Thinking About Religion A Reader

by Strenski, Ivan

• ISBN13: 9781405121668
• ISBN10: 1405121661
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-03-17
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This concise reader creates a useful mix of classic and contemporary responses to issues in the study of religion, ideal for those coming to the subject for the first time. Pairing pivotal theorists and theories of religion alongside cutting-edge criticism from both their contemporaries and modern-day scholars, this vibrant collection enables students to gain a balanced understanding of the diverse methods, theories, and theorists involved. The major historical and methodological developments in the study of religion in the West are traced through the works of leading theorists including Herbert of Cherbury, David Hume, Georges Sorel, Baruch de Spinoza, Friedrich Max Muller, Edward Burnet Tylor, William Robertson Smith, James George Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim. Each of these primary figures meets their critical match in contributions from contemporary scholars designed to raise questions both for and against their approach and work. Along with Ivan Strenskirs"s textbook, Thinking about Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion, this reader offers a complete resource for introductory students of religious studies.

Author Biography

Ivan Strenski is Holstein Family and Community Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His previous publications include Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History (1988), Religion in Relation: Method, Application, and Moral Location (1993), Durkheim and the Jews of France (1997), Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (2002), Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (2003), and The New Durkheim: Essays on Philosophy, Religious Identity and the Politics of Knowledge (2006).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. viii
Acknowledgments	p. xi
The Quest for Natural Religion	p. 1
Edward's Prayer	p. 1
Common Notions Concerning Religion	p. 2
from The Natural History of Religion	p. 8
Hume's Natural History of Religion and the Beginning of the Social Scientific Study of Religion	p. 13
The Critique of Religion Also Begins with the Critique of the Bible	p. 23
from The History of the Origins of Christianity, Book I: Life of Jesus	p. 23
The Historical System of Ernest Renan	p. 27
from A Theologico-Political Treatise and a Political Treatise	p. 31
The Bible and Religion in the Century of Genius, Part III: The Hidden Dialogue in Spinoza's Tractatus	p. 34
The Shock of the Old: Max Muller's Search for the Soul of Europe	p. 49
Preface to Chips from a German Woodshop	p. 49
On the Philosophy of Mythology	p. 53
Forgotten Bibles	p. 57
Muller on the Science of Religion	p. 61
The Shock of the 'Savage': Edward Burnett Tylor, Evolution, and Spirits	p. 65
from Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern	p. 65
The Religion of Savages	p. 68
from Primitive Culture	p. 71
Edward Burnett Tylor and the Mission of Primitive Man	p. 74
Evolution in the Religion of the Bible: William Robertson Smith	p. 83
from Lectures on the Religion of the Semites	p. 83
Renan's Histoire du peuple d'Israel	p. 88
William Robertson Smith	p. 91
Setting the Eternal Templates of Salvation: James Frazer	p. 97
from The Golden Bough	p. 97
Outcast from the Islands: Frazer, The Golden Bough, and Modern Anthropology	p. 106
from Evolution to Religious Experience: Phenomenology of Religion	p. 115
from The Meaning of Religion: Lectures in the Phenomenology of Religion	p. 115
from Argonauts of the Western Pacific	p. 119
from The Idea of the Holy	p. 121
Towards a Theory of the Configurations of Religion	p. 126
Religious Experience Creates the World of the Modern Economy: Max Weber	p. 135
from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism	p. 135
Capitalism and Protestantism	p. 144
Religion and Development: Weber and the East Asian Experience	p. 146
Tales from the Underground: Freud and the Psychoanalytic Origins of Religion	p. 155
from The Future of an Illusion	p. 155
Sigmund Freud	p. 163
The Neurosis of Civilization	p. 166
from Freud: The Mind of the Moralist	p. 168
Bronislaw Malinowski, Bipolarity, and the "Sublime Folly" of Religion	p. 177
from Magic, Science and Religion	p. 177
Souvenir of Malinowsky	p. 182
Anthropology and the Science of the Irrational: Malinowski's Encounter with Freudian Psychoanalysis	p. 184
Seeing the Sacred with the Social Eye: Emile Durkheim's "Religious Sociology"	p. 195
from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life	p. 195
Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena	p. 199
Contribution to Discussion "Religions Sentiment at the Present Time"	p. 207
Individualism and Intellectuals	p. 212
Pragmatism and Protestantism in the Development of Durkheim's Sociology of Religion	p. 217
Mircea Eliade: Turning the 'Worm of Doubt'	p. 223
from Patterns in Comparative Religion	p. 223
Crisis and Renewal	p. 226
Cosmogonic Myth and "Sacred History"	p. 236
Mircea Eliade: Apologia Pro Opere Suo	p. 241
Index	p. 248
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