Written by Professor Charles B. Jones
Format: MP3
Unabridged Religion undoubtedly plays an important part in the lives of people around the world. As Professor Charles B. Jones notes, many people "would say [religion] is the most important part" of their lives and participate in the practices of their faith as a means of deepening their commitment to and understanding of the
world around them. Whether one acts as an individual, a local community member, or part of a broader fellowship of believers, the approach to religion remains the same: viewing religion and religious life from the inside, "where [one] meet[s] and experience[s] it." What changes, however, when the approach to religion comes from the outside in an attempt to understand the idea of religion itself? How do scholars proceed with studying the ways the religious experience is felt, shared, and communicated? How do they explain how this extraordinarily powerful force can define and shape the communities it creates? In Introduction to the Study of Religion, Professor Jones offers a vibrant first look at the discipline known as religious studies and shows how a succession of other fields—sociology, psychology, anthropology, and phenomenology—has each tried to explain the complex relationship among individuals, cultures, and faiths—a relationship as old as the first human quest for answers to fundamental questions of life, death, and what may lie beyond. Though the evolution of the discipline originated in the minds of intellectuals grounded in Christianity and Western religious traditions, these theories have since influenced the work of scholars immersed in the study of every faith our world has to offer. Professor Jones's eclectic background—which includes a master's degree in Theological Studies, a doctorate in History of Religions, and a deep immersion in East Asian Buddhism and interfaith relations—makes him the ideal teacher for a course on religious studies. An exceptional ability to assemble complex philosophical and theological ideas into a seamless, comprehensible, and unfailingly interesting whole and a frequent use of vivid historical examples illustrate Professor Jones's command of a field overflowing with streams of different (and sometimes divergent) thought. Indeed, Introduction to the Study of Religion is suffused with vigorous, challenging ideas and populated by intellectual giants both familiar—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud—and unfamiliar—Bronislaw Malinowski, Mircea Eliade, Rodney Stark. Professor Jones focuses on how each of these thinkers turned his particular system of beliefs to the consideration of religion in a series of rich stories that surface throughout the lectures. Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, had a decidedly unique approach to the study of religion. Agreeing with British philosopher David Hume that religion was indeed bad science, while also believing that it served the vital function of promoting social cohesion, Comte devised a new human-centered religion more suitable for the modern, scientific age of the Enlightenment. His Church of Positive Science, with himself as the original High Priest of Humanity, attracted a significant number of followers and still flourishes in Brazil.
Learn How Scholars Have Grappled with the Study of Religion Itself Like the discipline it examines, Introduction to the Study of Religion is not about the beliefs of any one religion, nor is it a comparative look at familiar faiths. Instead, Professor Jones traces the idea of studying religion itself, drawing not only on the challenging and provocative collection of theories from the many disciplines that have influenced the development of religious studies, but also on revealing anecdotes and illuminating case studies that make this course a constantly surprising delight. You'll see how "functional" anthropologists like Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown helped pull their discipline out of the drawing room—where their Victorian predecessors had practiced "armchair anthropology," gazing at compiled data to construct their theories—and put it into the field to study a given culture, where observations might be made over a long period. But you'll also see the flaws that persisted in this approach, which often failed to recognize not only the impact of neighboring cultures but also that of the anthropologist himself, as Malinowski's own field diaries, printed soon after his death, dramatically revealed.
You'll learn how philosopher Immanuel Kant—no great friend of religion—theorized that we can never make actual contact with the external world, but can know it only from the internal images our minds construct from the raw data pulled in by our senses. This approach—known as phenomenology—created a tool that later thinkers like Jakob Friedrich Fries, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade would ironically seize on to study religion as a sui generis phenomenon in its own right. They would no longer have to resort to "methodological atheism" or "reductionist" thinking that would shrink the vast complexities of religion to the limitations of a particular discipline, eliminating the very essence of what they were trying to study. For Eliade, for example, phenomenology made possible the idea of "the sacred," a true reality that not only could be experienced internally but which could, in what he called an "in-breaking," burst through into everyday existence and affect people's social organization and behavior. And you'll encounter the prolific work of sociologist Rodney Stark, who, beginning in the 1970s, approached the question of why people engaged in religious activities by setting off in an entirely new direction. Casting aside Freud's idea of religion as a "pathology" and Marx's hostility to what he considered both oppressive and an "opiate," as well as the belief of most social scientists that religion was an irrational activity, Stark and his collaborator, William Sims Bainbridge, began with the assumption that people were essentially rational. Working within what economists call exchange theory, Stark and Bainbridge developed a landmark body of thought known as Rational Choice Theory, wherein the exchange, according to Professor Jones, is one of certain personal costs—such as curbing desires, acting morally, being good to other people, or participating in religion—in return for the "compensators" offered by their faith. Though those compensators might well come after death, in the form of an afterlife, they could just as easily be a part of this life as well. In a fascinating case study devoted to Stark's book, The Rise of Christianity, Professor Jones shows how Stark applied his theories to what is often referred to as the "miraculous" increase in Christian believers—from 3,000 to 25 million in only 300 years—to show that Rome's conversion from Paganism to Christianity was, in fact, quite rational. Christianity offered doctrines and teachings that directly addressed many of Rome's most pressing issues. Paganism had given no justification for such values as caring for one's neighbors; in fact, famed physician Galen, when he fled Rome during a time of plague, left behind a (still-extant) letter disavowing any responsibility for risking his own life to treat strangers.
A Fascinating Look at Belief and What It Means—For Believers and Nonbelievers Alike By the end of this course, you'll have a solid grasp of the major thinkers and ideas that have contributed to this fascinating field of study, including their strengths and weaknesses, as well as insights into many aspects of religious life, belief, and practices—insights that may well have applications in your own life, whether or not you adhere to a religious faith. And as Professor Jones makes clear, religious studies is a field with room for both points of view as well as all of the analytic tools such a wide and disparate group of scholars have contributed to his field. "It's true that I am a religious person," says Professor Jones. "I go to church every week. But I also study all of these theories. "When confronted with data from actual people's religious lives, and in seeking to understand the lives of these people better, one needs to reach into the toolbox and pull out the right tool for the job. ... "What you don't want to do is to say, 'I am a Marxist' or 'I am a Freudian' or 'I am a Jungian,' and be so committed to the use of a single interpretive tool that one comes to see all religious data as simply supporting that theory. As I've said before, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. "What part do these theories play in my own religious life? I find it very useful to keep in mind both the theological attitude and the religious studies attitude because ... [the] creative tension [between the two] ... keeps them in check and in balance, [preventing] either one of them from becoming hegemonic and controlling. Each critiques the other. "I think that kind of healthy tension provides a way of maintaining balance in this world in which we live."