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.
Daugiau informacijos
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.
Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction;
1. The discourse on modernity;
2. The aesthetic critique of modernity; Part I;
3. The phenomenology of
religion;
4. Nietzsche;
5. Marx;
6. Freud;
7. Facts or values?;
8. Rational
history, rational speech;
9. Of writing, representing and evoking;
10. The
aesthetics of the sacred;
11. Summary; Part II;
12. On madness: Michel
Foucault;
13. The possession at Loudun: Michel de Certeau;
14. Religion and
the absence of God: Jacques Derrida;
15. Summary; Part III.;
16.
Phenomenology and post-modernism revisited;
17. A return to ideology;
18.
Summary; Part IV;
19. Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.
Paul-Francois Tremlett is a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies and a Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, UK. He has published essays on theory and method in the study of religions, on aspects of religion and culture in the Philippines and on the anthropology of religion on Taiwan.
