Social Sciences
World Religions
World religions refer to the major religious traditions practiced around the world, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others. These religions often have distinct beliefs, rituals, and ethical codes, and they play a significant role in shaping cultures, societies, and individual worldviews. The study of world religions provides insights into diverse spiritual practices and their impact on human behavior and societies.
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10 Key excerpts on "World Religions"
eBook - PDFAn Introduction to Religion and Politics
Theory and Practice
- Jonathan Fox(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Religious worldviews, beliefs, doctrines, and theologies 4 As noted in Chapter 1, social scientists study human behavior, and political scientists focus on political behavior. In this chapter I focus on some of the most important religious influences on human behavior: religious worldviews, beliefs, doctrines, and theologies. These aspects of religion provide a lens through which people can understand the world around them. Religions also include explicit instructions on how to behave. These qualities of religion, potentially, have profound influences on political behavior. RELIGION AS A BASIS FOR UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD Human beings process huge amounts of information brought to them by their senses. However, they do not do so in a vacuum. They use belief systems or some other framework to help them interpret, comprehend, and process the information brought to them by their senses. This includes the need to understand the physical universe in which we live and how we relate to it. Essentially, we have a need to answer a series of questions. How do we understand the world around us? How do we understand day-to-day events? Is there a will behind the world around us and the events that take place in it and, if so, what is the nature of that will? It also includes more existential questions, such as: Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? What is our place in the world? Finally, we also strive to understand the unknowable and un- understandable. What happens after death? Why is there evil in the world? Religion can provide a set of answers to these questions, as well as many others. I argue that every human being has a framework of belief that helps them grapple with these issues, among others. Religion is clearly not the only source for these frameworks, but it is a significant one. Political ideologies such as liberalism, fascism, communism, socialism, and nationalism, among many others, can all play a role in people’s frameworks of belief.
eBook - PDFRELG
WORLD
- Robert Van Voorst(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
With each encoun-ter with new people and new ideas, our knowledge of ourselves and our knowledge of others are connected and influence each other. You should first think through your own past encounters with religion, pro and con. Here are several short but thought-provoking questions 4 BEGINNING YOUR STUDY OF World Religions 40,000 years ago may have had religious beliefs and practices, and that mod-ern humans (who began to emerge around 35,000 years ago) definitely had religion. From the dawn of human civilizations to today, reli-gion has shaped all human cultures. 1-2a Defining Religion But this talk of the preva-lence of religion leads us to ask: What exactly is reli-gion? Many people have something interesting to say about what religion is. Grappling with this question involves both careful, objective, academic thinking and personal engage-ment. John Bowker remarks, “We all know what [reli-gion] is until someone asks us to tell them.” 2 If pressed for an answer, people in the Western world would typically say that religion is based on belief in and obedience to God. However, do they mean the God followed in a particular religion or something more general, such as gods? A few major religions—certain branches of Hinduism and Buddhism, for example— have relatively little teaching about gods. Jainism has no gods at all. Some people around the world would answer that religion is a system of morality. On first reflection, this might seem to be a more all-encompassing definition than the previous one. Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun and now a popular writer on World Religions, wrote that “Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong,” and that the value systems in religions deal with that wrong. 3 The three main Western religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have strong moral teachings. Confucianism is so centered on morality that the issue of whether it is a social philosophy or a religion is often debated.
eBook - PDFImagining Religion in the Czech Republic
Anthropological Perspectives
- Jakub Havlicek(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- LIT Verlag(Publisher)
He summarises his approach to the study of religions in the book titled Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions, published for the first time in 1978. 841 J. Z. Smith argues that the study of religions is primarily a humanities or social science discipline, closer to anthropology rather than theology. When it comes to the concept of religion, Smith says: “(...) there is nothing that is inherently or essentially clean or unclean, sacred or profane. There are situational or relational categories, mobile boundaries which shift according to the map being employed.” 842 According to Smith, Euro-American, Western colonialism and imperialism based on the dichotomous thinking of “us” versus “they” or “civilised” versus “barbaric” has given rise to the category of World Religions. Smith called it questionable right away, because: A World Religion is a religion like ours; but it is, above all, a tradition which has achieved sufficient power and numbers to enter our history, either to form it, interact with it, or thwart it. All other religions are invisible. We recognize both the unity within and the diversity between Part II: 4. The Scientific Imagining of Religion 208 839 Ibid.: 73. 840 Ibid.: 73–74 841 Smith 1978. 842 Ibid.: 291. the “great” World Religions because they correspond to important geo-political entities with which we must deal. All “primitives”, by way of contrast, may be simply lumped together as may be so-called “minor religions” because they do not confront our history in any direct fashion. They are invisible. 843 All other religions are minority religions, because they do not influence “our” history in any substantial manner and from this perspective they are either entirely negligible or do not even exist for us. 844 Regarding the history of constructing the concept of religion, J. Z. Smith says that although it has a long history, it is essentially pointless to delve for its contemporary meaning deeper than the 16 th century.
