How studies of religion have contributed to communication theory and philosophy (original) (raw)

Religion has been studied within a variety of fields: sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, history, and most recently in the interdisciplinary field known as religious studies, which first gained a place in universities in the 1960s. Beginning with the intellectual foundations of social theorists writing on religion and society in the 19th and early 20th century (Hegel, Marx, James, Durkheim, Weber, Freud), this essay reviews how studies of religion have made contributions toward communication theory and philosophy. It argues that a significant split in the study of religion, particularly as related to the fields of communication and media studies, dates to the post-war years. This split is characterized by an interest in the enduring power of myth and the search for universal human experiences with the sacred, on the one hand, and a commitment to understanding human experience in relation to particular cultural contexts on the other. Attention to secularization and, later, the post-9/11 context, inaugurated a renewed interest in questions of religion, media, and the state as well as questions of globalization, commercialization, and religious change. Work is just now beginning to embrace culturally comparative approaches to the ways that differing religious traditions have contributed to key concepts in communication such as privacy, copyright, freedom of expression, and connection.