Understanding theories of religion : an introduction / Ivan Strenski.
| Uniform Title: | Thinking about religion
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|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Chichester, West Sussex :
Wiley Blackwell,
2015.
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| Edition: | Second edition. |
| Subjects: | |
| Physical Description: | ix, 268 pages ; 25 cm |
| Format: | Book |
Contents:
- Introduction: Understanding theories of religion is better than just being critical
- Part I. The prehistory of the study of religion: responses to an expanding world. Jean Bodin and Herbert of Cherbury: true religion, essential religion, and natural religion
- Understanding religion also began with trying to understand the Bible
- Part II. Classic nineteenth-century theorists of the study of religion: the quest for the origins of religion in history. Max Müller, the comparative study of religion, and the search for other Bibles in India
- The shock of the "savage": Edward Burnett Tylor, evolution, and spirits
- The religion of the Bible evolves: William Robertson Smith
- Setting the eternal templates of salvation: James Frazer
- Part III. Classic twentieth-century theorists of the study of religion: defending the inner sanctum of religious experience or storming it. Understanding how to understand religion: "phenomenology of religion"
- How religious experience created capitalism: Max Weber
- Tales from the underground: Freud and the psychoanalytic origins of religion
- Bronislaw Malinowski and the "sublime folly" of religion
- Seeing God with the social eye: Durkheim's religious sociology
- Mircea Eliade: turning back the "worm of doubt"
- Part IV. Liberation and post-modernism: race, gender, post-colonialism, the discourse on power. From modernism to post-modernism: mostly Michel Foucault
- Theorizing religion with race in mind: prophecy or curiosity?
- Sex/gender and women: feminists theorizing religion
- Another "otherness": post-colonial theories of religion
- Conclusion: being "smart" about bringing "religion" back in.