Discourse on Civility and Barbarity

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-19-975460-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 559 g

In recent years scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the category of ''religion'' to describe a distinctive form of human experience and behavior. In his last book, The Ideology of Religious Studies (OUP 2000), Timothy Fitzgerald argued that ''religion'' was not a private area of human existence that could be separated from the public realm and that the study of religion as such was thus impossibility. In this new book he examines a wide range of
English-language texts to show how religion became transformed from a very specific category indigenous to Christian culture into a universalist claim about human nature and society. These claims, he shows, are implied by and frequently explicit in theories and methods of comparative religion. But they are
also tacitly reproduced throughout the humanities in the relatively indiscriminate use of ''religion'' as an a priori valid cross-cultural analytical concept, for example in historiography, sociology, and social anthropology. Fitzgerald seeks to link the argument about religion to the parallel formation of the ''non-religious'' and such dichotomies as church-state, sacred-profane, ecclesiastical-civil, spiritual-temporal, supernatural-natural, and irrational-rational. Part of his argument is
that the category ''religion'' has a different logic compared to the category ''sacred,'' but the two have been consistently confused by major writers, including Durkheim and Eliade. Fitzgerald contends that ''religion'' imagined as a private belief in the supernatural was a necessary conceptual space
for the simultaneous imagining of ''secular'' practices and institutions such as politics, economics, and the Nation State. The invention of ''religion'' as a universal type of experience, practice, and institution was partly the result of sacralizing new concepts of exchange, ownership, and labor practices, applying ''scientific'' rationality to human behavior, administering the colonies and classifying native institutions. In contrast, shows Fitzgerald, the sacred-profane dichotomy has a
different logic of use.

Zielgruppe

Scholars in religion, history, and constitutional law.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzgerald, Timothy

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1: Introduction
2: Methodology 1: The Critical Study of Religion
3: Methodology 2: Religion and Secular, Sacred and Profane
4: On Civility and Barbarity
5: Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII's Formularies of Faith
6: English Historical Documents, 1485-1558
7: Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimage
8: English Historical Documents, 1660-1832
9: Religion, State, and American Constitutionalism
10: Postscript on Civility and Barbarity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Reader in Religion, University of Stirling, Scotland.