Vocabulary for the Study of Religion
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Subject: Religious Studies
Edited by: Robert A. Segal & Kocku von Stuckrad.
The Vocabulary for the Study of Religion offers a unique overview of critical terms in the study of religion(s). This first dictionary in English covers a broad spectrum of theoretical topics used in the academic study of religion, including those from adjacent disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, historiography, theology, philology, literary studies, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and political sciences.
Subscriptions: Brill.com
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The Vocabulary for the Study of Religion offers a unique overview of critical terms in the study of religion(s). This first dictionary in English covers a broad spectrum of theoretical topics used in the academic study of religion, including those from adjacent disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, historiography, theology, philology, literary studies, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and political sciences.
Subscriptions: Brill.com
Indexicality
(1,146 words)
Abstract: Indexicals are words like “I” and “now,” utterances of which refer to different things depending on the speaker, time, and place of the utterance. Indexicals require us to make the philosop…
Date:
2014-09-16
Indigenous Religions
(2,316 words)
Abstract: Academic interest in the study of indigenous religions began with the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the origin of “primitive” religions. By the 1970s, the term “primal” became incre…
Ineffability
(1,355 words)
Abstract: Ineffability is the quality or state that applies to things that are incapable of being expressed in words. While the purported range of such things can be vast, the deployment of ineffabil…
Date:
2014-09-16
Initiation / Transformation
(3,671 words)
Abstract: Initiation is a notion applied to a wide variety of ritual action, including vocational rites, induction into secret societies, and the transition to adulthood. Both scholarly and popular n…
Innovation
(2,078 words)
Abstract: Innovation is a largely ignored concept in the study of religion. Most often, it has been seen as a reaction to influences that are either culturally foreign or else culturally native but s…
Insider / Outsider
(2,408 words)
Abstract: The insider-outsider problem results from scholarly attempts to achieve “understanding in depth” of religious communities while at the same time achieving objectivity. Deep levels of unders…
Date:
2014-09-16
Institution
(4,786 words)
Abstract: If one understands the term “institution” in a broader sense that covers all social forms, specific religious institutions are religious roles, a religiously-led conduct of life, a biograph…
Intellectuals
(1,980 words)
Abstract: Intellectuals have been especially relevant to religions devoted to proselytism, whereas religious commitment has been associated with a change of mind. This entry follows this distinction …
Date:
2014-09-16
Interpretation
(9 words)
Abstract: ⸙Explanation and Interpretation, Hermeneutics and Interpretation Bibliography
Interreligious Relations
(3,130 words)
Abstract: Interreligious relations have been a key issue throughout the history of religion, as it moved from polytheism to monotheism to secular modernity. Polytheism tended to accept various religi…
Intertextuality
(3,013 words)
Abstract: Intertextuality refers to the idea that no text is isolable or self-sufficient and that the boundaries of a text are indefinite and permeable. Those boundaries extend both externally, throu…
Intoxication
(1,973 words)
Abstract: All religions have a sense of the sacred, a spiritual world beyond the realm of everyday existence but which can nevertheless be communed with, albeit not by everyone. One of the ways of co…
Intuition
(3,489 words)
Abstract: Within the Western philosophical tradition the term “intuition” can be used in at least three different ways, covering modes of cognition that are rational, pre-rational, or even irrational…
Invisible Religion
(1,054 words)
Abstract: The concept and theory of an “invisible religion” was developed by Thomas Luckmann in
Das Problem der Religion in der Modernen Gesellschaft (1963). He argued that the erosion of the Christian monopoly on religion…