Conclusion: Construction sites at the juncture of religion and gender

The articles in this special issue offer fresh definitions of ‘new’ and ‘old’, of ‘local’ and ‘world’ religions. The themes of purity, danger and fundamentalism; female leadership, mediumship, self-sexism; and natalism and nationalism are discussed. This conclusion stresses the ‘folk’ sources of ‘mainstream’ religions, and focuses on the way the articles show women to be at the juncture of changing values concerning religion and gender, reform and fundamentalism.     

The Catholic Church and Croatia's Two Transitions1

Abstract

In this article we examine the religious situation in postsoviet Estonia. Traditionally a Christian country, Estonia today is strongly influenced by its Soviet past. Only one third of the population belongs to a particular religion, while nearly half the population say that religion plays no role in their lives. The state's attitude towards the various religions is remarkably positive and the legislation concerning religious organisations is very liberal. Most believers in Estonia belong to Lutheran and Orthodox churches. The biggest non-Christian religion is Estonian Native Religion, and there are also Buddhist, Jewish and Muslim communities. In the late 1990s several problems arose concerning legislation and religious studies at schools. Discussion of these topics found the Christian denominations on one side and non-Christian religions on the other. Although the question whether Religious Studies should be a compulsory subject in schools is still fervently disputed, this now happens in the secular media, while discussion has more or less ceased amongst the various religions. The dialogue between Christian and non-Christian religions is nearly non-existent and there seems to be no will to intensify interrelations. If problems emerge, the representatives of the various religions turn to the state rather than discuss them among themselves.     

Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion

In The Western Construction of Religion Daniel Dubuisson argues that the concept of ‘religion’ is too historically and culturally contingent to serve as the basis for a comparative discipline. The concept is indigenous to Western culture and is inherently theological and phenomenological. He argues for a constructionist view of the discipline and proposes the concept ‘cosmographic formations’ as a replacement for ‘religion’. Religious phenomena should be taken as discursive constructions that link embodied individuals to the social, cultural and cosmic orders. The following reviews evaluate Dubuisson's arguments, relating them to broader currents in the theory of religion. Daniel Dubuisson responds to each of the reviews.¹     

Theology and Religious Studies at the Turn of the Millenium: Reconceiving the Field

This article originated as a lecture at the celebration of 150 years of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in King's College of the University of London. Professor Ford argues that our good practice as teachers has outstripped any available paradigm of the field, so it is necessary to reconceive it. He proposes four dimensions that unite theological and religious studies: how to study the phenomena of religions; how to establish norms and responsibilities; how to cope with radical, self-involving particularity; and how to involve the divine in academic studies.     

Religious history as religious studies

What is the relationship between religious studies and religious history? Academic historical thinking emerged in part to repudiate ecclesiastical traditions of history, making the difference between religious history and histories of religion a question of denominational rivalry more than a difference in sect. Scholars working in the academic study of religion and the academic study of history have increased self-consciousness of this contingency but have not developed an account for the consequence of history as the primary mode for our thinking. As a result, scholars of religion frequently fall silent in the wake of postcolonial critiques of religious subjects, believing their work is adequately buttressed when this history (the history of the relationship between colonial oppression and religious classification) is acknowledged. Yet this is only the beginning of our work. Religious history cannot evade the methodological challenges of religious studies precisely because to identify an object as religious is to begin an inquiry into the subject of religion itself. Using the example of the year 1893, the author seeks to demonstrate how scholars of history might justify their subjects as religious, and how scholars of religion might consider their concept of history.     

Seeking Roots

One of the best-selling Scottish books of 1989, The Root of the Matter ( Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, £9.95 ) recalls the earlier part of the life of its author, Anthony Ross OP, a convert from Presbyterianism who ended up as a Dominican priest widely known in Scotland for his work with young people, and who was elected Rector of Edinburgh University and then Prior Provincial of the English Dominican Province. Allan White OP, who was one of the first two Dominicans since the Reformation to take a degree in Scotland and for six years was Superior of the Dominican Community in Edinburgh, here puts the story of Anthony Ross in the context of a wider story.     

