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Time: 15 hours
Level: Advanced
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 Introduction Resource- There is a widespread perception in the West that we live in a secular age, an age in which religion is at best an optional extra, if not a false delusion completely out of place. However, religion still...
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- What are the issues? Resource
- Some themes recur when we start to think about religion. These include issues of continuity and change, representation, differing perspectives, authority, community and identity. In this unit we start...
- Continuity and change Resource
- Religions generally go to a great deal of trouble to stress how consistent, how changeless, how solid they are, but change is, in fact, an observable and constant factor in religion. At a personal level,...
- Representation Resource
- Representation is a complex idea, or set of ideas, but it is extremely important in relation to studying religion. Representing religion might mean being an official delegate of a religion, or it might...
- The Victoria and Albert Museum's 'Sacred Spaces' exhibition Resource
- Some of these issues of representation were addressed indirectly by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2000, when an exhibition called ‘Sacred Spaces’ was mounted in conjunction with religious...
- Differing perspectives Resource
- Closely related to representation of religion is the recurring issue of differing perspectives. In talking about perspectives here, we are thinking about how we look at something. We rarely approach anything...
- Sources of authority Resource
- A very useful way of gaining insight into a religion and seeing how it works is to examine its sources of authority: for example, whether authority is vested in scriptures, in religious specialists, in...
- Language Resource
- Language is frequently a knotty problem in religion. As religions and religious ideas move from their place of origin to other cultures, either the new recipients have to learn the language of origin (Hebrew,...
- Religion and spirituality Resource
- A good example of polysemy can be found in the different ways in which people regard the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’, and this is the subject of the first exercise below.
- Community and identity Resource
- In an Italian exhibition of cartoons on the theme of globalization (reported in the Financial Times (Lloyd, 2000)), one depicted two women sitting on a couch. The first woman explains enthusiastically...
- Religion and the individual Resource
- How formal or informal, how personal or impersonal, how loose or how tight, how casual or demanding the religious community is will depend on the form of religion, the extent to which it is enforced and...
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- New perspectives Resource
- The purpose of studying religion is to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.
- Insider/outsider perspectives Resource
- Social historians have long argued that we must study history ‘from the underside’, if we want to thoroughly understand a society. In other words, it is not sufficient to have a top-down knowledge of a...
- Is religion a museum piece? Resource
- We have used the video sequence below to highlight the emic/etic problem and we would like you to carry out a short exercise using it to consolidate your understanding of these terms.
- Theological, reductionist and phenomenological perspectives 1 Resource
- If we are thinking about individual perspectives on religion, there are three very common and useful terms we can employ: theism, atheism and agnosticism. In everyday parlance, ‘theism’ denotes a belief...
- Theological, reductionist and phenomenological perspectives 2 Resource
- Although theology had been thought of as ultimate knowledge, in post-Enlightenment thought, religion came to be seen by many in the West as a hindrance to progress and the advancement of human knowledge....
- Theological, reductionist and phenomenological perspectives 3 Resource
- The term ‘phenomenology’ is a good example of polysemy, as it has different meanings according to the academic context in which it is found. There are scientific phenomenology and philosophical phenomenology,...
- Conclusion Resource
- Having asked you to think about these perspectives on religion and approaches to its study, I must again emphasize that this is a very crude way of characterizing a very complex area of research. These...
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| | References and Acknowledgements | |
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