Explaining and Interpreting Religion
Essays on the Issue
Will be published approx. on 1. December 1992
Book
Hardback
XII, 155 pages
978-0-8204-1914-5 (ISBN)
Description
This collection of recent essays on the social scientific study of religion makes the fundamental claim that on the one hand social scientists cannot be facilely grouped into «explainers» rather than «interpreters» of religion and that on the other hand scholars of religious studies - religionists - cannot fend off the social scientific challenge by rejecting explanation for interpretation. Not only are the concepts of explanation and interpretation defined differently in different fields, but by most definitions of the terms religionists and social scientists alike both explain and interpret religion. An acute hiatus between religionists and social scientists remains, but it is over how, not whether, religion gets explained and interpreted.
More details
Person
The Author: Robert A. Segal, Professor of Religious Studies at Louisiana State University, is the author of The Poimandres as Myth: Scholarly Theory and Gnostic Meaning, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction, Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation, and The Gnostic Jung. He has also published many articles in the areas of methodology and theory in the study of religion, theories of myth, and Gnosticism. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has taught at Reed College, Stanford University, the University of Toronto, the University of Pittsburgh, and Tulane University.
Content
Contents: This book of essays challenges the conventional view that social scientists «explain» religion and that, by contrast, scholars of religions studies - religionists -interpret it. Both groups turn out to explain and interpret religion alike.
OR: This book of essays demonstrates the disparate uses of the terms «explanation» and «interpretation» in the study of religion. It then considers the implications of those uses for the reconcilability of a social scientific approach to religion with a religionist one.
OR: This book of essays demonstrates the disparate uses of the terms «explanation» and «interpretation» in the study of religion. It then considers the implications of those uses for the reconcilability of a social scientific approach to religion with a religionist one.