Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0009
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter proposes that a proper telos for the study of religion is Critical Humanism. Drawing on Aristotle and Charles Taylor, it explains how Critical Humanism provides a theoretical framework for studying religion and describes its mobile, liberal, dialogical, and inclusive aspects. Building on the ideas of Felski, Walzer, Rorty, and the environmental humanities, it notes how Critical Humanism places a premium on expanding the moral imagination and examines the connections between that idea and humanistic scholarship. That discussion leads into an account of four values to which the study of religion can be connected: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. The chapter then describes four works in the study of religion that exemplify these values. Lastly, it summarizes the chapter’s arguments in response to the challenges posed by Weber’s view of science and Welch’s reckoning with the field’s “identity crisis” as described in chapters 1 and 2.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132119462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0006
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Embodied Practice and Materialist Phenomenology","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter critically examines the Materialist-Phenomenological Method for studying religion and the work of the sociologist of religion Manuel A. Vásquez. This method focuses on the study of embodied religious practices, visual cultures, vernacular idioms, and particular locales as these are studied according to historical and often ethnographic methods of analysis. The chapter interrogates Vásquez’s work More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion, which proffers a “somatocentric” theory that aims to escape the legacy of Cartesian dualism. The chapter raises questions about Vásquez’s philosophical anthropology and shows how he repeats and reinforces the firewall separating the study of religion from reasons for studying it. In More than Belief, the chapter shows, one encounters the fact-value dualism that underwrites the ascetic ideal in religious studies, one so thoroughgoing that it prevents Vásquez from grasping the need to provide philosophical reasons to justify his theory.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128574125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0004
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Scientific Rationality and Causal Explanation","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the work of Donald Wiebe and the Scientific-Explanatory Method. Otherwise known as the naturalistic paradigm, the Scientific-Explanatory Method insists that the study of religion should operate within a value-free, disinterested, and empirical set of parameters. The chapter examines Wiebe’s ideas and then enlists and expands on insights offered in the previous chapter to show how Wiebe’s naturalism rules out valid sources of knowledge about human experience. Drawing on the philosophical anthropology and hermeneutical ideas of Charles Taylor, it shows how naturalism drapes human conduct under the banner of behaviorism and excludes from consideration the idea that human beings are agents who act according to intersubjective reasons. The chapter concludes by arguing that the naturalistic paradigm relies on a fact-value distinction that reflects and reinforces the commitments to value-neutrality that the book identifies as afflicting the field.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130405343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0001
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"On Justifying the Study of Religion","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter takes up the question whether the study of religion can be justified and indicates why scholars of religion deny themselves reasons for tackling that question. It uses as its point of departure Max Weber’s lecture, “Science as a Vocation” as articulating a methodological standard for studying religion, one that privileges value-neutrality and avows an “ascetic ideal” (following Nietzsche). It is argued that this ideal poses obstacles to making justificatory claims on behalf of studying religion and fortifies a repressive scholarly conscience in the field’s regime of truth. The chapter adds that this conscience is not entirely repressive and notes the presence of quixotic, haphazard appeals to normative ideals that materialize in the study of religion. Lastly, it sketches the book’s alternative to the ascetic ideal and describes ideas from moral philosophy that inform the book’s critical and constructive argument.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125930672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0007
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Genealogy, Ideology, and Critical Theory","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the Genealogical-Ideological Method for interrogating the category of religion and unmasking its complicity with capitalist market interests, racial and gender inequities, colonializing practices, and power. With these ideas in hand, the chapter examines representative works by Russell McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and Saba Mahmood. In their works, it is argued, the problem of failing to provide justificatory arguments looms large. McCutcheon and Fitzgerald fail to see how the problems they espy in the study of religion apply to their way of thinking. Mahmood conceives of human agency as an outcome of repetitive bodily practices rather than as relying on reasons for action, thus denying her ways to understand human motivation in Islamic pietism and concealing the justificatory dimensions of the practices she describes in Politics of Piety. The chapter shows how problems in these approaches are symptomatic of difficulties surrounding the justificatory status of the study of religion.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133233252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0002
