Studying Religion (PDF)

While many entry level resources concentrate on providing detailed descriptions of the world's religions, Studying Religion: An Introduction turns its attention from the data of religion to the analytic skills required of anyone interested in studying the behaviors and institutions that we commonly name as religions. It shifts the focus from describing the exotic or curious religious "e;Other"e; to examining scholarly practice itself, and persuades readers that prior attention to their own habits will assist their efforts to study the habits of others. Although this little book can be used as part of an introductory course (when supplemented by ethnographic materials of the instructor's choosing), and is accessible to interested readers outside the university, it will also be of use in any course in the study of religion. For, despite the topic under study, the same intellectual skills are required to isolate, name, and examine within a comparative context, those collections of human artifacts that strike students as deserving attention. Studying Religion: An Introduction will therefore assist instructors across the academic study of religion to set the table, as it were, with the descriptive and comparative methods, as well as explanatory theories, on which scholars routinely draw in carrying out their work.