http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
"This book asks: Can the study of religion be justified? It poses this question on the view that scholarship in religion, especially work in "theory and method," is preoccupied with matters of methodological procedure and thus inarticulate about the goals that can justify the study of religion and motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, it insists, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. The book identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, each of which it critically examines as symptomatic of this crisis, on the way toward offering an alternative framework for thinking about purposes for studying religion. Shadowing these methodologies is a Weberian scientific ideal for studying religion, one that privileges value-neutrality. This ideal poses obstacles to making justificatory claims on behalf of studying religion and fortifies a repressive conscience about thinking normatively within the field's regime of truth. After making these points, the chapter describes the book's alternative framework, Critical Humanism, especially how it theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship and offers a basis for thinking about the ethics of Religious Studies as held together by four values: Post-critical Reasoning, Social Criticism, Cross-cultural Fluency, and Environmental Responsibility. Ordered to such purposes, the book argues, the study of religion can imagine itself as a valuable and desirable enterprise so that scholars of religion can relax their commitment to matters of methodological procedure and avow the values of studying religion"--
I. A CRISIS OF RATIONALE -- 1. On Justifying the Study of Religion -- 2. The Ethics of Religious Studies -- II. A REGIME OF TRUTH -- 3. Interpretation, Comparison, and the History of Religions: On the historian of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith -- 4. Scientific Rationality and Causal Explanation: On the naturalism of Donald Wiebe -- 5. Existential Symbolism and Theological Anthropology: On the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich -- 6. Embodied Practice and Materialist Phenomenology: On the sociologist of religion, Manuel A. Vásquez -- 7. Genealogy, Ideology, and Critical Theory: On Russell T. McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and Saba Mahmood -- 8. Philosophy, Normativity, and Metacriticism: On the philosophers of religion, Stephen S. Bush and Kevin Schilbrack -- III. PURPOSES, DESIRES, ANDCRITICAL HUMANISM -- 9. Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism -- Epilogue: Critical Humanism as a Vocation -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]