Introducing Religion
Subtitle: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith
Contributors: Willi Braun (Editor); Russell T. McCutcheon (Editor)
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Published: February 28, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9781845532307
Subjects: History of religion; Religious education / world faiths; Teaching of a specific subject; Social Science; Religion - Socialissues; Sociology; General; Sociology of Religion
Description: "To mark the contribution of one of the most influential theorists of religion, thirty-one leading scholars of religion from around the world put their minds together to work on problems of introducing "religion": as a category of human social practices, as a term that must be subject to scholarly theorizing, as a subject that must be carefully presented to students in the classroom. The claim of this volume is that the disciplined, cross-cultural and comparative study and teaching of religion in the academy is closely tied to the multi-level task of "introducing" (in the Latin sense of introducere) religion, of taking religion inside the academic discourses in the humanities and social sciences, of taking students - whether career academics or college students - inside religion as a set of ordinary human practices rather than initiating them into a sanctum of extraordinary knowledge about extraordinary things."--Jacket.