Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- PART I THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT'S NEUTRAL GROUND
- 1 The study of religion and the rise of atheism: conflict or confirmation?
- 2 Doing Theology in the university
- 3 Shaping the field: a transatlantic perspective
- 4 The study of religion as corrective reading
- PART II MEETINGS ON MUTUAL GROUND
- RESPONSE
- Index of names
- Subject index
1 - The study of religion and the rise of atheism: conflict or confirmation?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- PART I THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT'S NEUTRAL GROUND
- 1 The study of religion and the rise of atheism: conflict or confirmation?
- 2 Doing Theology in the university
- 3 Shaping the field: a transatlantic perspective
- 4 The study of religion as corrective reading
- PART II MEETINGS ON MUTUAL GROUND
- RESPONSE
- Index of names
- Subject index
Summary
INTRODUCTION TO THE QUESTION
‘Religion’ and ‘theology’ are not terms with fixed meanings and invariant applications. They are rather topics or commonplaces – not in the sense of the familiar and the trite, but in the classical sense of linguistic variables, terms ambiguous and capacious enough to house a vast diversity of meanings, arguments, and referents. The interconnection of such topics constitutes neither a determined problem nor an exact proposition. It constitutes what John Dewey called ‘a problematic situation’, an indeterminate area out of which problems and their resolutions can emerge only if these ambiguous terms are given specific meanings and definite applications within particular inquiries. Recognising the ambiguity of both ‘religion’ and ‘theology’, this paper proposes to obtain a greater purchase on the problematic situation they together delimit, first, by offering a few precisions on ‘religion’ as its meaning developed through history to reach its generic consensus in late modernity; and then, by exploring how the scientific study of religion, so understood, came to engage one of the arguments of modern theology: the existence or non-existence of God.
In a remarkable review of the scientific study of religion over a fifty-year period, Mircea Eliade provides a benchmark for this project by selecting 1912 as a date of particular consequence. That year, five stars rose in the firmament. Émile Durkheim published his Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.
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- Fields of FaithTheology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-first Century, pp. 3 - 24Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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