Religious Studies

Aspects of reductionism in religious studies

  Reductionism is a major methodological mistake in research and generally in thought; because it can pose as an obstacle to comprehensive views about the researched issue. This issue is more tangible in religious phenomena - due to the multidimensional entity of this subject – and can be more destructive. A researcher through focusing on one role and aspect of religion and concentrating on a ...

Reconceptualising Religion : A Philosophical Critique of Religious Studies as Cultural Studies

The aim of my argument (1) is to reconceptualise what is now called religious studies as the study of institutionalised values, and the relation between values and the legitimation of power in a specific society. Though I do not talk much about power here, it is always a fundamental issue in the study of specific social groups.The first assumption which I make in this paper is that the way anal...

Religious Studies and Electronic Information: A Librarian's Perspective

THE FIELD OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES has seen an abundance of computerbased tools and publications during the last few years. Bibliographic databases, full-text databanks, and electronic Bibles are in many ways changing the face of biblical and theological studies. Librarians, according to a recent survey, see themselves as facilitators to electronic information in religion, but actual figures from t...

Evolutionary Religious Studies ( ERS ) : A Beginner ’ s Guide

In collaboration with the advisory board of the ERS project: Religion has been studied from a scholarly and scientific perspective for as long as there have been scholars and scientists. religion from a naturalistic perspective, without invoking the actual existence of supernatural agents or events. Today, there is an enormous body of information on religious phenomena from a naturalistic persp...

Toward a Post-Orientalist Approach to Islamic Religious Studies