By Jeppe Sinding Jensen
Religious trust is without doubt one of the so much pervasive and ubiquitous features of human society. faith has shadowed and illuminated human lives for the reason that primitive instances, shaping the area perspectives of cultures from remoted tribes to gigantic empires. ranging from the basis that faith is an idea which might be analysed and in comparison throughout time and cultures, What is Religion? brings the main updated scholarship to undergo on humankind’s so much enduring creation.
The booklet opens with a short heritage of the assumption of faith, then divides the learn of faith into 4 crucial subject matters - kinds, representations, practices, and associations – and concludes with a last, eye-opening bankruptcy on faith this day. jam-packed with case reviews from quite a lot of religions, previous and current, What is Religion? bargains a truly present, accomplished, but intellectually demanding evaluate of the heritage, theories, practices, and research of religion.
Accessible, wide-ranging, enticing, and brief, What is Religion? is written essentially for undergraduate scholars within the learn of faith, however it can be worthwhile for college students of anthropology, historical past, psychology, sociology, and theology in addition to a person drawn to how and why people got here and stay religious.
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Sample text
In France, Claude Lévi-Strauss combined ideas from cultural anthropology and linguistics in structural anthropology as a way to discover universal aspects and “hidden” codes in human culture in general. Lévi-Strauss studied culture as consisting of ideas and pointed out how the universal aspects of the “ésprit humain” are not in the head (the English translation “human mind” blurs this idea) but in culture. As the linguist who discovers a new language strives to analyse its rules and meanings, so may anthropologists study cultures and religions, and discover the elements, such as the symbols, norms and values that cultures and religions are composed of, and how they work in practice.
Hegel (1770–1831) inspired earlier generations of scholars of religion to talk quite freely of the “essence of religion” (Capps 1995: 1–52). Very often, by “essence”, they actually meant the referents of religious traditions, namely the superhuman or supernatural agents or other “marks” of a transcendent, sacred realm. It is difficult to discern what the essence of religion is or possibly could be. There is, after all, a conspicuous difference between looking for an essence of a concept or an essence of a phenomenon.
In addition, in the end, how should one go about proving the validity of one or the other view? Neither judgement (for that is what they are) is empirically tractable in any way. The agnostic, academic approaches in the study of religion handle such matters differently: they acknowledge that religious traditions are made by humans as social constructions. Now, the question arises: what is the essence of social constructions? Very simply stated, they are social – and so shared by groups that have ideas and values in common.