Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Understanding Religion is a lucid, creatively structured, and nearly jargon-free introduction to theories and methods for studying religious communities and traditions in diverse societies, bold in scope, and presented in a manner that is undergraduate-friendly, yet sophisticated enough for use in a graduate-level course." * Journal of Interreligious Studies *
"Explores themes one might expect in a textbook as well as ones welcomely added, emphasizing a 'deeply political' approach that continually draws the reader’s attention back to whose voice gets expressed in scholarship, and whose does not." * Religious Studies Review *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
List of Boxes
Acknowledgments and Dedications
Introduction
PART I. WHAT IS RELIGION AND HOW TO APPROACH IT?
1. Religion: Language, Law, and Legacies
Case Study 1A: Falun Gong: Religion or Self-Cultivation Practice?
Case Study 1B: Christians and Ancestor Veneration: Religion or Culture?
2. Method: Insider-Outsider Debates, Phenomenology, and Reflexivity
Case Study 2A: Living between Religious Worlds: Conversion and Reconversion
Case Study 2B: Hindu and Christian? Multiple Religious Identities
3. Life: Lived Religion, Syncretism, and Hybridity
Case Study 3A: Mexican American Catholicism and Our Lady of Guadalupe
Case Study 3B: Thai Buddhism as Lived Religion and Syncretic Practice
PART II. THEORIES, METHODOLOGIES, AND CRITICAL DEBATES
4. History: Historical Methodology and the Invention of Tradition
Case Study 4A: The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Faith
Case Study 4B: Laozi, the Daodejing, and the Origins of Daoism
5. Power: Social Constructionism, Habitus, and Authority
Case Study 5A: Mosques, Minarets, and Power
Case Study 5B: Individual (New Age/Alternative) Spirituality as Modernity's Ideology
6. Identity: Social Identity Theory, In-Groups, Out-Groups, and Conflict
Case Study 6A: Shiv Sena, Hindu Nationalism, and Identity Politics
Case Study 6B: Race, Religion, and the American White Evangelical
7. Colonialism: Postcolonialism, Orientalism, and Decolonization
Case Study 7A: Beyond "Inventing" Hinduism
Case Study 7B: Magic, Superstition, and Religion in Southeast Asia and Africa
8. Brains: The Cognitive Science of Religion and Beyond
Case Study 8A: Religion, Non-Religion, and Atheism
Case Study 8B: Ancestors, Jesus, and Prosocial Behavior in Fiji
9. Bodies: Material Religion, Embodiment, and Materiality
Case Study 9A: Weeping Gods and Drinking Statues
Case Study 9B: Embodied Practice at a Christian Shrine
10. Gender: Feminism, Sexuality, and Religion
Case Study 10A: Priests, Paul, and Rewriting Texts
Case Study 10B: Buddhist Feminisms and Nuns
11. Comparison: Comparative and Contrastive Methodologies
Case Study 11A: Comparing Hinduism and Judaism
Case Study 11B: A Comparison of Zen Buddhist and Protestant Christian Sitting Practices
12. Ritual: Ritualization, Myth, and Performance
Case Study 12A: The Zen Tea Ceremony and Protestant Eucharist as Performance and Ritual
Case Study 12B: Buddhist Ordination Rites
PART III. RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND SOCIETY
13. Diversity: Religious Borders, Identities, and Discourses
Case Study 13A: The Memory of Al-Andalusia
Case Study 13B: Dominus Iesus and Catholic Christianity in Asia
14. Dialogue: Interreligious Discourse and Critique
Case Study 14A: Christian and Muslim Women Reading Scriptures
Case Study 14B: Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: History and Discourse
15. Violence: Fundamentalism, Extremism, and Radicalization
Case Study 15A: The Invention of Islamic Terrorism
Case Study 15B: Buddhism and Violence
16. Secularism: Secularization, Human Rights, and Religion
Case Study 16A: Laïcité and the Burkini Ban
Case Study 16B: Singapore's Common Space
17. Geography: Place, the Lived Environment, and Environmentalism
Case Study 17A: Trees as Monks?
Case Study 17B: Protestant Christian Understandings of the "Holy Land"
18. Politics: Governance, the Colonial Wound, and the Sacred
Case Study 18A: Ethnicity and Religion: The Singaporean Malay-Muslim Identity
Case Study 18B: Saluting the Flag: The Case of Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States
Glossary
Who's Who
Notes
Index
