Conceptualizing Religion

How might we transform a folk category - in this case religion - into a analytical category suitable for cross-cultural research? In this volume, the author addresses that question. He critically explores various approaches to the problem of conceptualizing religion, particularly with respect to certain disciplinary interests of anthropologists. He argues that the concept of family resemblances, as that concept has been refined and extended in prototype theory in the contemporary cognitive sciences, is the most plausible analytical strategy for resolving the central problem of the book. In the solution proposed, religion is conceptualized as an affair of "more or less" rather than a matter of "yes or no," and no sharp line is drawn between religion and non-religion.

In Muḥammad ʿAbduh and his Interlocutors: Conceptualizing Religion in a Globalizing World, Ammeke Kateman offers an account of Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Islamic Reformism in a globalizing and diverse world.

How might we transform a folk category — in this case, religion — into an analytical category suitable for cross-cultural research? In addressing that question, this book critically explores various approaches to the problem of conceptualizing religion for scholarly purposes, particularly with respect to certain disciplinary interests of anthropologists. The author argues that the most plausible analytical strategy can be based on the idea of family resemblances, especially as that idea has been used and developed in contemporary prototype theory. In the solution proposed, religion is conceptualized as an affair of 'more or less' rather than a matter of 'yes or no,' and no sharp line is drawn between religion and non-religion.

This book provides a comprehensive selection of readings that relate to and explore the definition of religion. The texts come from a wide range of approaches, unified both by the questions they are addressing and their broadly social scientific perspective. The disciplines covered include anthropology, phenomenology, psychology and sociology. The editors have also included some key texts relating to the feminist approach to and critique of religion. The first section of the book includes some of the foundational texts, such as materials by Marx, Freud, and Durkheim. The remaining sections look at more recent discussions of the issues from the different disciplinary perspectives. Each reading is introduced by a biographical sketch of the author. The book also includes introductory discussions to each section that both raise the key issues developed in a particular discipline and address the disciplinary approaches from a more critical stance. Theories of Religion: A Reader is an invaluable critical resource, accessible to a broad audience as well as students of theology and religious studies.

Since its founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

This book examines major conceptual challenges confronting freedom of religion or belief in contemporary settings. It will be a valuable resource for students, academics, and policy-makers with an interest in law, religion, and human rights.

This volume collects select papers on methodology in the study of religion that were originally presented at the XVIIth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, held in Mexico City in 1995. Granted the status of adjunct proceedings for the Congress, the collection opens with the editors’ detailed survey of the longstanding importance of discussions on methodology within the IAHR. The twenty-one essays which follow examine religion and the history of the study of religion within a variety of theoretical contexts. The essays are organized in terms of three general sub-divisions: general issues in methodology (from the impact of both postmodernism and reflexive anthropology on the study of religion to the politics of religious studies as practiced in different national settings); reflections on the categories commonly employed by scholars working in the field (e.g., “religion,” “syncretism,” “gender,” “New Religious Movements,” “sacred,” “power,” “experience,” etc.), and finally, the collection ends with a review symposium on one of the more sophisticated recent treatments of the problem of defining religion, Benson Saler’s Conceptualizing Religion (Brill, 1993). Despite carrying out their work in a variety of settings—from Denmark and Finland, to Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, the USA, and Mexico—the authors all model a similar approach to studying religion as but one instance of human culture.