Richard Rorty and the pragmatic turn in the study of religion

Recent interest in the pragmatic tradition draws much of its impetus from the work of Richard Rorty and his critics. This paper argues that Rorty's late interest in religion derives from his abiding interests in American liberalism and not specifically from his Pragmatism. Students of religion, however, have much to learn from the pragmatic tradition and over the last 25 years work by Wayne Proudfoot, Jeffrey Stout, and others has been important in establishing a pluralist approach to the study of religion that avoids the pitfalls of foundationalism, essentialism, and dogmatism in understanding religion and religious phenomena. The continued pursuit of this approach, the essay concludes, will help students of religion avoid unnecessary worries about theories and methods.     

THE PRAGMATIC TURN IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition puts forward a complex argument in favor of American democracy as a healthy and legitimate moral and political tradition in itself. Stout does not dwell on the place of his own work in the “pragmatic” approach to the study of religion in the last thirty years. This paper attempts to situate Stout's work in the approach to religion identified with Mary Douglas and Wayne Proudfoot and to suggest some of the consequences for comparative religious ethics of his making that “pragmatic turn.”     

Levinas,recognition and judaism

I seek to draw out the unique character of Levinas’ theory of recognition by highlighting its transitional character in a double sense. It is transitional, firstly, in that it stands between two models of recognition: the earlier agonistic model of Kojeve and the later model of Honneth which takes as its point of departure a primordial relation of mutual affirmation between individuals. It is transitional secondly in the sense that, while Levinas initially employs the concept of recognition, he is later explicit in his rejection of it. The interest of Levinas’ transitional model of recognition for the philosophy of religion is that Levinas negotiates both transitions by calling on archetypes borrowed from the Jewish tradition. An exploration of this model thus provides us with a fresh vantage point from which to address anew the question of the articulation of social philosophy and the philosophy of religion in his work.     

Re-reading al-birūnī's India: a case for intercultural understanding

It is argued that until recently the major motive behind the interest in religious traditions other than one's own has been to refute the truth-claims of the former. This attitude was based on the conviction that the religious tradition to which the student of religion belonged contained all that he or she needed to know, since whatever remained outside the authoritative revelation was at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous. Although prevalent throughout history, this approach was not the only model for studying religions other than one's own. There have been scholars within the Islamic tradition who showed genuine interest in studying and understanding other religious traditions on their own terms. Arguably, one of the best representatives of these scholars was al-Birūnī (973–1048 CE) whose accomplishments in other disciplines, notably in natural sciences, overshadowed his crucial contribution to the study of religion. This paper is an attempt to contribute to the current debate in the study of religion by analyzing the method al-Birūnī employed in his treatment of the religious traditions of India. In pursuing the subject, the paper aims to elucidate the phenomenological, dialogical and comparative aspects of al-Birūnī's thought in light of contemporary scholarship.     

Hume's natural history of religion and the beginning of the social scientific study of religion

David Hume's The Natural History of Religion (1757) has rightly been considered a key work in the development of the social scientific study of religion. Compared with other pioneers in the field, Hume is precociously modern in many ways: (1) in his insistence on the distinction between the issue of origin and the issue of truth, (2) in his concentration on causes rather than reasons, (3) in his interest in the recurrent rather than the one‐time origin of religion, (4) in his search for a non‐religious rather than an irreducibly religious origin of religion, (5) in his comparative rather than particularistic approach, (6) in his inductive rather than deductive approach, (7) in his stress on the non‐rational rather than rational dimensions of religion, (8) in his focus on the effect as well as the origin of religion, (9) in his concern with the unintended rather than the intended effects of religion, and (10) in his separation of religion from ethics.     

Advaita Vedanta and the Repositioning of Subjectivity in the Life-writing of Christopher Isherwood, "Homosexualist"

Abstract

For British critics, Christopher Isherwood went off the literary radar when he declared himself a pacifist and de-camped to California on the eve of WWII. Nothing he wrote after the Berlin Stories (1939), when his life was barely half over, until Christopher and his Kind, in 1976, when he emerged as a kind of gay literary icon, was accorded much serious attention from Britain's literary establishment. Furthermore, what he published during his long relationship with a guru in the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition—which culminated in the classic My Guru and his Disciple (1980)—has scarcely been taken seriously, and only a few of the more astute literary critics have detected the influence of Vedanta philosophy in his later work (e.g. Nagarajan, 1972). Yet there have been calls for Isherwood to be re-evaluated as a serious religious writer (Wade, 2001).

If such calls are to be taken seriously there are several issues that need to be addressed, not the least of which would be the dominant cultural expectations surrounding the (im)possibility of a spirituality not predicated on the denial of sexuality. "My personal approach to Vedanta was, among other things, the approach of a homosexual looking for a religion which will accept him," he wrote in 1970 (Bucknell, 2000: ix).

There is also the problem of an unreconstructed colonialist prejudice towards religious practices associated with a subject people. Here, I review important aspects of the non-dualist philosophy of his Advaita training that allowed Isherwood to integrate his sexuality and his writing with his religious practice.

