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Informationen zum Autor Ivan Strenski is Holstein Family and Community Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He served as North American Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Religion from 1979-2004, and is the author of numerous books, including Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (2002), Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (2003), The New Durkheim: Essays on Philosophy, Religious Identity and the Politics of Knowledge (2006), and Why Politics Can't Be Freed from Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). He is also editor of Émile Durkheim (2009), and Thinking about Religion: A Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006). Klappentext Understanding Theories of Religion explores the core methods and theorists in religion, through the works of classic and contemporary figures from the history of anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. It offers a comprehensive study of the development of theories of religion, spanning the classics of early modern and Enlightenment Europe, to modern theories of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, and through to postmodern theories of religion and the latest theoretical trends. The second edition expands coverage of religious theories from the 1960s through to the present day, exploring topics including religion and postmodernism; race, sex, and gender; and religion and postcolonialism.Updated throughout, the book offers illuminating insights into the questions that challenged various theorists, and how their successors then adapted and built upon their ideas. By integrating both critical and historical approaches, it reveals how the study of religion evolved in response to great cultural conflicts and major historical events. Individual chapters address the theory attached to a significant individual or school, and reveal how these ideas and methods were then brought into the study of religion. Offering a fresh perspective to conventional approaches which often seek only to demonstrate why theorists were wrong, this expanded new edition of Understanding Theories of Religion seeks to press the question of why these theorists so deeply believed that they were right. Student-friendly features are incorporated throughout, including chapter introductions and summaries, biographical vignettes, a timeline, a glossary, and many other learning aids. Zusammenfassung Featuring comprehensive updates and additions, the second edition of Understanding Theories of Religion explores the development of major theories of religion through the works of classic and contemporary figures. Inhaltsverzeichnis Preface to the Second Edition: Understanding, Instead of Just Thinking vii1 Introduction: Understanding Theories of Religion Is Better than Just Being Critical 1Part I The Prehistory of the Study of Religion: Responses to an Expanding World 72 Jean Bodin and Herbert of Cherbury: True Religion, Essential Religion, and Natural Religion 93 Understanding Religion Also Began with Trying to Understand the Bible 19Part II Classic Nineteenth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion: The Quest for the Origins of Religion in History 314 Max Müller, the Comparative Study of Religion, and the Search for Other Bibles in India 335 The Shock of the "Savage": Edward Burnett Tylor, Evolution, and Spirits 456 The Religion of the Bible Evolves: William Robertson Smith 557 Setting the Eternal Templates of Salvation: James Frazer 65Part III Classic Twentieth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion: Defending the Inner Sanctum of Religious Experience or Storming It 758 Understanding How to Understand Religion: "Phenomenology of Religion" 779 How Religious Experience Created Capitalism: Max Weber 9310 Tales from the Underground: Freud and the Psychoanalytic Origins of Religion 10611 Bronislaw Malinowski and the "Sublime Folly" of Religion 11812 Seeing God with the S...
