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Why Study Religion? offers an alternative framework, Critical Humanism, for thinking about the purposes of the discipline. Richard B. Miller theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship. He argues that the future of religious studies will depend on how well it can articulate its goals as a basis for motivating scholarship in the field.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- I. A Crisis of Rationale
- Chapter 1: On Justifying the Study of Religion
- Chapter 2: The Ethics of Religious Studies
- II. A Regime of Truth
- Chapter 3: Interpretation, Comparison, and the History of Religions
- Chapter 4: Scientific Rationality and Causal Explanation
- Chapter 5: Existential Symbolism and Theological Anthropology
- Chapter 6: Embodied Practice and Materialistic Phenomenology
- Chapter 7: Genealogy, Ideology, and Critical Theory
- Chapter 8: Philosophy, Normativity, and Metacriticism
- III. Purposes, Desires, and Critical Humanism
- Chapter 9: Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism
- 1. The End of Religious Studies
- 2. Acts and Moral Agency
- 3. Critical Humanism
- 4. Four Values
- 5. Exemplary Works in the Study of Religion
- 6. Critical Humanism and the Ethics of Religious Studies
- Epilogue: Critical Humanism as a Vocation
About the author
Richard B. Miller is a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture, and the award-winning Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition; Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning; and Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought.
Summary
Why Study Religion? offers an alternative framework, Critical Humanism, for thinking about the purposes of the discipline. Richard B. Miller theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship. He argues that the future of religious studies will depend on how well it can articulate its goals as a basis for motivating scholarship in the field.
Additional text
There are many reasons to admire this book and many ways in which scholarship might benefit from it. Miller's critical engagements with the field's prominent methodologies are well executed and insightful.