Isherwood was inclined less to approach ideas as abstract principles and more as they were embodied in particular people. With this particular Swami, an exponent of the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition, Isherwood found his lifelong guide, and the narrative of his spiritual journey is the history of a relationship that deepened over 40 years. That relationship is the other focus of this article.     

Review Essay: Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion by J. E. Belzen

Jacob Belzen spends the first two-thirds of his 2010 book doing two things: (1) developing a cogent critique of the presuppositions that underlie mainstream psychology, especially as regards the study of religion, and (2) promoting greater use of what he calls a “cultural psychology.” The last third presents a number of religious case studies, all from the Netherlands, that demonstrate the value of cultural psychology. Although Belzen emphasizes “embodiment” in these studies, his results suggest that religion is often a “performance” for particular audiences. Finally, the applicability of Belzen’s approach to religions outside the Western tradition is discussed.     

MICHAEL POLANYI ON ART AND RELIGION: SOME CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON MEANING

This paper is a critique of the theory of meaning in art and religion that Michael Polanyi developed in his last work entitled Meaning. After giving a brief summary of Polanyi's theory of art, I raise two serious difficulties, not with the theory itself, but with the claims Polanyi makes about the relation of meaning in art to science and religion. Regarding the first difficulty, I argue that Polanyi betrays an earlier insight when in Meaning he attempts to dissociate meaning in art from meaning in science; instead I argue that both science and art are aesthetic enterprises. Regarding the second, I argue that Polanyi's account of religion is an aesthetic reduction, that meaning in religion, at least in the Western tradition, is not so much an aesthetic as it is an existential matter.     

PEIRCE'S PRAGMATIC THEOLOGY AND STOIC RELIGIOUS ETHICS1

Charles S. Peirce believed that his pragmatic philosophy could reconcile religion and science and that this reconciliation involves a religious ethics creating a real community with the cosmos and God. After some rival pragmatic approaches to God and religious belief inconsistent with Peirce's philosophy are set aside, his metaphysical plan for a reconciliation of religion and science is outlined. A panentheistic God makes the best match with his desired conclusions from the Neglected Argument for the reality of God, and this God is also capable of fulfilling the pragmatic role demanded by Peirce's ethical expectations for the intelligent functioning of religion. The discussion proceeds to an elaboration of the aesthetic, metaphysical, and ethical elements of Peirce's philosophical system, which indicate why Peirce's religious ethics is best categorized as akin to Stoicism, with some Christian elements. For Peirce, religious ethics proceeds from the (potentially universal) agapic community's cooperation with God's loving creativity of the universe.     

ERNEST BECKER'S PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION FORTY YEARS ON: A VIEW FROM SOCIAL COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

This article distinguishes between three projects in Ernest Becker's (1924–1974) later work: his psychology of “religion,” his psychology of religion, and his psychology of Religion (with a capital R). The first is an analysis of culture and civilization as immortality projects, means by which to deny death. The second, which overlaps with the first, is a characterization of religion‐as‐practiced (e.g., by adherents of the world religions) as a particularly effective immortality project vis‐à‐vis death anxiety. The third is less social scientific and more theological; Becker argues for a view of God that is in the tradition of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich (and, arguably, Pseudo‐Dionysius, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas). Focusing on the second of these projects—as much has already been written on the first, and little can be said about the third—this article evaluates Becker's claims about religion‐as‐practiced in light of recent developments in social cognitive psychology.     

Implicit religion,explicit religion and purpose in life: an empirical enquiry among 13- to 15-year-old adolescents

In his analysis of the construct “implicit religion” Edward Bailey speaks of those individuals “who believe in Christianity” but who do not display the behaviours of explicit religion, like church attendance. A recent research tradition has tried to operationalise this understanding of implicit religion by studying those who believe that they can be a Christian without going to church. A longer established research tradition has demonstrated the association between explicit religiosity and an enhanced sense of purpose in life. The aim of the present study is to test the hypothesis that implicit religiosity (in the sense of believing that you can be a Christian without going to church) is also associated with an enhanced sense of purpose in life. Data provided by a sample of 25,825 13- to 15-year-old adolescents support this hypothesis. In turn these findings support the notion that implicit religion (in the sense operationalised by this study) fulfils some functions similar to those fulfilled by explicit religion.     

A POSITIVE PHENOMENOLOGY: THE STRUCTURE OF MAURICE BLONDEL'S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

Given recent developments in Franco‐German phenomenology with its so‐called ‘theological turn’, there has been a concomitant renewal of interest in Maurice Blondel's thought. In this paper I consider the phenomenological structure of Blondel's early philosophy. Blondel defended and published his controversial thesis in 1893 and with this work presented a highly original phenomenology that was deeply indebted to the positive tradition and yet went beyond this same tradition to include even religious practice as part of its inquiry. Keen to engage the rationalist philosophers of the French academy, Blondel proposed a phenomenological project that was geared to engage the critical spirit of an age that was already deemed to be post‐metaphysical. It is in clarifying the manner in which Blondel conceives such a positive phenomenology that I indicate how his thought may contribute to contemporary debates in the phenomenology of religion.     