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"The Ethics of Religious Studies","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that the study of religion lacks an “ethics of religious studies,” by which the author means a theoretical justification of the guild. Focusing on a 1971 report by Claude Welch, Graduate Education in Religion: A Critical Study, it targets Welch’s refusal to provide such a justification and explains its silence by referencing the long shadow cast by Protestant thinking about the dangers of self-justification. It is argued that Welch’s argument erects a firewall between the study of religion and the justification of that study, one that reinforces the commitment to value-neutrality that is described in chapter 1. To explain the field’s preoccupation with methodology, the chapter turns to Stephen Toulmin’s discussion of scientific disciplines and the importance of having a goal as a condition for organizing mature research. It concludes by sketching the outlines of scholarship in religious studies and the distinction between routine work and metadisciplinary work.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122888863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0003
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Interpretation, Comparison, and the History of Religions","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter critically examines the work of Jonathan Z. Smith and the Interpretive-Comparative Method for studying religion. It unpacks Smith’s ideas about theory and method and shows how they instantiate the guild’s ascetic ideal in the study of religion. It describes three signature ideas in his approach, noting in particular Smith’s silence about matters of purpose when theorizing about method. It then describes how he mobilizes his ideas in his treatment of the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana with the aim of overcoming incomprehension surrounding that event by invoking a method of interpretive and comparative reasoning. Drawing on the ideas of Peter Strawson, the chapter shows what a critical humanistic assessment of Jonestown would look like in contrast to Smith’s reading of them, focusing on the experience of indignation at injustice and the tragic loss of life at Jonestown.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130832229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0008
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Philosophy, Normativity, and Metacriticism","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the Philosophical-Evaluative Method for studying religion. It is argued that this method offers conceptual clarity about key terms and assumptions that are regnant in theory and method in the study of religion and helps one see that correcting for the inarticulacy about the value of religious studies lies not in crafting a better methodology but by realizing how the field can account to broader, more comprehensive ideas about its place within the production of critical humanistic knowledge. With these ideas in hand, the chapter focuses on the work of Stephen S. Bush and Kevin Schilbrack. It examines their central claims that draw, respectively, from pragmatism and the philosophy of mind. The chapter concludes by pressing these scholars to speak about the ends of religious studies.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123899155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0010
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Epilogue","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"The epilogue concludes the book by clarifying how Critical Humanism makes possible an ethics of religious studies. Positioned against an episteme that draws its sustenance from Reformation, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment thinking, Critical Humanism provides reasons that enable present and future generations to grasp the values of studying religion and provides a model of reasoning that can break the spell of the field’s regime of truth of value-neutrality. It thereby enables scholars to overcome a long-standing repression of desire and discover humanistic excellences according to which motives for studying religion are desirable and worthy of attachment and transmission. Seen in this way, the epilogue argues, Critical Humanism is a vocation. It allows scholars to recommend religious studies for the present and in ways that make possible hope for the future.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128149012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why Study Religion?Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0005
Richard B. Miller
{"title":"Existential Symbolism and Theological Anthropology","authors":"Richard B. Miller","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197566817.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on The Theological-Anthropological Method and the work of its principal architect Paul Tillich. It examines features of Tillich’s thinking that have had appeal in religious studies by elaborating on two frameworks in his thought and six Tillichian tenets about religion. It then exposes a striking paradox in Tillich’s theology. In his view, religions typically fail to apply the Protestant Principle, by which he means a self-critical criterion that is based on the belief that no human symbol is adequate to the task of representing the unconditioned. Tillich would thus have one judge many religions—those that lack, or fail to apply, that self-critical principle—as sources of idolatry and existential despair. It is argued that the potential of the Theological-Anthropological Method to provide motivating reasons to study religion is weakened by this fact.","PeriodicalId":137455,"journal":{"name":"Why Study Religion?","volume":"16 8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124412854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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