Reappraising Durkheim For The Study And Teaching Of Religion Today

Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today is an occasion to critically analyze and reassess the work of this intellectual pioneer. It is also an effort to signal the continuing importance of Durkheim for today’s graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms. Reappraising Durkheim brings together ten new critical essays in which noted sociologists, psychologists, phenomenologists, philosophers, and historians of religion grapple with the questions Durkheim raised and the solutions he proposed. Taken together, the volume is a careful historical and multi-disciplinary study of Durkheim that will lead students to a better understanding of how to study religion. Reappraising Durkheim will be an excellent text for courses focusing on theory and method in the academic study of religion at both the graduate and advanced undergraduate level. It would therefore be appropriate for use in departments of religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.

Emile Durkheim's work on religion occupies a central place in religious studies classrooms today. This volume is designed as a resource for teachers, offering practical advice about productive ways to approach central texts and difficult pedagogical issues.

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion draws on the expertise of an international team of scholars providing both an entry point into the sociological study and understanding of religion and an in-depth survey into its changing forms and content in the contemporary world. The role and impact of religion and spirituality on the politics, culture, education and health in the modern world is rigorously discussed and debated. The study of the sociology of religion forges interdisciplinary links to explore aspects of continuity and change in the contemporary interface between society and religion. Using a combination of theoretical, methodological and content-led approaches, the fifty-seven contributors collectively emphasise the complex relationships between religion and aspects of life from scientific research to law, ecology to art, music to cognitive science, crime to institutional health care and more. The developing character of religion, irreligion and atheism and the impact of religious diversity on social cohesion are explored. An overview of current scholarship in the field is provided in each themed chapter with an emphasis on encouraging new thinking and reflection on familiar and emergent themes to stimulate further debate and scholarship. The resulting essay collection provides an invaluable resource for research and teaching in this diverse discipline.

The cross-cultural study of religion has always gone hand in hand with the worldview, sciences, or intellectual frameworks of the time. These frames, whether focused on psychology or politics, gender or colonialism, bring out perspectives for understanding religious behavior. Today one of our common civic worldviews is represented in the shift from scriptural to evolutionary history. This volume brings together in one place key essays by professor emeritus William Paden, showing a progression of steps he has taken in exploring bridgeworks between comparative religion and evolutionary models of religious behavior. One of the leading scholars in religious studies, Paden shows ways that religion can be contextualized as part of the natural world and thus seen as reflecting the ingrained sociality and world-making drive of the human species. Paden argues that although comparativism has been challenged as too culture-bound, too western, or too gendered, cross-over categories and concepts between religious traditions cannot be avoided. Arguing that there are recurrent patterns of human behavior common to our species and that thereby underlie all cultures, he proposes that the missing link in the Religion Evolution debate is comparative religion, a global, cross-cultural perspective on religious behaviours throughout time. Each article is contextualized within this overall trajectory of thought within Paden's work and the history of the discipline as a whole.

This book challenges those contemporary sociologists who argue that the notion of 'society' is an outmoded basis for sociological analysis and instead revitalizes the idea that sociology is truly 'the study of society'. Mellor returns the human and religious aspects of social life to the centre of social theory.

How should ancient religious ideas be approached? Is "religion" an applicable term to antiquity? Should classicists, ancient historians, and religious studies scholars work more closely together? Nickolas P. Roubekas argues that there is a disciplinary gap between the study of Greek and Roman religions and the study of “religion” as a category-a gap that has often resulted in contradictory conclusions regarding Greek and Roman religion. This book addresses this lack of interdisciplinarity by providing an overview, criticism, and assessment of this chasm. It provides a theoretical approach to this historical period, raising the issue of the relationship between “theory of religion” and “history of religion,” and explores how history influences theory and vice versa. It also presents an in-depth critique of some crucial problems that have been central to the discussions of scholars who work on Graeco-Roman antiquity, encouraging us to re-examine how we approach the study of ancient religions.

Religion is controversial and challenging. Whilst religious forces are powerful in numerous societies, they have little or no significance for wide swaths of public or private life in other places. The task of theoretical work in the sociology of religion is, therefore, to make sense of this apparently paradoxical situation in which religion is simultaneously significant and insignificant. The chapters of Part One consider the classical roots of ideas about religion that dominated sociological ways of thinking about it for most of the twentieth century. Each chapter offers sound reasons for continuing to find theoretical inspiration and challenge in the sociological classics whilst also seeking ways of enhancing and extending their relevance to religion today. Part Two contains chapters that open up fresh perspectives on aspects of modern, post-modern and ultra-modern religion without necessarily ignoring the classical legacy. The chapters of Part Three chart new directions for the sociological analysis of religion by fundamentally re-thinking its theoretical basis, by extending its disciplinary boundaries and by examining previously overlooked topics.

Given the fact that today's university students are far more culturally sophisticated than ever before, "Comparing Religions: Possibilities and Perils" brings together a distinguished group of professors of religion with years of teaching experience to address the central question of how comparison of religions should be pursued in today's classroom. Covering topics such as recent theoretical approaches to comparison, case studies of comparing religions in the classroom, and the impact of postcolonialism and postmodernism on the modernist assumptions of comparitivism, the volume seeks to problematize and interrogate the field, especially as it relates to emerging models of pedagogy at the university level. "Comparing Religions" will be of especial interest to those who teach in religious studies departments, or who teach courses on religion in departments of anthropology, sociology, and history.