_A much-needed consideration of methodology in comparative philosophy._.

: In the poetry of Daud Kamal, water figures as an image of mercy, as in the Quran, and as a mirror that reflects divine hidden presence. The rock pool evokes the memory of Gandhara and other foundational civilizations born in love and creative ferment. Conversely, the images of drought, heat, and dust symbolize a parched spiritual order. The river, a recurring archetypal image in Kamal’s poetry, represents the fluid self that is subsumed into collective identity to become a poetic (...) distillate of history. Key words: Daud Kamal, water imagery, drought imagery, Pakistani poetry in English, Gandhara civilization, Islamic poetry. Resumen: En la poesía de Daud Kamal, el agua figura como una imagen de misericordia, como en el Corán, y como un espejo que refleja la presencia divina oculta. El estanque evoca la memoria de Gandhara y otras civilizaciones fundamentales nacidas en el amor y el fermento creativo. Por el contrario, las imágenes de sequía, calor y polvo simbolizan un orden espiritual reseco. El río, una imagen arquetípica recurrente en la poesía de Kamal, representa el yo fluido que se subsume en la identidad colectiva para convertirse en un destilado poético de la historia. Palabras clave: Daud Kamal, imágenes de agua, imágenes de sequía, poesía paquistaní en inglés, civilización de Gandhara, poesía islámica. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of the special issue of Human Studies on “Alfred Schutz and Religion”. Following a line similar to that of Dominique Janicaud I call into question the very phenomenological status of the “phenomenology of religion” developed across the various contributions. Appealing to the Husserlian principle of freedom from presuppositions my critique focuses on the way these phenomenologies of religion talk about “religion”. At their core, the failure contained within these contributions is the failure to properly consider (...) a question which begins any undergraduate Religious Studies program—what is “religion”? I charge that because these contributions take it as “self-evident” what religion “is” they allow a metaphysical assertion into their phenomenology which breaches the “neutrality” demanded of the principle of freedom from presuppositions. Drawing on the work of the Critical Religion project in Religious Studies I further highlight how this metaphysical assertion predicates an unavoidable ideological assertion, one which serves colonial mechanics of exclusion. (shrink)

Wesley Wildman is one of the foremost philosophers of religion calling for the evolution of the discipline from its present narrow focus on theistic beliefs to become a discipline concerned with religions in all their diversity. Towards this end, he proposes that philosophers of religion understand what they do as multidisciplinary comparative inquiry. This article assesses his proposal.

The metaphors by which we live, derivative of religious perspectives, shape the ways in which we are engaged with the world around us. This is particularly evident in matters pertaining to consumption and population, factors in the calculus of global sustainability. Increasing concern over the past quarter century with environmental degradation has been paralleled by interest in the relation of religion to a developing environmental ethic. Such interest has called for sensitivity to the religious perspectives of all people, an interest (...) that is promoting involvement in inter-religious dialogue. The significance of this for public policy comes in three areas: growing interest in patterns of social relationships, ecojustice or the way in which we live out social relationships, and growing reflection on the essential nature of religion for value formation in public life. (shrink)

This article tracks a shared methodological tension within the work of a few classic phenomenologists, based on an epistemological juxtaposition at the heart of their enquiry. This epistemological tension emerges as secular and non-secular concepts are worked with concurrently. A modified form of this tension is present in the materialist phenomenology of religion that David Chidester presents, which links his phenomenology to the earlier classical forms. However, although a methodological tension is maintained in his work, the epistemological juxtaposition that initiated (...) the tension is collapsed along humanist boundaries, with important consequences for the study of religion. (shrink)

The argument of this article assumes that religious literacy is urgently needed in the present geopolitical context. Its urgency increases the more religion is viewed in opposition to criticality, as though religion entails an irrational and inviolable commitment, or leap of faith. This narrow view of religion is reinforced by certain rather dogmatic secular framings of religion, which require any and all forms of religious expression to be excluded from public life. Excluding religion from the public has the unfortunate effect (...) that religiosity can take extreme forms with little social mediation through political deliberative cultures. Such approaches do not support religious literacy, but tend to generate increasingly polarized and fractured debates about the place of religion in society and education. In contrast to the attitude that seeks to privatize religion, I argue that religions are fundamentally public facing, not least because they act as social institutions that bind communities together. I argue that it is the hermeneutical traditions immanent to religions themselves that must inform the ways that religions can appropriately inform public life. (shrink)