Making Time Protestant in Early-Modern Glasgow

This article, drawn largely from the under-utilized Kirk session records from late-sixteenth-century Glasgow, by way of example, demonstrates how changing dispositions towards time were at the heart of the Reformation change of religion in Scotland. From the expansion of time obligations of Christians, the alteration of holy days, and the re-definition of basic units of time, alternative understandings of time were among the most tangible effects of the establishment of Protestantism in Scotland. In introducing time as a new way to examine the broad influence of the Reformation on the lives of the Scottish people, the article builds on recent research on the European Reformations while also introducing new perspectives on the uniqueness of the Scottish case.     

Internment and ministry: A dialogue with Joseph Kitagawa

This dialogue presents a profile of the late Joseph Kitagawa—a renowned scholar of the history of religions (Religionswissenschaft). It focuses on comparative religion and philosophy, as well as several other important issues related to his distinguished career as an Episcopal priest and dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. They are: his experience of American concentration camps during World War II; Christian atheism and new theological models; concepts of time in Oriental and Occidental faiths; depth-psychology and contemporary ministry; and Paul Tillich's significance for the pastoral counseling movement.David M. Moss, Ph.D., Th.D., is the Book Review Editor of thisjournal and the Past President of the Georgia Chapter of the American Association's Division of Psychoanalysis. The interview is part of a series that will be published in a volume entitledDialogues in Depth Psychology and Religion.     

The Greatest Christian Hero, Philosopher, and Poet: Christopher Dawson's Italian Trinity

Christopher Dawson (born 1889), a Catholic scholar and renowned philosophical historian, spent his academic life exploring the relationship of religion, sociology and culture. He believed that without an understanding of religion it is impossible to comprehend the culture of humanity or peoples. His magisterial work, Religion and Culture, established him as an historian's historian. He ended his days as Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard Divinity School, the first Catholic to occupy a chair there.     

Religion and the use of animals in research: some first thoughts

Religious traditions can be drawn on in a number of ways to illuminate discussions of the moral standing of animals and the ethical use of animals in scientific research. I begin with some general comments about relevant points in the history of major religions. I then briefly describe American civil religion, including the cult of health, and its relation to scientific research. Finally, I offer a critique of American civil religion from a Christian perspective.     

“Rise Up and Walk”: Psychology,Comparative Theology,and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion</Emphasis>

This article provides a review and assessment of the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (2014) as a resource for the emerging discipline of comparative theology and, in particular, Hindu-Christian studies. Co-editor Lewis Rambo has highlighted the importance of this volume as an example of a new multi-disciplinary approach to the psychology of religion, one that incorporates the insights of theological studies along with phenomenology of religion, history of religions, and other disciplines. In the vision of the Handbook, however, theology would seem to remain an object of inquiry, as its norms and patterns inform a broader, integrative, social scientific project. The article argues that theology can emerge as a subject as well as an object, opening at least the possibility of a deepened, renewed, and truly constructive comparative inquiry into the phenomenon of religious conversion.     

Scientology and Catholicism Do Mix: A Note on Teaching New Religions in a Catholic Classroom

Abstract. This note from the classroom explores teaching new or alternative religions within the context of a Roman Catholic Liberal Arts College. The essay will specifically focus on a section of a course entitled “Modern Religious Movements” in which students were asked to consider different methodological approaches to the teaching and study of Scientology and the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary. This note from the classroom details how this rather unexpected comparison prompted students to reconsider the category cult and argues that encouraging self‐reflexivity in a largely Catholic classroom can become a crucial means for engaging a broader discussion of new religions, cult discourse, and the academic study of religion itself.     

Methodological concerns in the psychology of religion: Continuities, losses and transforming perspectives

This article seeks solutions to what has recently been called the ‘crisis’ in the psychology of religion by returning to the programs of its founding fathers. It explores some of the methodological debates that followed the translation of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience into German. More was at stake than the commonly drawn distinction between empirical and hermeneutical approaches to religion, or between quantitative and qualitative methods. What was at stake was the need for another kind of psychology in general. This article pays special attention to Wilhelm Wundt's fundamental criticism of James and of others in the psychology of religion. Despite the problems inherent in both James' and Wundt's aborted general psychology programs, each nonetheless contains approaches that may yet serve as an impetus to contemporary research on religion. Contemporary developments in cultural psychology in particular complement current research in the psychology of religion.     

