Religious Studies: The Key Concepts

Carl Olson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136902055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Religious Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible, A-Z resource, defining and explaining key terms and ideas central to the study of religion. Exploring broad and recurring themes which are applicable in both eastern and western religions, cross-cultural examples are provided for each term to give a comprehensive overview of the subject. Subjects covered include:

• afterlife
• comparative religion
• festivals
• ethics
• gender
• monotheism
• world religions
• modernity
• pilgrimage
• theism
• secularization

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With cross referencing and further reading provided throughout, this book provides an inclusive map of the discipline, and is an essential reference for all students, academics and researchers.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES

The Key Concepts

AFTERLIFE

Although there is a wide variety of belief about the afterlife from a cross-cultural perspective, this richness possesses a common thread that concerns the destiny of the individual after death. Within many cultures, it is the soul that survives in contrast to the perishable body, although the soul is not always considered immortal. Among the Native American Ojibwa, there is a belief in two souls: body- or ego-soul and free-soul. The latter soul possesses a separate existence from the body, being able to travel during sleep. After death, the free-soul becomes a ghost that is eventually reunited in the afterlife with the body-soul.

Afterlife beliefs are often reflected by a culture’s conception of heaven and hell. These beliefs frequently have social consequences reflected by notions of good and bad behavior and rewards promised for positive actions. These types of conviction are evidence that earthly existence helps to determine one’s destiny in the afterlife. In many religious cultures, some form of judgment determines whether or not one’s deeds merit a pleasant or painful destiny. These destinies are conceptualized as a paradise akin to a heaven or a painful place like hell, although such a clear distinction is not always the case, however, because some religious cultures believe in a more ambiguous or shadowy place, such as the ancient Jewish notion of Sheol, a dark place where the dead are inert. For the ancient Egyptians, the dead go to the underworld of Osiris where the deceased confesses to sins that he/she did not commit, tries to establish his/her righteousness, is judged by a panel of gods, appears before Osiris, and his/her heart (location of emotions and intellect) is weighted against a feather, a symbol of cosmic harmony and justice (Ma’at). Those with heavy hearts are thrown to a hideous monster made of many different animals.

Further reading: Obayashi (1992); Taylor (2001); Vecsey (1983)

AGENCY

This is a relatively new concept in the field, borrowed from the philosophical writings of Donald Davidson and Charles Taylor. Donaldson is interested in agency and interpretation that he claims includes the pattern of interaction between speakers and their environments. The irrational is internal, for instance, to an agent, and is a matter of not adhering to rational norms. Thus, irrational behavior is a failure to conform fully to the rational pattern of the remaining agent’s attitudes and behaviors.

Within a cultural context, agency refers to the way that individuals behave despite their social and religious context. A person might have been raised in a strict religious home, but decides not to participate in religion in adult life. This type of person is acting upon their own personal agency and contrary to their life history and social conditioning. In spite of cultural conditioning, a person is free to choose another option unexpected by other members of one’s family or society. This scenario indicates that individuals have a role in shaping their personal lives, are not mere products of the prevailing culture, and that there are limits upon a culture to get members to conform.

Due to the influence of the poststructural thinker Michel Foucault, agency is interpreted as a form of resistance against the ideologies of a culture. In this case, agency is a power exercised, for instance, by an oppressed person or group against cultural forces. Beyond mere free will or resistance, agency is a capability to make something happen, as in rites of passage that transform adolescents into adults, ordinary men into kings, unmarried to married, and the dead into ancestors.

The transformative potential of agency does not mean that a person must exercise it. It is possible to let it remain simply potential. The efficacy of an individual’s agency can be measured by the success or failure of a rite. The exercise of agency through rites suggests that agency is not simply an individual capability, but is also distributed through a cultural network that includes social and religious institutions, political leaders, community, family, local groups, and councils.

