14 Facts About Religious studies

Religious studies, known as the study of religion, is an academic field devoted to research into religious beliefs, behaviors, and institutions.

Religious studies originated in the nineteenth century, when scholarly and historical analysis of the Bible had flourished, and Hindu and Buddhist texts were first being translated into European languages.

Some scholars of religious studies are interested in primarily studying the religion to which they belong.

Conversely, other scholars of religious studies have argued that the discipline should reject the term "religion" altogether and cease trying to define it.

Religious studies explored Protestant and Catholic attitudes and doctrines regarding suicide in his work Suicide.

Related searches

One of the earliest academic institutions where Religious Studies was presented as a distinct subject was University College Ibadan, now the University of Ibadan, where Geoffrey Parrinder was appointed as lecturer in Religious Studies in 1949.

Religious studies seeks to study religious phenomena as a whole, rather than be limited to the approaches of its subcategories.

William James's The Varieties of Religious studies Experience analyzed personal experience as contrasted with the social phenomenon of religion.

Religious studies used his psychoanalytic theory to explain religious beliefs, practices, and rituals, in order to justify the role of religion in the development of human culture.

Religious studies recognized "how easy it is for prior beliefs and interpretations to unconsciously influence one's thinking, Husserl's phenomenological method sought to shelve all these presuppositions and interpretations.

Religious studies suggests that we should perform the epoche as a means to engage in cross-cultural studies.

Many scholars of religious studies argued that phenomenology was "the distinctive method of the discipline".

Group of scholars have criticized religious studies beginning in the 1990s as a theological project which actually imposes views onto the people it aims to survey.

In 1998, Jonathan Z Smith wrote a chapter in Critical Terms for Religious Studies which traced the history of the term religion and argued that the contemporary understanding of world religions is a modern Christian and European term, with its roots in the European colonial expansion of the sixteenth century.