Religion, Religious: Can Anti-Definitionalists Stay Tethered to the Study of Religion? (original) (raw)
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Recent calls for better policing of the borders of the field ring hollow to my mind. What is fascinating about religion are the borderlands. (Winnifred Fallers Sullivan) To use category names should be a commitment to tracing the assemblages in which these categories gain a momentary hold. (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing) COURSE DESCRIPTION The category of religion has been described as "the most ideological of Western creations." It is a modern western concept, born perhaps in 1799, yet most of what it is thought to refer to is non-modern or non-western. At the same time, it seems an inescapable part of articulating what it means to be human here and now. What does it reveal and obscure? Can it be thought about in a non-mystifying way? This course weaves together a critical history of the academic discipline of religious studies with explorations of everyday " religion-making " in the broader culture and our own lives. We engage classic and contemporary theories of the nature, history and value of religion in order to develop a critical understanding of the concept as well as of the phenomena which are made to bear its name. Many other categories constitutive of western modernity interlock with the concept of religion, too – not least the secular. Understanding the travails of religious studies offers insight into other, similarly fraught disciplines, as indeed into the nature of disciplinary projects as a whole. A reflective awareness of the concept of religion and its study offers incisive perspectives on politics, gender, ethics and identity. But what has recently been called " religion-making " isn't just something scholars do. We experience religion as a natural kind because it is woven into our individual, social and even political experience. Religions are made and unmade by participants as well as by critics, by high and pop culture, by individuals and communities negotiating complicated landscapes of identity, by those who claim to be " spiritual but not religious, " and even by the law. The academic study of religion is not an escape from these wider practices of making and unmaking " religion " and " religions " but a privileged place for intervention in the broader theoretical and practical challenges of our time.
Religion and Atheism: beyond the divide
Journal of Beliefs & Values
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On (not) defining (non)religion
Social scientific research on religion (and related phenomena, including nonreligion, atheism, and secularity) is invariably prefaced by sheepish attempts to define these terms, followed by apologies for the inevitable inadequacy of the proposed definitions. This paper argues that scholars of religion and nonreligion should accept the fact that “religion” and “nonreligion” are, like all social scientific concepts (and some biological ones), fuzzy categories. There is no such thing as religion, such that the term “religion” picks out all and only all examples of religion, or specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions for counting as religious. Rather, there are causally and phenomenologically distinct phenomena—such as the belief in supernatural agents, participation in rituals, formation of non-kin groups, obedience to moral codes, and so forth—that variously co-occur in packages we intuitively label as particular religions. Furthermore, these distinct phenomena are also present among ostensibly nonreligious (or secular) individuals and groups. Scholars of religion and nonreligion should therefore all but abandon the terms “religion” and “nonreligion”, and with them the clichéd definitional handwringing that typically comes with attempts at defining these terms. At best, they may retain their social functions—in names of departments, scholarly organizations, conferences, and journals, for example—but they have no legitimate scientific use.
“Public Schools May ‘Teach about Religion’—Not ‘Teach Religion’.” (ABC-CLIO, 2023)
Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society, 2023
Buck, Christopher. “Public Schools May ‘Teach about Religion’—Not ‘Teach Religion’.” In Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society, ABC-CLIO, 2023. Entry ID: 2045124. https://issues2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/2045124\. [ABC-CLIO database subscription required.] Originally published in 2012 in ABC-CLIO’s “World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy” database. • Invited essay, intended as model “argument essay” for undergraduate students. • Introduces Christopher Buck’s “CLEAR Argument Paradigm,” a generative model (based on British philosopher Stephen Toulmin’s paradigm for analyzing arguments) to assist students in writing argument essays: (1) “Claim” (Opinion, Stance, Thesis); (2) “Limits” (Qualifier); (3) “Evidence” (Reasons, Grounds); (4) “Assumptions” (Warrants and Backing); and (5) “Rebuttal” (advance responses to foreseeable objections). • Also introduces Buck’s “DREAMS Paradigm.” “DREAMS” is a mnemonic acronym for the following six dimensions of religion: (1) “Doctrinal”; (2) “Ritual”; (3) “Ethical”; (4) “Artistic”; (5) “Mystical”; and (6) “Social.” Based on the model originally proposed by Scottish scholar (and founder of the academic study of religion in Britain), Ninian Smart (1927–2001), in Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (1983, six “dimensions”) and Dimensions of the Sacred (1996, seven “dimensions”), but further refined by adding four subcategories within each “dimension” of religion. (See Buck, “Ninian Smart (1927–2001).” British Writers. Supplement XXIV (2018).) Developed as a classroom tool (for university students) for formally comparing world religions (where Smart’s “Materialistic” dimension is subsumed in Buck’s “Artistic” dimension): DREAMS Paradigm Doctrinal Dimension (metaphysics, philosophy of religion) [Acronym: CASE.] • Cosmology (cosmogony/theodicy). • Anthropology (soul/consciousness/purpose). • Soteriology (predicament/salvation). • Eschatology (afterlife/apocalypse). Ritual Dimension (anthropology of religion) [Acronym: CROW.] • Calendar (type/special features). • Rites of Passage (rites of life/life-crisis rites/rites of faith). • Observances (festivals and fasts/pilgrimages). • Worship (communal/domestic). Ethical Dimension (philosophy of religion) [Acronym: LIVE.] • Laws (prescriptions/proscriptions). • Intentions (motives/reactions). • Virtues (saints/saintliness). • Ethics (moral principles/social principles). Artistic Dimension (art history, iconography) [Acronym: MAPS.] • Music (liturgical/devotional). • Art & Architecture (visual arts, temples, shrines, pilgrimage sites/assembly halls). • Performance (dance/drama). • Symbols (literary/concrete). Mystical Dimension (psychology of religion) [Acronym: GASP.] • Goal of Attainment (quest/preparation). • Activities (spiritual exercises/mystical orders). • Stages (path/progress). • Peak Experiences (visions, auditions/transformations). Social Dimension (sociology of religion) [Acronym: DORM.] • Distribution (heartland/diaspora). • Organization (hierarchy/community). • Relations (church/state relations/interfaith relations). • Missions (domestic/foreign).
