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Publications (50)
A point by point response to Wiebe’s ‘Manifesto’, mostly in support of the ‘methodological naturalism’—with added precautions on the current use of the term ‘science’. A philosophy for the study of religion is called for, with an epistemological range that caters for collective methodologies and social ontologies; respects the analytic distinction...
Comparison, the study of religion and the name J.Z. Smith are inextricably linked. In spite of adversity, Smith defended the necessity of comparison in many of his contributions to the field, once known as Comparative Religion. This homage to Smith sketches a theoretical model of 4 domains of comparabilities which may further enhance the methodolog...
William E. Paden, New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016), ix +253 pp. ISBN: 9781474252102. $114.00 (hbk); ISBN: 9781350057890. $39.95 (pbk).
Historical knowledge as well as contemporary research point out how narratives are essential in human life, culture, and society. The same holds for the formation and maintenance of religious worlds. Narratives of many kinds play fundamental roles in religion and (other) social constructions and, accordingly, narratives are crucial in individual se...
This special issue revolves around two main problems that need disentangling: the emic–etic debate and the insider–outsider problem. As the appointed discussant to the workshop in which this issue’s papers were first presented, I noted the emergence of some related and recurring problems on which I further elaborate in this article. These problems...
For many centuries, the relations between philosophy and religion were very close—at times indistinguishable. That is not so in the modern secular academy, which houses philosophy along with the study of religion but without noticeable mutual relations between the two. Kevin Schilbrack has ably dealt with that situation in his latest publication ‘P...
The topics of social ontology, culture, and institutions constitute a problem complex that involves a broad range of human social and cultural cognitive capacities. We-mode social cognition and shared intentionality appear to be crucial in the formation of social ontology and social institutions, which, in turn, provide the bases for the social man...
Religion is a semiotic phenomenon par excellence. Without signs and signification processes there could not ever have been any religion, and so semiotics should play a prominent role in the investigation of religion(s). However, this has not been the case. Yelle deserves praise for reminding scholars of religion of the research potentials of semiot...
Tradução do Capítulo 1.3 de Michael Stausberg e Steven Engler, orgs. The Routledge Handbook of ResearchMethods in the Study of Religion. Londres: Routledge, 2011, pp.40-53. Tradução gentilmente autorizada porTaylor & Francis, proprietária dos direitos autorais da obra.
‘Normative Cognition’ is a theoretical model of human cognition as driven, modulated and governed by symbolically mediated inter-subjective social norms and conventions. The conditions for normative cognition are biological and cultural because norms and values are transmitted in thought, behavior, and institutions via symbolic, i.e., cultural medi...
There are two general views of religion shared by the greater part of the public in the modern world. The first is that, despite modernity, science, technology and so on, religion can be understood as something fundamentally human, social and meaningful although it may contain dubious claims to truths about the contents of the world. So conceived,...
In the study of religion, the `insider-outsider' problem seems to remain a stubborn issue. As self-evident and reasonable as that distinction may seem is it theoretically dubious and methodologically worthless. Rudolf Carnap would have dubbed it a `pseudo-problem' that obscures more than it discloses. At most, it demonstrates the plain fact that kn...
In the broad perspective, religion appears to have had a natural history or evolution: there were beginnings, countless changes over time and, presumably, there will be terminations. Evolution, however, has been a tabooed theme in the study of religion during most of the 20th century, but this is now changing. It should be noted that is not unprobl...
Religious traditions abundantly demonstrate how norms, rules, constraints and models are installed and transmitted in multiple media: myth, dogma, ritual, institutions, etc. These abound in cosmologies, classification systems, morality, and purity and they influence individual and collective human practice. The term `normative cognition' is introdu...
According to Kuhn (1970), one of the real stumbling blocks in the advancement of a science is the question of adequate and legitimate theorizing when a science passes from one phase, or paradigm, to another. The study of religion now seems to have gone from the formative, descriptive ‘what?’ phase to the theoretically more interesting ‘how?’ phase—...
Over the past decade, the cognitive study of religion has gained momentum as a major theoretical breakthrough. However, most of its major contributors, often referred to as ‘cognitive hardliners’, have so far largely disregarded issues that have otherwise been of central concern to scholars in the study of religion, namely those concerning the cult...
This review article was occasioned by the publication of Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001), the title of which left this reviewer in some doubt and intent on investigating whether Boyer’s ambition has been fulfilled. Here, it must be noted that this reviewer is generally positive about the rewar...
A comparative study of religion rests on comparison and generalization. Both require that the object of study, the subject matter of various religions have something in common - certain properties that warrant their juxtaposition in analyses. If they had nothing in common, "the study" of religion would not make any sense. But it seemingly does, thu...
Reflektioner over et brud i ritualforskningen.Theories of ritual have mainly focused on the various functions of ritual. S shift in the study of ritual has occurred through two recent publications, i.e. Rules without Meaning by Frits Staal (1989) and Rethinking Religion by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley (1990). Both works draw on theoretic...
Review-artikel om udgivelser på dansk 1989-1991 omhandlende islam på den ene eller den anden måde.
Michael Pye (ed.), Marburg revisited, institutions and strategies in the study of religion, Marburg, diagonal-Verlag, 1989, DM45,00/$30.00
Som et mere ureflekteret resultat af vestlig sekulariseret tænkning betragtes forholdet mellem religion og politik ofte som en konflikt mellem to heterogene enheder. Det er forfatterens overbevisning, at nogle af de nuværende antropologiske definitioner af religion som et kulturelt ideologisk system lige så godt kan anvendes på ideologisk baseret p...
As an example of the predominant trend in modern structuralist-influenced classical research on the myths of antiquity the interpretation of Marcel Detienne of the myth of “Honeyed Orpheus” found in the fourth Georgic of Virgil is reviewed in this survey-article, thereby demonstrating the usefulness of the structuralist approach. The occasion for t...
