Product Description: This book addresses a fundamental dilemma in religious studies. Exploring the tension between humanistic and social scientific approaches to thinking and writing about religion, Daniel Gold develops a line of argument that begins with the aesthetics of academic writing in the field...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: It has been argued that religious studies is a polymethodic discipline, and that the student of religion should be familiar with the approaches of the major disciplines concerned with understanding the nature of religion, not least because the approach adopted has profound influence on the phenomena chose for investigation and the conclusions reached...read more

Publisher description: Explores the relationships men, women, and children have formed with the Virgin Mary and the saints in twentieth-century American Catholic history, and reflects, more broadly, on how people live in the company of sacred figures andhow these relationships shape the ties between people on earth. Author Robert Orsi also considers how scholars of religion occupy the ground in between belief and analysis, faith and scholarship.

This book argues that the understanding and explanation of religion is always historically contingent. Grounded in the work of Bakhtin and Ricoeur, Flood positions the academic study of religion within contemporary debates in the social sciences and humanities concerning modernity and postmodernity, particularly contested issues regarding truth and knowledge. It challenges the view that religions are privileged, epistemic objects, argues for the importance of metatheory, and presents an argument for the dialogical nature of inquiry. The study of religion should begin with language and culture, and this shift in emphasis to the philosophy of the sign in hermeneutics and away from the philosophy of consciousness in phenomenology has far-reaching implications. It means a new ethic of practice which is sensitive to the power relationship in any epistemology; it opens the door to feminist and postcolonial critique, and it provides a methodology which allows for the interface between religious studies, theology, and the social sciences. (view table of contents)

Product Description: A work that at once celebrates and extends the formidable contributions of the late Edmund Perry to the study of religions, this comprehensive collection brings together three generations of distinguished scholars to consider the history, theory, and applications of the comparative method in religious study...read more

Product Description: A collection of essays by distinguished scholars in the academic study of religion, The Craft of Religious Studies represents the variety of research and analytical methods that researchers employ when examining religious phenomena, whether personally or socially expressed...read more

Product Description: This revised edition updates information and includes an explanation of the author's step-by-step presentation of the stages in the phenomenology of religion; an introduction to the current debate; over-reductionism; key philosophical terms used by Husserl; and reference sources for further reading...read more

Product Description: A renowned Islamicist and historian of religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith is one of the most important contemporary voices in the study of religion. This book critically examines the idea of faith in Smith’s writings and explores the relevance of his conception of faith for the future study of religion...read more

In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.

Product Description: Investigates the philosophical assumptions in religious studies, especially in ethnography of religion.

Product Description: Discursive approaches to the study of religion have received a lot of attention recently. Making Religion brings together leading theorists in the field who explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of the analysis of religious discourse...read more

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Product Description: This book elucidates the conceptual or theoretical issues in religious studies by means of utilizing the tools of philosophical analysis, providing a philosophy of religious studies that is anchored in the intentional systems theory, on one hand, and in scientific realism, on the other hand...read more

Product Description: The essays in 'A Modest Proposal on Method', three of which are new, further document failings in the study of religion but offer practical suggestions for reinventing the field.