eBook - PDFReligion, spirituality and the social sciences
Challenging marginalisation
- Spalek, Basia, Imtoual, Alia, Basia Spalek, Alia Imtoual(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Policy Press(Publisher)
12 Religion, spirituality and the social sciences religion; scientific theories and the evidence for them, like political decisions and the interests they represent, are properly matters of public debate, but not religious rituals and their mythological rationales, because there is no agreed medium in which they can be expressed apart from that imposed on them from without by secular reason. In the new public space created by globalisation and the ‘real virtuality’ (Castells, 1996, pp 410-18; May, 2003, 2005) of electronic communications media, it is not so much the privatisation (retreat into interiority) of religious convictions as the individualisation (isolation in autonomy) of the culturally uprooted and disorientated that is making possible the new universalisms of the ‘next Christendom’ (Jenkins, 2002) or the ‘virtual ummah’ (Roy, 2004): cut off from ties to community and place by social mobility or emigration, individuals absorb the shock of individualisation by identifying with idealised, ahistorical versions of all-encompassing religious world-views such as those of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. The obverse of this globalisation of the religious is the consolidation of localised groups of true believers who demand space in the public sphere to be exclusively themselves. It is at this point that the question of how to study religions in global public space becomes interesting.The founders of Religionswissenschaft took their scientific stand on comparativism and phenomenological method, a heritage which is indeed foundational for the discipline of Religious Studies, but in the context defined by orientalism and post-colonial theory this is increasingly regarded as a Western perspective which prematurely universalises ‘religion’ and approaches the religions as Christianity’s ‘religious others’ (King, 1999; Masuzawa, 2005).
eBook - PDFReflections on the Study of Religion
Including an Essay on the Work of Gerardus van der Leeuw
- Jacques Waardenburg(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Our analysis should be directed toward disclosing the various basic views and perspectives of the discussing parties, that is to say toward discovering their basic intentions. Religions are considered here as human views of reality and truth, views which can be analyzed, like any oudook on, and interpretation of, reality. To sum up, religious discussions can be studied both according to their empirical social reality and as the confrontation and communication of views, outlooks and interpretations of reality. Individuals, groups and whole societies differ considerably both with regard to what is considered to have a religious meaning and with regard to what is considered to be the specific content of that meaning. In the last analysis it is certain basic intentions that determine what is considered to be 'religious' or 'religion' by particular individuals, groups or societies. 168 Applications 2. S O M E I S S U E S OF P R E S E N T -D A Y R E L I G I O U S D I S C U S S I O N S Religious discussions have gone on until the present day. In Muslim countries we find fervent discussions about the role which Islam should play in a modern state and society, and a number of Islamic ideologies have been developed which express different views on the subject. Hindus discuss not only metaphysics and ritual but also social organization; Buddhists discuss not only ways of liberation but also social philosophy and ethics. Among Jews not only the prescriptions of the Judaic religion but also the meaning of Israel are subjects of discussion; the various schools of meditation have developed their own ways of discussing individual and social life. Among Christians, religious discussions are endless; not only on doctrinal and ecclesiastical matters, but also on the social implications of faith and on ethical issues in general.
- Richard K. Fenn(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
It does, however, require that social theory for the cross-cultural study of religion be much more aware of its own contingency and dependence on the social context to which it is applied and in which it is framed. It also necessitates taking much more seriously the notion of how religion actually gets used in society. This probably eliminates the possibility of a universal theory for all times and circumstances; and it certainly makes precise theoretical prediction of future states of religion virtually impossible. Admitting these limitations never-theless gives social science a better chance of understanding differences in a world where we realize that the aims of our observations are to a large degree the variable products of our own making. References Bamyeh, M.A. 1993. “Transnationalism,” Current Sociology 41(3):1–95. Beckford, J.A. 1989. Religion and Advanced Industrial Society. London: Unwin Hyman. Bellah, R.N. 1970. “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Industrial World , Ed. R.N. Bellah. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 168–89. Bellah, R.N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W.M., Swidler, A., and Tipton, S.M. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Beyer, P. 1998. “The Modern Emergence of Religions and a Global Social System for Religion,” International Sociology 13:151–72. Despland, M. 1979. La religion en occident: Evolution des idées et du vécu. Montreal: Fides. Durkheim, E. 1965. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , Transl. J.W. Swain. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. 1969. “Le sentiment religieux à l’heure actuelle,” Archives de Sociologie des Religions 27:73–7. Fitzgerald, T. 1990. “Hinduism and the ‘World Religion’ Fallacy,” Religion 20:101–18. Fitzgerald, T. 1997. “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9:91–110.
eBook - PDF- Frank Whaling(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Indeed at another level, the study of science and the study of religion are part of a greater whole. As we survey the 'global context' since 1945 it is clear that during that period the world has become one in a way that was not so evident before. The growth of world population, the spread of nuclear weapons, increasing pollution, the problem of world poverty, and the diminishing of non-renewable energy resources affect the whole planet. What Toffler has called the 'Third Wave' (1980), the new tech-nological revolution centred upon space exploration, the development of the riches of the sea, the increasing use of micro-technology, and the extension of the genetic sciences has consequences for the whole globe. And these consequences are not merely scientific. As Ervin Laszlo puts it, 'The dominant consensus in Western societies is that such problems The study of religion in a global context 393 are mainly physical and ecological in nature, and that they can be overcome by more and higher technology' (1979: 1). He points out, however, that, 'The root causes even of physical and ecological prob-lems are the inner constraints on our vision and values' (1979: 3)- In other words, there is a growing awareness of the interconnectedness of our global problems. They are not only physical and scientific, they are also human and cultural. They have to do with the vision, values, the worldview of men, and to that extent they have to do with 'religion.' One of the important themes in this book has been that of the interrelationship between the different approaches to the study of re-ligion. Implicit in our discussion has been the question as to whether the various methods of studying religion are complementary or opposed. We have suggested in general that the approaches we have oudined are interconnected parts of a wider whole.
