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This article explores new ways of looking at qualitative data in the study of religion. I call them the interstitial, inverted, and dialogical approaches. The interstitial approach provides an alternative to traditional triangulation by treating discrepancies between, say, self-reporting and observation of religious attendance not as a problem, but as an interstice where new information can be found. The inverted approach examines how discourses about “the other” – the other’s religion, in this case – enable researchers to analyze positive self-identifications, even when those are left unarticulated. Finally, the dialogical approach responds to a recurrent problem in qualitative religion research: researchers often assume that they ways in which people talk about religion have particular consequences. The dialogical approach enables researchers to demonstrate whether and how this is indeed so. The three approaches show how epistemological reframing – all three are, in different ways, constructionist approaches – enables novel thinking about “religion.”

This paper introduces a tool designed to mitigate a longstanding challenge to developing social anthropological theories of ritual – how to generate enough comparable case studies for rigorously testing the predictive strength and generalizability of the theory under scrutiny. Our “constitutive relevance of models” (CRoM) test identifies structural continuities between anthropological and psychological theoretical models of ritual phenomena that would justify sharing some analytical tools between models. With this test, anthropologists can in certain cases draw on a psychological theory construct’s superior empirical tractability to more efficiently identify instances of ritual phenomena that are suitable for developing and testing their own anthropological models. To demonstrate, we apply a CRoM test to validate the use of a construct developed under a psychological theory of ritual, Lawson and McCauley’s “ritual form hypothesis,” to search for case studies suitable for assessing the theoretical claims that anthropologist Roy Rappaport made for “highly sacred” rituals.

Comparison is a fundamental operation in the milieu of the remarkable abilities of human beings to transcend themselves in acts of perception and the accumulation of knowledge. Comparison is holding together things that are at once the same and different. The very possibility of the copresence of same and different, of is and is not, is a gift of human biology and evolution. Humans compare because it is our distinctive nature to do so. Academics have the added responsibility of being self-aware, self-reflective, and articulate when comparing. This article develops a rich theory of comparison in conjunction with detailed reflections on late nineteenth century encounters of European-Australians and Aborigines in Central Australia. The intent is to advance our understanding of comparison and also to articulate in the practical terms of method what is involved in comparison, arguing most generally that comparison is of the fabric of any proper study of religion.

In view of the questionability of the concept “religion” as an analytical category for the investigation of pre-modern, non-Western cultures, how can one still pursue the history of religion or historical sociology of religion? Roughly speaking, scholars of religion can be placed between two poles with regard to this question: (1) those who reject the cross-cultural use of “religion” as a comparative concept and (2) those who believe they cannot do without it. We propose an approach that acknowledges the cultural dependence and historicity of concepts such as “religion” and the “secular,” while still conducting historical research on pre-colonial non-Western societies relevant to the study of both. Our approach aims to investigate the emergence of social and epistemic structures in various cultures—forms of differentiation and distinction—that have enabled the reorganisation of socio-cultural formations into religions and thus facilitated the formation of “multiple secularities” in global modernity.

The scientific study of nonreligion has been described as being ‘under the spell’ of religion because the vast majority of research investigates nonbelief in respect to belief. This has resulted in a number of problematic theories, including the leading cognitive science of religion (CSR) theory that claims that religious belief is innate, and so to be a nonbeliever is to violate cognitive predispositions. This article critically analyzes innateness theories and encourages the development of further theories that incorporate social, adaptive, cultural, evolutionary, and biological factors in addition to cognitive contributors. This article details the roles of adaptive and functional aspects of nonbelief, the influence of credibility enhancing displays (CRED s), and the influence of cultural context on nonbelief as they are not sufficiently explained by CSR theories. It is proposed that future theories study nonreligion in its own right, instead of respective to religion, so that a broader range of unique characteristics can be accounted for without inaccurately and inadequately phrasing theories in terms of naturalness.

As it appears, the back and forth between CSR and critical theory pays a great deal of attention to religion as a classificatory and explanatory object but has thus far left alone another category—that of the human. Scholars in other fields, however, have long demonstrated the human subject to be a slippery trope all its own whose rhetorical and analytical value is not at all a given. It is on the evolution and contemporary state of this vein of criticism that I will focus, then, in an attempt to shift the register of the current conversation about CSR.

Behind its theoretical and scientific ambition, Pascal Boyer’s work mobilizes several ideas and notions (starting with that of “religion”) that belong to the old Western cultural tradition. It is precisely this ideological substratum and its indispensable cognitive “crutches” that this article seeks to identify.

