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Interpreting Religion: Making Sense of Religious Lives

Online ISBN:
9781529211658
Print ISBN:
9781529211610
Publisher:
Policy Press
Book

Interpreting Religion: Making Sense of Religious Lives

Erin Johnston (ed.),
Erin Johnston
(ed.)
Duke University
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Vikash Singh (ed.)
Vikash Singh
(ed.)
Montclair State University
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Published online:
19 January 2023
Published in print:
31 May 2022
Online ISBN:
9781529211658
Print ISBN:
9781529211610
Publisher:
Policy Press

Abstract

This collection brings together a diverse range of interpretivist perspectives to find fresh takes on the meanings of religion. Cutting across paradigms, traditions, and levels of analysis, experts from the UK, US and India apply their varied lenses to a range of substantive topics, from totalitarianism in China to the Eastern Orthodox practice of fasting – with research based on in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, historical methods and survey data from scholars trained in sociology, anthropology, and history. What unites these diverse studies is a central concern with meaning-making, and a shared commitment to the study of meaning as intersubjective, relational, and situated, and as a result, to the importance of scholarly reflexivity. Each chapter demonstrates the power of interpretive approaches for moving us toward expanded notions of causality – explanations that take seriously mutually constituting and contingent relationships between meanings, their foundations and evolutions, and their consequences for social action. Often asking “how” rather than what or why, the interpretive approaches highlighted in this volume allow us to see the dynamic and complicated interplay between stability and fluidity, tradition and innovation, history and the present, as well as between structure and agency, individual and collective, explicit and implicit, both within and beyond “the religious proper.” They also reveal how interpreting religion is itself an unfolding, dynamic, and constitutive process which is generated through both deliberative reflection and embodied understanding. This volume provides an orienting toolkit for interpretive scholars who seek to make sense of religious life.

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