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Irreverence and the Sacred: Critical Studies in the History of Religions

Online ISBN:
9780190911997
Print ISBN:
9780190911966
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Irreverence and the Sacred: Critical Studies in the History of Religions

Hugh Urban (ed.),
Hugh Urban
(ed.)

Professor of Comparative Studies

Professor of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University
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Greg Johnson (ed.)
Greg Johnson
(ed.)

Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder
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Published online:
22 November 2018
Published in print:
27 December 2018
Online ISBN:
9780190911997
Print ISBN:
9780190911966
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Irreverence and the Sacred brings together some of the most cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, and international scholars working today to debate key issues in the critical and comparative study of religion. The project is inspired in large part by the work of Bruce Lincoln, whose influential and wide-ranging scholarship has consistently posed challenging, provocative, and often irreverent questions that have really pushed the boundaries of the field of religious studies in important, sometimes controversial ways. Retracing the history of the discipline of religious studies, Lincoln argues that the field has consistently championed a “validating, feel-good” approach to religion rather than posing more critical questions about religious claims to authority and their role in history, politics, and social change. A critical approach to the history of religions, he suggests, would focus on the human, temporal, and material aspects of phenomena that are claimed to have a superhuman, eternal, or transcendent status. This volume takes up Lincoln’s challenge to “do better” by engaging in critical analyses of four key themes in the study of religion: myth, ritual, gender, and politics. A reflexive volume, the book also interrogates the “politics of scholarship” itself, critically examining the relations of power and material interests at work in the study as well as the practice of religion. The scholars involved in this project include not only some of the most important figures in the American study of religion—such as Wendy Doniger, Russell McCutcheon, Ivan Strenski, and Lincoln himself—but also European scholars whose work is hugely influential overseas but not well known in the United States—such as Stefan Arvidsson, Claude Calame, Nicolas Meylan, and others.

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