This article argues that the problems that comparative religion encountered in the 1980s and onward did not arise from the comparative project as such, but rather from the fact that comparative religion was founded on an analytical strategy that relied on defining religion. In order to overcome these problems and critique of Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others, it is proposed that the comparative study of religion could be re-established on the basis of a different analytical strategy and more specifically on the basis of a relational perspective, in which the crucial point of departure is the finding that religions in many periods and cultural settings seem to constitute themselves in relation to at least one significant other religion. In periods and cultural settings, where religions relate to each other, we do in fact have a commonality between all religions, namely the inter-religious relation. This relation can ensure that we are not comparing things that have nothing in common. If the inter-religious relation is the point of departure, the comparative study of religion can be transformed in such a way that it is not overturned by the social constructionism or post-modernism of J. Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others. This article argues that the problems that comparative religion encountered in the 1980s and onward did not arise from the comparative project as such, but rather from the fact that comparative religion was founded on an analytical strategy that relied on defining religion. In order to overcome these problems and critique of Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others, it is proposed that the comparative study of religion could be re-established on the basis of a different analytical strategy and more specifically on the basis of a relational perspective, in which the crucial point of departure is the finding that religions in many periods and cultural settings seem to constitute themselves in relation to at least one significant other religion. In periods and cultural settings, where religions relate to each other, we do in fact have a commonality between all religions, namely the inter-religious relation. This relation can ensure that we are not comparing things that have nothing in common. If the inter-religious relation is the point of departure, the comparative study of religion can be transformed in such a way that it is not overturned by the social constructionism or post-modernism of J. Z. Smith, Talal Asad and others.

The explanatory gap between the life sciences and the humanities that is present in the study of human phenomena impedes productive interdisciplinary examination that such a complex subject requires. Manifested as epistemological tensions over reductionism vs. holism, nature vs. nurture, and the study of micro vs. macro context, the divergent research approaches in the humanities and the sciences produce separate bodies of knowledge that are difficult to reconcile. To remedy this incommensurability, the article proposes to employ the complex adaptive systems approach, which allows to study specific cultural systems in their ecologies and to account for the myriads of factors that constitute such systems, including nonlinear interactions between these factors and their evolution. On a specific example of religious systems, we show that by studying cultural systems in their contextual variability, mechanistic composition, and evolutionary history, the humanities and the sciences should be able to fruitfully collaborate while avoiding previous pitfalls of excessive reductionism, genetic determinism, and sweeping overgeneralizations, on the one hand, and pitfalls of excessive holism, cultural determinism, and aversion to any generalizations, on the other hand.

In this short review and debate article I use Nicolas Meylan’s Mana: A History of a Western Category as a starting point for discussing the Swedish historian of religions Geo Widengren (1907-1996) and his theory of the so-called High God. Resembling mana, the High God theory is a second-order concept that is used to explain the origin of religion in the history of humankind.

I have spent a number of years focusing my research on the Roman Cults of Mithras. In this autobiographical reflection on that study, I consider the relationship between research on a specific, if perhaps obscure, religious tradition and methodological and theoretical issues in historical and comparative studies of religion generally.

Characteristic of the recent cognitive approach to religion (CSR) is the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality. This thesis readily lends itself to the critical understanding of religious belief as “our intuitive psychology run amok.” This effective restriction of the scientific critique of agent causality to notions of supernatural agency appears arbitrary, however, in light of evidence from cognitive and social psychology that our sense of human agency, including our own, is interpretive in nature. In this paper I argue that a cognitive approach to religion that extends the critique of agent causality to the folk psychological experience of conscious will is able to shed light on several characteristically religious phenomena, such as spirit possession, ritual action, and spontaneous action in Zen Buddhism.

This paper takes the social constructivist approach, formulated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, as a starting point for an investigation into epistemology and theorizing in the contemporary study of religion. It discusses various strands of scholarship in dialogue with social constructivism and questions in particular the reductionism of radical constructivist positions. Exploring the boundaries of the classical social constructivist paradigm, the article argues that students of religion should consider the implication of social, historical, embodied and material structures in the production of knowledge about religion. For that purpose, it draws on various soft realist approaches to stress the importance of remaining attentive to positionality (reflecting on the sites from where we theorize) and contextuality (reflecting on the inter-relation of discourse and materiality) in theorizing “religion”. Finally, the article suggests that soft realist positions can be integrated in a slightly broadened social constructivist framework for the study of religion.

In response to the recent publication ofTheory In a Time of Excessthis article offers an outsider perspective on the theoretical issues raised and why they are ultimately unlikely to be resolved. The article argues that there is a widespread problematic tendency to equatetheorywith a specific category ofcritical theorythat tautologically restricts the theoretical boundaries of the study of religion field and neglects the contributions of more empirically inclined theorists. In a similar manner, essentialising narratives about the Cognitive Science of Religion that portray the field as unified and monolithic are highlighted and the validity of such critiques is questioned.

‘Religion’ is often, if not always, deemed a rather problematic category by critical theorists, who urge scholars to be more attentive to the genealogy and history of the category. As part of the review symposium ofTheory in a Time of Excess(2016), this review essay argues that ‘theory’ itself could be deemed problematic if we wish to be consistent in adopting such a critical stance, which can lead to several dead-ends when excluding other theoretical options and possibilities.

