Understanding Theories of Religion

Preface to the Second Edition: Understanding, Instead of Just Thinking vii
 
1 Introduction: Understanding Theories of Religion Is Better than Just Being Critical 1
 
Part I The Prehistory of the Study of Religion: Responses to an Expanding World 7
 
2 Jean Bodin and Herbert of Cherbury: True Religion, Essential Religion, and Natural Religion 9
 
3 Understanding Religion Also Began with Trying to Understand the Bible 19
 
Part II Classic Nineteenth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion: The Quest for the Origins of Religion in History 31
 
4 Max Müller, the Comparative Study of Religion, and the Search for Other Bibles in India 33
 
5 The Shock of the "Savage": Edward Burnett Tylor, Evolution, and Spirits 45
 
6 The Religion of the Bible Evolves: William Robertson Smith 55
 
7 Setting the Eternal Templates of Salvation: James Frazer 65
 
Part III Classic Twentieth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion: Defending the Inner Sanctum of Religious Experience or Storming It 75
 
8 Understanding How to Understand Religion: "Phenomenology of Religion" 77
 
9 How Religious Experience Created Capitalism: Max Weber 93
 
10 Tales from the Underground: Freud and the Psychoanalytic Origins of Religion 106
 
11 Bronislaw Malinowski and the "Sublime Folly" of Religion 118
 
12 Seeing God with the Social Eye: Durkheim's Religious Sociology 129
 
13 Mircea Eliade: Turning Back the "Worm of Doubt" 142
 
Part IV Liberation and Post-Modernism: Race, Gender, Post-Colonialism, the Discourse on Power 155
 
14 From Modernism to Post-Modernism: Mostly Michel Foucault 157
 
15 Theorizing Religion with Race in Mind: Prophecy or Curiosity? 171
 
16 Sex/Gender and Women: Feminists Theorizing Religion 189
 
17 Another "Otherness": Post-Colonial Theories of Religion 216
 
18 Conclusion: Being "Smart" about Bringing "Religion" Back In

Ivan Strenski is Holstein Family and Community Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He served as North American Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Religion from 1979-2004, and is the author of numerous books, including Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (2002), Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (2003), The New Durkheim: Essays on Philosophy, Religious Identity and the Politics of Knowledge (2006), and Why Politics Can't Be Freed from Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). He is also editor of Émile Durkheim (2009), and Thinking about Religion: A Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

"This is an extremely useful collection of readings which in combination with Strenski's companion volume would be recommended reading to undergraduate students in religious studies requiring access to 'bitesize' pieces of the formative works in their discipline.""Theological Book Review "