‘Only one repertory’: American religious studies

This paper assesses American Religious Studies by attending to its institutional lineages, its tone and genre, and its sometimes unconscious methodological presumptions. Exploring the implications of Zora Neale Hurston's ‘lying up a narrative,’ this piece suggests that a series of narrative, curricular, and theoretical commitments produce a particular kind of ‘religion’ as normative in the study of American religions. As the narrative of post-denominational pluralism has become normative, a discursive ambivalence has been produced wherein a liberal, identitarian conception of religion coexists awkwardly with a radical suspicion of the analytical limits of ‘religion’ as an object of study. Identifying the different nodes of this ambivalence, this essay suggests that scholars might move beyond analytical repetition or paralysis by pluralizing method, genre, and style.     

Thinking the ‘question’ of religion: The aporia of Buddhism and its democratic heritage in Sri Lanka

(If an abstract can ever be ‘abstract’?) Buddhism (and, more generally, religion) has never been thought as a question - that is, as a question inseparable from the question of the political. The academic study of Buddhism continues to be dominated by an empiricist, humanist, and even humanitarian project, shackled by modes of knowledge production, within the garrisons of colonialist area studies. No textualizing, anthropologizing, historicizing approach - however, critical it may be - can avoid the trap of humanism. To think the question of religion, one must begin to think it and its heritage as an aporia, an irreducible contradiction. In reading Qadri Ismail's Abiding by Sri Lanka, I argue that reflecting on the aporia of religion - whose legacy is not a ‘problem’ to be solved, inherited, or abandoned - might well enable us to imagine a notion of the political hitherto unheard of.     

Drawing a line between the religious and the secular: the cases of religious education in Sweden and India

Abstract

Religion as a school subject – Religious Education (RE) – is handled differently in various national contexts. This article discusses two different systems of managing (or avoiding) RE: those used in non-denominational Swedish and Indian schools. The article focuses particularly on what is allowed in the classroom with regards to religion. Both countries are secular, but where is the line drawn between the secular and the religious? Allowing the two contexts to meet reveals the particularities of each. The impact of Protestant Christianity, specifically Lutheranism, is evident in Swedish RE: religion is to be defined through beliefs and words, and religious actions should be excluded from classrooms. The Swedish context highlights ‘knowledge of’ religions, but avoids religious action. In India, there is no explicit RE, but Indian education does include learning from religion as well as ‘doing religion.’ The Indian approach is very inclusive, to the point of emphasising, as teachers put it, a common core of all religions. Both systems of RE offer particular opportunities and face certain difficulties in dealing with the contemporary globalised world.     

Orientalism, representation and religion: the reality behind the myth

Said's Orientalism has been called an ‘epoch-making’ and ‘paradigm constitutive’ book. While it undoubtedly caused a stir on its appearance and proved an important influence upon post-colonial studies and other developments in literary and cultural theory, a careful re-reading of it reveals a deeply flawed work that offers a confused analysis of human representations and realities, a highly selective and partial engagement with Western and Middle Eastern history and scholarship, and a particularly unhelpful approach to religion. The argument offered here is that Said's claims about ‘Orientalism’ are actually incoherent, veering between Foucauldian social constructionism and references to trans-cultural human realities; that the theoretical approaches to religion are inconsistent and highly selective; that the account of human agency is entirely inadequate; and that, although Said condemns entire generations of Orientalist scholars as racist, imperialist and ethnocentric, he is insufficiently reflective about his own scholarly position and the implications of its inconsistencies. Although Orientalism has been hailed as a book that ‘breathed insurgency’, it actually offers a vision of human beings as remarkably powerless in the face of arbitrary and abstract discourses that define their lives as oppressors or oppressed. Said sought to demonstrate that the reality behind the myth of scholarly impartiality was a racist and ethnocentric exercise of control and authority over the Orient, but the reality behind the myth of Orientalism is a theoretically flawed work offering a reductive account of religion and an impoverished view of human beings.