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! Reading for Thursday: William James ! Today:

! Religious study vs academic study ! Brief history of Religion and its study

What is religious studies?

! Separating Religion From Theology in American Universities
! Engel (1962) ! Schempp (1963) decisions

! Religious study of religion vs academic study of religion

! Cultivating different virtues ! On Truth claims

!And Yet why is it ol to teach Buddhist mediation and not prayer?

Thesis thirteen
When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood, suspends one's interest in the temporal and contingent, or fails to distinguish between "truths", "truth-claims", and "regimes of truth", one has ceased to function as historian or scholar. In that moment, a variety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collector, friend and advocate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur, retailer of import goods). None, however, should be confused with scholarship.

Key moments in the history of Religion

!KEY: Religion is not a timeless human quest !In early Christian writings
! careful, scrupulous observation, full of awe

!Augustine (4th C. CE) !Post-Augustine

! a state of life bound by monastic vows Oxford English Dictionary (1200)

Three Driving Forces

! Our modern concept of religion

1.! Reformation thinking 2.! Scientific naturalism 3.! The negotiation of difference 1.! Wars of religion 2.! The New World 3.! world religions

Summarizing Religion
!Religion
!In significant respects, then, the modern notion of religion is a European and North American, and particularly, protestant, attempt to negotiate diversity.

!Modern !Notion !Protestant !Negotiate Diversity

Reformation
! Martin Luther (1483-1546)
!! !!

95 Theses How am I justified? On Faith and Works (1519)

!!

!You must get used to the idea that it is one thing to do the works of the law and quite another to fulfill it!That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law; it is faith that brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ. The Spirit, in turn, renders the heart glad and free, as the law demands. Then good works proceed from faith itself. Martin Luther

! Faith and the personal relationship with the sacred (especially post 1950)

Natural religion and the ordering of the world

!Descartes (1596-1650)

!Higher Biblical Criticism !David Humes critique of miracles and the argument by design !Natural v. Revealed Religion
!Religion as an intuition of the Universe as a whole and of Oneself as part of it Schleiermacher (1799)

!The Enlightenment
!Religion: a gang of ruthless zealots, intent upon aggrandizing themselves, no matter what cost to social peace. Gibbon

!Social Scientific Study of religion

!World Religions !Beliefs and Practices

Religion outside Europe

! Columbus, the apocalypse, and the restoration of Jerusalem ! The Requirement (1510)
! God our Lord gave charge [of all peoples] to one man named St. Peter, so that he was lord and superior of all the men of the world We will not compel you to turn Christians. With the help of God, I will enter forcefully against you, and I will make war everywhere and I will take your wives and children, and I will make them slavesand I will take your goods, and I will do to you all the evil and damages that a lord may do to vassals.

! !

! Debates of Las Casas and Seplveda, or the origin of Human rights