In his discussion of agency, Charles Taylor makes a case for it as an individual mental process by distinguishing between disengaged and engaged agency. With the former type, the agent fully distinguishes oneself from the rational and social worlds. Therefore, the subject’s identity is no longer defined by what lies external to the subject in the world. The engaged agent is an embodied subject who is engaged in and open to the world. In other words, the engaged agent acts in the world and on the world. Embodiment is the subject’s form of agency, and it represents a context for one’s experience as a context conferring meaning.

Further reading: Davidson (1980); Foucault (1994); Taylor (1985)

AGNOSTICISM

This is a conceptual position related to the negation of the Greek term gn

stos (meaning to know), implying not to know, for instance, whether God exists or not. To be certain or to have faith that God exists represents a theistic position, whereas to deny the existence of God is atheism. Being agnostic does not necessarily mean that a person is not deeply religious, although it is commonly used to describe someone who is detached from religious commitments or is unwilling to speculate about something that cannot be empirically validated.

In the nineteenth century, agnosticism becomes associated with the scientific perspective by T. H. Huxley (1825–1895), who claims that Christian doctrine represents unverifiable speculation that cannot withstand the scrutiny of the scientific method. During this historical period, agnosticism finds favor with other scientifically inclined intellectuals such as Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and others. Within twentieth-century philosophy, agnosticism is adopted by many logical positivists and postmodernists in the latter half of the century. Some agnostics claim that the existence of God, for instance, cannot be proven or disproved. It is thus preferable to be detached from such metaphysical speculation.

ANCESTORS

In many religious cultures throughout history, ancestors are deceased family members that are intimately related to the living and are regarded as family leaders and members of the community, even though no longer alive. Ancestors are imagined to be spiritual superintendents of family affairs, continuing to hold titles, such as mother or father, after death that they held when alive. These features are evident in the traditional Chinese family cult where every home possesses an ancestral altar that hold a number of wooden spirit tablets with each of them representing a deceased ancestor. The presence of these spirit tablets indicates that the dead continue to occupy a place in family activities.

The ancestral cult and reverence presuppose the commemoration of the departed by name, which suggests worship directed specifically to him or her. Using an ancestor’s name during ritual action, suggests that the departed is invested with distinctive attributes similar to any person. This also means that ancestors are to be distinguished from the high gods. In traditional Chinese religion, the ancestor cult is composed of two parts: mortuary rites immediately following death and sacrificial rites that maintain a long-term relationship between the living and the dead. The mortuary rites are performed for the benefit and salvation of the soul in China, whereas the sacrificial rites are performed to stabilize the relationship between the dead and the living at two locations: home and ancestral temple. The family sacrifices of a more elaborate variety are observed on the death day anniversary, festival days, and the first and fifteenth of each month. And these sacrifices feature kowtowing before the ancestral spirit tablets, burning of incense, candles, and paper money, offering of food and drink, and concluding with wishes that the ancestors enjoy the offerings. The offerings are a means of communicating with the dead and providing them with sustenance in their next life.

Ancestor reverence is directly rooted in the social structure of a society and embedded into the kinship, domestic and descent relations and institutions. Ancestor worship (a disputed notion) in China is a lineage cult with the major responsibility to perform the necessary rites resting on the oldest living son, who accepts the role as a right and a duty. This is because he replaces his father in the social structure. Among the Ashanti of Africa, each lineage owns a blackened stool that serves as a shrine of its ancestors. Offerings of food and drink are made on the stool.

Ancestors play an important role in many religions because they are believed to act as guardians of the social and moral order. They rise above the transitory human level by virtue of constituting fundamental categories of moral and legal thought. This invests them with sacred significance, their sanctioned rights and duties unchallenged by the living. Thus ancestors make social members conform to expected norms of behavior, whereas any deviation from the norms incurs ancestral disapproval. The ancestral cult reflects the need of a society to maintain itself. If a society depends on its ancestors, the departed also depend on the living, forming a mutually beneficial sy...