Research and writing at the intersection of faith and medicine by now include thousands of published studies, review articles, books, chapters, and essays. Yet this emerging field has been described, from within, as disheveled on account of imprecision and lack of careful attention to conceptual and theoretical concerns. An important source of confusion is the fact that scholarship in this field constitutes two distinct literatures, or rather meta-literatures, which can be termed faith as a problematic for medicine and medicine as (...) a problematic for faith. These categories represent distinct theoretical lenses for viewing the intersection of faith and medicine. Observations about these two approaches are offered, along with insights about why the discourse on faith and medicine should become better integrated into discussions of religion and science. (shrink)

The Goddess People of Avalon, a young and flourishing religious community in Glastonbury (South-England), have been defining themselvesprincipally as a revitalization of the prehistoric worship of the Great Goddess. Based on fieldwork data of the author, the article offers an introduction into the religious tradition and ritual praxis of the contemporary Goddess People. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the ritual genre of Sacred Drama with its interpretationof the general and local history of religions. The variety of recursivity (as a reference (...) to the past), which this ritual genre expresses, is examined within an analytical frame that has been developed for different forms of ritual dynamics. Particularly, the analytical concepts ritual transfer, adaptation, invention and ritual design are discussed. Within the lastyears, a change in the self-image and legitimizing strategies of the Goddess People has occurred: Whereas in their nascent years, they understood themselves as a reactualization of primordial spirituality, they tend to see themselvescurrently more as a newreligious tradition, inventing their rituals creatively and confidently. The article argues for the use of the analytical concept ritual design to describe this aspect of ritual dynamics. Thus, instead of evaluating the degree of originality of rituals from an academic point of view, the legitimizing strategiesof religious agents come to the fore. (shrink)

Universities in the USA have become bastions of secularity in a distinctly religious society. As such, they are subjected to a variety of robust and rigorous religious critiques. In this paper I do not seek to engage in the debate between the supporters of the secular university and its opponents. Furthermore, I do not claim to summarize the history of the critique of the secular university, nor to present an exhaustive map of its current articulations. My purpose is rather more (...) limited and modest, namely, to locate some of the key arguments of the current religious criticism of the secular university and put them in a wider philosophical context. Exploring the philosophical infrastructure of this criticism enables not only a more comprehensive and profound understanding of it, but also urges us to rethink the purpose and essence of the university as an institution that both reflects and forms our society and culture. The article is structured as follows; first section puts the religious criticism of the secular university in the context of the latest wave of criticism levelled at contemporary universities. Second section explores the argument according to which the secularization of the university led to the loss of the ideal of education for excellence in the wide, classical sense of the term. Third section examines the theoretical foundations of the call to reintegrate religion in contemporary universities, while fourth section explores the various practical consequences of this demand. (shrink)

An increasingly common complaint about philosophy of religion—especially, though not exclusively, as it is pursued in the “analytic tradition”—is that its preoccupation with questions of rationality and justification in relation to “theism” has deflected attention from the diversity of forms that religious life takes. Among measures proposed for ameliorating this condition has been the deployment of “thick description” that facilitates more richly contextualized understandings of religious phenomena. Endorsing and elaborating this proposal, I provide an overview of different but related notions (...) of thick description before turning to two specific examples, which illustrate the potential for engagement with ethnography to contribute to an expanded conception of philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The word 'paradigm' appears in a number of Cornelia Roux's published works (Roux 1998; 1998a; 2003; 2008; 2009; 2011). This article re-examines her use of 'paradigm' in the light of Thomas Kuhn's (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on recently published work on religion and education (Gearon 2013; 2014), I elaborate why researchers and educators alike require a more rigorous theoretical conceptualisation of the underlying paradigms of contemporary religious education. Outlining how a satisfactory understanding of the paradigms in religious (...) education require an understanding of the epistemological grounds of each, the article presents, by way of demonstration, a critical outline of six such paradigms: the scriptural-theological; the phenomenological; the spiritual-experiential; the philosophical-conceptual; the socio-cultural; and the historical-political. (shrink)