What I Really Said about Secularisation

The author sets out the different elements in his approach to secularization over forty years from a conceptual critique to an empirical general theory, initially covering Europe and America and later global Christianity, taking into account different historical inflections to secularization as a component of master narratives. The author presents his interest in secularization as strongly linked to his interest in religion and politics, faith and violence.     

Rorty,religion, and humanism

This article offers a review of Richard Rorty’s attempts to come to terms with the role of religion in our public and intellectual life by tracing the key developments in his position, partially in response to the ubiquitous criticisms of his distinction between private and public projects. Since Rorty rejects the possibility of dismissing religion on purely epistemic grounds, he is determined to treat it, instead, as a matter of politics. My suggestion is that, in this respect, Rorty’s position is best construed as that of a humanist rather than a post-modernist. Ultimately, it appears that, in his view, the positive element of religion—i.e. the idea of religion as a social gospel—has been absorbed and transformed into a utopian striving which humanists associate with the ideal of democracy. Hence, in this regard, religion can be considered obsolete. Yet, without explicitly invoking the usual epistemic grounds, Rorty’s arguments for excluding religion from the public sphere remain rather thin, and an interest in reforming rather than excluding religion would have been more consistent with his general outlook.     

Negotiating the Boundaries of Science and Religion: The Case of Henry Margenau

The life of Henry Margenau (1901–1997) offers a case study in the complexity of the science-religion relation. As a physicist-philosopher at Yale University, he pursued a public program of "amalgamating religion with science." He drew upon his authority as a physicist and a tradition of philosophical idealism to advocate a "reciprocity" between the two spheres. He argued that a "new modesty" and "metaphysical attitude" among scientists created new opportunities for collaboration. At the same time, his view of faith and his sense of the religiousness of science created troubling ambiguities. In the end, Margenau embodied the ambivalent relation between science and religion while revealing the limits of renegotiating the boundaries.     

Three pioneers of comparative psychology in America, 1843-1890: Lewis H. Morgan,John Bascom,and Joseph LeConte

Scientific comparative psychology in America dates from the mid-1890s, but there is a body of earlier literature on the topic, written during a period of theistic debates over Darwinian evolution. The anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan rejected instinct as an explanation of animal behavior in 1843 and defended the mental similarities between animals and humans, although he was not an evolutionist. John Bascom's textbook Comparative Psychology (1878) is the earliest American work to use that title, and its theistic approach anticipates some arguments found in much later evolutionary works. Beginning in 1860, the geologist Joseph LeConte, who is well known for defending the compatibility of evolution and religion, wrote several articles in which he outlined a comparative evolutionary approach to psychological problems. However, these writers did not establish a coherent research tradition and were ignored by the "New Psychologists" of the 1880s.     

WHAT DOES EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY TELL US ABOUT PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION?

Abstract. Considerations from evolutionary biology lead Michael Ruse, among others, to a naturalistic turn in philosophy. I assess some of the pragmatic and skeptical conclusions concerning ethics, religion, and epistemology that Ruse draws from his evolutionary naturalism. Finally, I argue that there is an essential tension between science and religion which forecloses the possibility of an ultimate reconciliation between the two as they are now understood.     

Culturalized Religion: A Synthetic Review and Agenda for Research

Scholars have taken a growing interest in what we call “culturalized religion”—that is, forms of religious identification, discourse, and expression that are primarily cultural in character, insofar as they are divorced from belief in religious dogma or participation in religious ritual. This article aims to clarify our current thinking about these phenomena so as to facilitate future theoretical and empirical work. Drawing on recent work in the sociology of culture, we distinguish between culturalized religion as a form of constituted culture, a form of pragmatic culture, and a form of identity; and theorize three principal types of relations connecting each of these modalities: reinforcing relationships, resource relationships, and destabilizing relationships. In so doing, we develop an inclusive and dynamic approach to studying culturalized religion that clears the ground for further research into its diverse modalities and manifestations, as well as their points of intersection and interaction.     

Habermas,Religion, and Public Life

Abstract

Although many scholars view Jürgen Habermas as the most important philosopher and social theorist since Weber, his account of religion has been relatively neglected. This may be a reflection of the fact that he appears to offer quite distinct views of religion, but it may also reflect the strong secularist assumptions of his early work. In this paper, Habermas’s early and later views of religion are outlined and the change in his understanding of religion is mapped—from being one of the sources of modernity’s inner problems to being a principal source of the passions and motivations underpinning cultural life today. I argue that the relative neglect of Habermas’s work on religion is unfortunate, as it offers a creative and important attempt to move beyond the secular assumptions that have characterised much modern study of religion, providing it with a central role in the mediation of the costs and benefits of modernity.