: Six Common ClichésGagging at the Feast of Two Unexamined Assumptions: Religion, All Good or All BadThe Religion-Is-No-Good ClichéThe Second Set of Two Clichés: Religion Is Belief and Belief in God‘Religion's’ Private PartsPowerless in ParadiseTwo Ways to Eliminate ‘Religion’Is Religion Our Phlogiston? An Historica...
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Confronting the Paradox of ‘Power’How ‘Power’ Plays Havoc with Thinking about “Institutional Violence”Whom Should We Blame? ‘History’ on TrialHistory's Helper: We Should Also Blame FoucaultProblematizing Power in South AfricaFoucault versus FoucaultThinking about Power as Auctoritas and HierarchyWhat More Is to Be Done? Thinking about Power as Auct...
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Durkheim, the pragmatist? Almost everything we read about Durkheim would indicate that he and his followers were not only temperamentally averse to violence, but that these aversions grew out of a deeply entrenched view of the world and human nature. Durkheim's Third Republic liberalism was con-ceived as an alternative both to the authoritarian mil...
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A swirl of puzzles surrounds a work of Émile Durkheim’s that Jonathan Z. Smith claims is the ‘single most provocative treatment of’ the idea of the sacred in the Durkheimian corpus – Professional Ethics and Civic Morals. Why, one asks, was Durkheim’s work first published in Turkey, especially when the lectures that gave rise to this volume had been...
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The publication in 1974 of Steven Lukes's Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, brought a new Durkheim into focus. A new generation of historical reappraisal and study was initiated into the life and works of Durkheim, the benefits of which are only now, a quarter of a century later, being reaped. Here, Durkheim is located within the context of his re...
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Economic globalization has always required ideological legitimation. In the first instance this legitimation was explicitly theological; today in Roman Catholic circles it continues to be. The first modern legitimations of what would become economic globalization were made on the universalist bases of the “law of nations,” a derivation from “natura...
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To understand Muslim ‘human bombers’, we obviously must see them within the discourse of jihad, but also within that of ‘sacrifices’ and ‘gifts’. From this perspective, ‘human bombers’ act because of their social relationships – whether these are with other human beings or with divine persons, conditions, or states of affairs. ‘Human bombings’ are...
Chapter
I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in religion. More than anything else, growing up in a Polish-American home pushed me toward an intellectual life in religious studies. Largely at the behest of my mother, I was raised an enthusiastic Roman Catholic. Although I grew up on my physician father’s dairy farm outside Philadelphia in Moor...
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I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in religion. More than anything else, growing up in a Polish-American home pushed me toward an intellectual life in religious studies. Largely at the behest of my mother, I was raised an enthusiastic Roman Catholic. Although I grew up on my physician father’s dairy farm outside Philadelphia in Moor...

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