On the Dark Side of the "Secular": Is the Religious-Secular Distinction a Binary?
Recent scholarship claims to have revealed the problematic nature of the religious-secular distinction: (1) the distinction is slippery or fluid; (2) the meanings of the words "religious" and "secular" have changed over multiple historical contexts; (3) the distinction is a binary; (4) it is essentialist in nature. Analyzing these objections, the article shows that it is very difficult to find a clear problem statement. To whom is the religious-secular distinction a problem and why? The distinction was originally made within Christian theology, where it concerned a triad rather than a binary: true religion, false religions, and the secular. The notion of the secular always required the presence of the opposition between truth and falsity in religion, because it was the sphere that remained after true and false religion had been demarcated. In this sense, the secular had a "dark side," namely idolatry or false religion. To a Christian believer, there is no conceptual problem involved in making the religious-secular distinction, because his theology helps him specify what true and false religion are and, as a consequence, what the secular is. However, because of its neutrality in religious matters, the liberal state has tried to reduce the theological triad to a binary opposition between religion and the secular. The inevitable failure of this attempt has created a formless secular sphere that is haunted by its dark side: the notion of false religion.
The Commitment to Go on Theorizing "Religion"
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 2018
There are two kinds of scholars in the world, those who do theory and those who do not. This is one of the main organizing binaries in Theory in a Time of Excess (edited by Aaron W. Hughes). All contributors of the volume agree that theory is something that is valuable. In this essay I explore what theory means in this book and how contributors to the volume highlight different aspects of theorizing. This opens up the question of who are the most fruitful conversation partners that potentially maintain and extend a commitment to theorizing.
Reconstructing " Religion " from the Bottom Up (2016)
This article claims to uncover the core problematics that have made the debate on defining and conceptualizing " religion " so difficult and argues that this makes it possible to move beyond radical deconstruction towards reconstructing the concept for scholarly purposes. The argument has four main steps. Step 1 consists of establishing the nature of the entity " religion " as a reified imaginative formation. Step 2 consists of identifying the basic dilemma with which scholars have been struggling: the fact that, on the one hand, definitions and conceptualizations do not seem to work unless they stay sufficiently close to commonly held prototypes, while yet, on the other hand, those prototypes are grounded in monotheistic, more specifically Christian, even more specifically Protestant, theological biases about " true " religion. The first line of argument leads to crypto-theological definitions and conceptualizations, the second to a radical deconstruction of the very concept of " religion. " Step 3 resolves the dilemma by identifying an unexamined assumption, or problematic " blind spot, " that the two lines of argument have in common: they both think that " religion " stands against " the secular. " However, the historical record shows that these two defined themselves not just against one another but, simultaneously, against a third domain (referred to by such terms as " magic " or " superstition "). The structure is therefore not dualistic but triadic. Step 4 consists of replacing common assumptions about how " religion " emerged in the early modern period by an interpretation that explains not just its emergence but its logical necessity, at that time, for dealing with the crisis of comparison caused by
"Bridging the Gaps: A Better Future for the Study of Religion"
Religion, 2020
A better future for the study of religion would incorporate innovative and engaging approaches to bridge the gaps between popular and scholarly understandings of what comprises religion and why it remains relevant and significant in our world. This article calls for studying religion in a manner that emphasizes how it is thoroughly enmeshed with other ways of acting and existing in the world. The study of religion appears here as the study of how people attribute certain things as special, powerful, and authoritative, which conveys much about how people construct and manage social and cultural forms more generally. We argue that religion matters not because it supposedly represents a unique, autonomous realm of life, but rather because its workings are related to and paradigmatic for many other forms of human behavior.