A cutting-edge introduction to contemporary religious studies theory, connecting theory to data.
This innovative coursebook introduces students to interdisciplinary theoretical tools for understanding contemporary religiously diverse societies-both Western and non-Western. Using a case-study model, the text considers:
A cutting-edge introduction to contemporary religious studies theory, connecting theory to data.
This innovative coursebook introduces students to interdisciplinary theoretical tools for understanding contemporary religiously diverse societies-both Western and non-Western. Using a case-study model, the text considers:
List of Illustrations
List of Boxes
Acknowledgments and Dedications
Introduction
PART I. WHAT IS RELIGION AND HOW TO APPROACH IT?
1. Religion: Language, Law, and Legacies
Case Study 1A: Falun Gong: Religion or Self-Cultivation
Practice?
Case Study 1B: Christians and Ancestor Veneration: Religion or
Culture?
2. Method: Insider-Outsider Debates, Phenomenology, and
Reflexivity
Case Study 2A: Living between Religious Worlds: Conversion and
Reconversion
Case Study 2B: Hindu and Christian? Multiple Religious
Identities
3. Life: Lived Religion, Syncretism, and Hybridity
Case Study 3A: Mexican American Catholicism and Our Lady of
Guadalupe
Case Study 3B: Thai Buddhism as Lived Religion and Syncretic
Practice
PART II. THEORIES, METHODOLOGIES, AND CRITICAL DEBATES
4. History: Historical Methodology and the Invention of
Tradition
Case Study 4A: The Historical Jesus and the Christ of
Faith
Case Study 4B: Laozi, the Daodejing, and the Origins of Daoism
5. Power: Social Constructionism, Habitus, and Authority
Case Study 5A: Mosques, Minarets, and Power
Case Study 5B: Individual (New Age/Alternative) Spirituality as
Modernity's Ideology
6. Identity: Social Identity Theory, In-Groups, Out-Groups, and
Conflict
Case Study 6A: Shiv Sena, Hindu Nationalism, and Identity
Politics
Case Study 6B: Race, Religion, and the American White
Evangelical
7. Colonialism: Postcolonialism, Orientalism, and
Decolonization
Case Study 7A: Beyond "Inventing" Hinduism
Case Study 7B: Magic, Superstition, and Religion in Southeast Asia
and Africa
8. Brains: The Cognitive Science of Religion and Beyond
Case Study 8A: Religion, Non-Religion, and Atheism
Case Study 8B: Ancestors, Jesus, and Prosocial Behavior in Fiji
9. Bodies: Material Religion, Embodiment, and Materiality
Case Study 9A: Weeping Gods and Drinking Statues
Case Study 9B: Embodied Practice at a Christian Shrine
10. Gender: Feminism, Sexuality, and Religion
Case Study 10A: Priests, Paul, and Rewriting Texts
Case Study 10B: Buddhist Feminisms and Nuns
11. Comparison: Comparative and Contrastive Methodologies
Case Study 11A: Comparing Hinduism and Judaism
Case Study 11B: A Comparison of Zen Buddhist and Protestant
Christian Sitting Practices
12. Ritual: Ritualization, Myth, and Performance
Case Study 12A: The Zen Tea Ceremony and Protestant Eucharist as
Performance and Ritual
Case Study 12B: Buddhist Ordination Rites
PART III. RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND SOCIETY
13. Diversity: Religious Borders, Identities, and Discourses
Case Study 13A: The Memory of Al-Andalusia
Case Study 13B: Dominus Iesus and Catholic Christianity in Asia
14. Dialogue: Interreligious Discourse and Critique
Case Study 14A: Christian and Muslim Women Reading
Scriptures
Case Study 14B: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: History and
Discourse
15. Violence: Fundamentalism, Extremism, and
Radicalization
Case Study 15A: The Invention of Islamic Terrorism
Case Study 15B: Buddhism and Violence
16. Secularism: Secularization, Human Rights, and
Religion
Case Study 16A: Laïcité and the Burkini Ban
Case Study 16B: Singapore's Common Space
17. Geography: Place, the Lived Environment, and
Environmentalism
Case Study 17A: Trees as Monks?
Case Study 17B: Protestant Christian Understandings of the "Holy
Land"
18. Politics: Governance, the Colonial Wound, and the
Sacred
Case Study 18A: Ethnicity and Religion: The Singaporean
Malay-Muslim Identity
Case Study 18B: Saluting the Flag: The Case of Jehovah's Witnesses
in the United States
Glossary
Who's Who
Notes
Index
Paul Hedges is Associate Professor in the Studies in
Interreligious Relations in Plural Societies Programme, RSIS,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has authored or
edited more than a dozen books and over seventy academic papers.
His most recent book is Religious Hatred: Prejudice, Islamophobia,
and Antisemitism in Global Context.
"Understanding Religion is a lucid, creatively structured, and
nearly jargon-free introduction to theories and methods for
studying religious communities and traditions in diverse societies,
bold in scope, and presented in a manner that is
undergraduate-friendly, yet sophisticated enough for use in a
graduate-level course."
*Journal of Interreligious Studies*
"Explores themes one might expect in a textbook as well as ones
welcomely added, emphasizing a 'deeply political' approach that
continually draws the reader’s attention back to whose voice gets
expressed in scholarship, and whose does not."
*Religious Studies Review*
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