Following Habermas' claim that the discourse on modernity is characterised by a critique of reason that privileges aesthetic experience free from constraints of time and space and by a narrative of increasing rationality, an important point of departure for re-framing debates about theory and method in the study of religions is made available. In Religion and the Discourse on Modernity, Paul Tremlett argues that the aesthetic critique of modernity is constitutive of Marxist and post-modern thought and also of aspects of the phenomenology of religion and its critique of 'profane' existence.
He argues further that the Enlightenment promise of progressive rationality is constitutive of liberal and Marxist visions of modernity and the phenomenology of religion with its dream of global religious dialogue. This provides an opening for re-reading the likes of Otto, Eliade, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, de Certeau, Derrida and Bourdieu and for a new vision of the study of religions.
The point of departure for this book is the debate about whether religious studies should privilege explanation or understanding.
Engaging with contemporary scholarship in the field, Tremlett argues that the study of religions has always involved the conflation of facts and values and indeed has been structured in advance by the value-saturated discourse on disenchanted modernity. He argues that phenomenological and post-modern approaches to religions lack both theoretical and methodological coherence, and in their stead proposes a Marxist approach to religions that is at once empirical and informed by values pertaining to social justice, freedom and autonomy.
This important volume provides a major forum for re-reading key theorists in religious studies, with the aim of creating a new vision for the study of religions.