- James Thrower(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Religion, it is said, is a protest, but why it takes the particular form that it does, and issues in certain beliefs and no others, we are not told. But although, for 'scientific atheism', the three World Religions have their origin in a protest against the established order of society they soon become reconciled to it and take their place amongst its foremost supporters. This began to happen to the Christian religion with the Constantinian settlement and a similar reconciliation with the establishment can be traced in Buddhism which, claims Tokarev, soon became reconciled to the caste sys-tem in Northern India and, at a later stage in its development, with the social systems of many of the countries of the East. Similarly, Islam quickly became reconciled to the tribal aristocracies of Arabia and with the class systems of the Near and Middle Eastern states — systems which, in fact, it actively supported. Thus, at various times and places, World Religions have fulfilled exactly the same function as 'national/folk' religions. Religion, Tokarev concludes, is ultimately a conservative institution, and although World Religions begin as, and owe much of their initial success to, their having been movements of protest on the part of the oppressed, in the light of these later, conservative functions, it cannot be said that this is what distinguishes them from 'national' or 'folk' religions (See also Zhukov, 1976: p. 20). All that can be said is that World Religions represent a later stage in the develop- The history of religion 233 ment of religion. In fact, for Soviet historians of religion, they are not only the latest, but also the last historical stage in the develop-ment of religion (Semenov, 1976: p. 45).
eBook - PDF- Frank Whaling(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Insofar as the study of religion is intrinsically global in that it includes the study of all the World Religions, it is in a better position that most other academic endeavours to assimilate insights from the educational and spiritual universes of other cultures and religions and therefore to enable us to obtain a global vision. In this book, the present chapter and the previous chapter by Whaling, and the chapters by Bolle, Smart, and King make preliminary references to this topic. It seems reasonable to assert that the three models we have outlined, although western in provenance, refer to three basic areas of educational and human concern, namely man, transcendence and nature. It is signi-ficant that the study of religion, although primarily a human 'science' centred upon man has a stake in the other two areas as well. The social scientific approaches to the study of religion make a partial use of natural The study of religion in a global context 241 scientific methods of experiment and quantitative analysis, and the study of religion has a direct interest in man's ecological and cultural perspec-tive on nature; the phenomenological view of Einfühlung intimated by Ninian Smart, the hermeneutical view of myth intimated by Kees Bolle, and the phenomenological and comparative chapters by King and Whaling, all make reference, in different ways, to the notion of transcen-dence. Clearly 'transcendence' can mean different things. It can refer to the notion that our own human nature has a transcendent dimension; it can refer to human intentionality in regard to transcendent reality whether this be viewed as God, Allah, Yahweh, Brahman, or whatever; it can refer to an ontology of the sacred; or it can refer to the western post-positivistic search for transcendence in thinkers such as Reich (who sees transcendence as personal liberation, 1970).
eBook - PDFThe Promise of Salvation
A Theory of Religion
- Martin Riesebrodt, Steven Rendall(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
In classical sociology, the ethical-moral and power dimensions of religion were foregrounded. It was a matter of determining the influence of religion on the conduct of life, the role of religion in the production of belief in legitimacy, or its contribution to the maintenance of the social system. Recently, these perspectives have been broadened through discourse analy-sis. But what is still neglected is the analysis of individuals and group in-tercourse with superhuman powers—powers that from the point of view of religious practitioners clearly represent the very core of religion. To that extent, the sociology of religion has shown mainly an instrumental interest in religion; it has given little attention to religion itself. In that respect, it resembles current sociology of culture, which likewise is not really inter-ested in culture but only seeks to demonstrate that any given body of data can be run through the shredder of a certain conceptual apparatus. Thus, my approach constitutes a plea for taking an interest in religious phenomena themselves, qua religious phenomena, but for doing so empirically, as an investigation into their institutionalized and appropriated meaning, not, in the manner of phenomenology, as an “intuition of essences.” Understanding Religion I have offered a content-based definition of religion and thus made the mean-ing of religious practices central. The next question is how the meaning of religion as a complex of practices can actually be discovered. What sources are to be used? In principle, there are three possible interpretations: intellec-tualist or “theological” (broadly understood), subjectivist, and liturgical. I will first discuss the problem of intellectualist and subjectivist explanations of religion, and then outline my liturgical alternative and its advantages. It is not at all my intent to deter researchers on religion from engaging in subjective interpretations of religions or theologies.
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