Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age PDF Download

Author: Hans Kippenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691009090
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

View

Book Description
"Kippenberg is a fine scholar of real integrity. His book is a readable and practical introduction to the rise of the study of religion and culture in Europe as well as an intriguing piece of cultural theorizing. It is serious without being pompous, intelligent without being at all impenetrable, and fresh without being strange."--Ivan Strenski, University of California, Riverside

Author: Rodney Stark
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006174333X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 605

View

Book Description
Winner of the 2008 Christianity Today Award of Merit in Theology/Ethics The History of God In Discovering God, award-winning sociologist Rodney Stark presents a monumental history of the origins of the great religions from the Stone Age to the Modern Age and wrestles with the central questions of religion and belief.

Author: Jerry H. Bentley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521192463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 513

View

Book Description
Comprehensive account of the intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections, between 1400 and 1800.

Author: John Hedley Brooke
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195328191
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 335

View

Book Description
All too often scholars of science and religion have focused their attention almost exclusively on the Christian experience. At a time when religious ignorance and misunderstanding have lethal consequences, such provincialism must be avoided. This book expands our knowledge of science and religion beyond its largely Christian base to include the other Abrahamic faiths and the indigenous traditions of Africa and Asia.

Author: Titus Hjelm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415667976
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 221

View

Book Description
How do you study religion and society? In this fascinating book, some of the most famous names in the field explain how they go about their everyday work of studying religions in the field. They explain how the ideas for their projects and books have come together, how their understanding of religion has changed over the years, and how their own beliefs have affected their work. They also comment on the changing nature of the field, the ideas which they regard as most important, and those which have not stood the test of time. Lastly they offer advice to young scholars, and suggest what needs to be done to enable the field to grow and develop further.

Author: Annelies Lannoy
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110584131
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 404

View

Book Description
This monograph studies the professionalization of History of religions as an academic discipline in late 19th and early 20th century France and Europe. Its common thread is the work of the French Modernist priest and later Professor of History of religions at the Collège de France, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), who participated in many of the most topical debates among French and international historians of religions. Unlike his well-studied Modernist theology, Loisy’s writings on comparative religion, and his rich interactions with famous scholars like F. Cumont, M. Mauss, or J.G. Frazer, remain largely unknown. This monograph is the first to paint a comprehensive picture of his career as a historian of religions before and after his excommunication in 1908. Through a contextual analysis of publications by Loisy and contemporaries, and a large corpus of private correspondence, it illuminates the scientification of the discipline between 1890-1920, and its deep entanglement with religion, politics, and society. Particular attention is also given to the role of national and transnational scholarly networks, and the way they controlled the theoretical and institutional frameworks for studying the history of religions.

Author: Sonja Brentjes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317126904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

View

Book Description
The contributions to this volume enter into a dialogue about the routes, modes and institutions that transferred and transformed knowledge across the late antique Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Each contribution not only presents a different case study but also investigates a different type of question, ranging from how history-writing drew on cross-culturally constructed stories and shared sets of skills and values, to how an ancient warlord was transformed into the iconic hero of a newly created monotheistic religion. Between these two poles, the emergence of a new, knowledge-related, but market-based profession in Baghdad is discussed, alongside the long-distance transfer of texts, doctrines and values within a religious minority community from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the mountains of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The authors also investigate the outsourcing of military units and skills across religious and political boundaries, the construction of cross-cultural knowledge of the balance through networks of scholars, patrons, merchants and craftsmen, as well as differences in linguistic and pharmaceutical practices in mixed cultural environments for shared corpora of texts, drugs and plants.

Author: David Chidester
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022611757X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 398

View

Book Description
How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project. In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller’s dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan’s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

Author: Guy G. Stroumsa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019289868X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

View

Book Description
The Idea of Semitic Monotheism examines some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion in the long nineteenth century--from the Enlightenment to the First World War. It aims to understand the new status of Judaism and Islam in the formative period of the new discipline. Guy G. Stroumsa focuses on the concept of Semitic monotheism, a concept developed by Ernest Renan around the mid-nineteenth century on the basis of the postulated and highly problematic contradistinction between Aryan and Semitic families of peoples, cultures, and religions. This contradistinction grew from the Western discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship with European languages, at the time of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Together with the rise of scholarly Orientalism, this discovery offered new perspectives on the East, as a consequence of which the Near East was demoted from its traditional status as the locus of the Biblical revelations. This innovative work studies a central issue in the modern study of religion. Doing so, however, it emphasizes the new dualistic taxonomy of religions had major consequences and sheds new light on the roots of European attitudes to Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century, up to the present day.

Author: Miguel de Asúa
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110487497
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 367

View

Book Description
Science and Catholicism in Argentina (1750–1960) is the first comprehensive study on the relationship between science and religion in a Spanish-speaking country with a Catholic majority and a "Latin" pattern of secularisation. The text takes the reader from Jesuit missionary science in colonial times, through the conflict-ridden 19th century, to the Catholic revival of the 1930s in Argentina. The diverse interactions between science and religion revealed in this analysis can be organised in terms of their dynamic of secularisation. The indissoluble identification of science and the secular, which operated at rhetorical and institutional levels among the liberal elite and the socialists in the 19th century, lost part of its force with the emergence of Catholic scientists in the course of the 20th century. In agreement with current views that deny science the role as the driving force of secularisation, this historical study concludes that it was the process of secularisation that shaped the interplay between religion and science, not the other way around.