Introduction to the following set of papers: Lars Albinus, “A grammar of religious ‘truth’—pragmatic considerations on the nature of religious truth”; Terry F. Godlove, “Truth, meaning, and the study of religion”; G. Scott Davis, “Semantics and the study of religion”; Mark Q. Gardiner, “Why truth matters for the study of religion; a defense of a truth-conditional semantics”; Gabriel Levy, “Can fictional superhuman agents have mental states?”.

Theory in a Time of Excess(Equinox 2017) serves as a useful starting point to argue for a plural understanding of theory in the study of religion. While the existing conversation often implies that there is only one acceptable way of theorizing, it seems useful to distinguish between (at least) three understandings of theory—and a fourth potentially “illegitimate” one. These four forms (discourse theories, creative theories, scientific theories, and essentialist theories) are all present in the volume. Different theoretical approaches can learn from each other and expose their respective blind spots, which is the main reason to further a meta-theoretical debate about a permissible plurality within theory-building. Rather than a call to “just get along” under one big tent, this critical attitude implies that we should strive to better profile all four of these forms of theorizing in order to discuss their potential place in our discipline.

This article explores various ways in which the concept of truth is actually used across discursive boundaries separating common sense, science, mathematics, and religion. Although my overall approach is pragmatic, I argue that we also need to take some semantic restrictions into consideration. The main objective of the article is the issue of translating concepts of truth in various linguistic and cultural contexts without losing sight of the particular network of connotations. I come to the conclusion that with regard to a religious discourse, a translatable concept of truth typically enters the grammatical place of the subject rather than the predicate. From this position the discursive constraints of authority, authenticity and expressivity are held in check by an internal predetermination of the implied possibility of falsehood. Most of all, however, the article focuses on non-propositional aspects of a religious expression of truth, in which case the very distinction between true and false becomes patently irrelevant.

Truth-conditional semantics holds that the meaning of a linguistic expression is a function of the conditions under which it would be true. This seems to require limiting meaningfulness to linguistic phenomena for which the question of truth or falsity is relevant. Criticisms have been raised that there are vast swatches of meaningful language that are simply not truth-related, with religion representing a particularly rich and prevalent source. I argue that if the concept of truth as used in a truth-conditional semantics is understood in ways other than correspondence to fact, there are suitable reformulations of a truth-conditional semantics that may be appropriate for understanding religion. I further argue that these reformulations offer considerable methodological advantages to the scholar of religion.

This paper focuses on two contrasting approaches to the theory of linguistic meaning and asks how they color a range of issues of interest to scholars of religion. The so-called truth-conditional approach makes truth basic. It trades on the thought that we sometimes or perhaps often know what someone has said when we know what it would be for what she has said to be true. The other approach pegs meaning to how expressions and sentences are used in communicative situations. Dummett and Davidson are front and center. Davidson is of course in one sense a champion of truth-conditional semantics, but, over the issues I have in view, his case is instructively mixed. This discussion leads us toward an account of linguistic meaning which elevates over truth a family of concepts associated with use, including verification, justification, and pragmatic success.

This article consists of replies to the reviewers. For Ambasciano I show that his concern about the taint of epistemic phenomenologies can be largely deflected by understanding the exact contextualization of the materials he questions, particularly their place in the function, structure and serialized nature of the argument. Responding to Segal I try to clarify the evolutionary role of functionalism, the relation of Durkheim and Eliade as I am using them, and the role of difference in comparativism. Willard’s questions about the relations of my natural history approach to the cultural evolution model provides a good opportunity to point out their complementarity and differences.

The present paper offers a brief contextualization of William E. Paden’sNew Patterns in Comparative Religion(2016). Paden’s “new naturalism” entails the unification of cognition, biology, sociology, and ecology in order to bring down the divide between natural sciences and the humanities. While some representatives of the neo-phenomenological trend in comparative religion are currently reviving the most epistemically unwarranted assumptions of Mircea Eliade’s (1907-1986) disciplinary approach, Paden’s proposal stands out as an indispensable asset for the reorientation of comparative history of religions as a life science. Nonetheless, the presence of some problematic Eliadean tenets in Paden’s volume is called into question.

The aim of this paper is to deal with a slightly erroneous claim made in previous research that philosophical phenomenology has shown little interest in the topic of “religion”. The majority of this article deals with the branch of the Movement that I have dubbed Sociological Phenomenology which stems out of the work of Alfred Schutz and Max Scheler and has influenced scholars of religion like Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann and James Spickard. I offer a Husserlian critique of this branch of phenomenology for failing to appreciate the key insights of his later phenomenology’s “ontological turn” where he turned to an analysis on the natural attitude and the life-world. I conclude by showing what a phenomenology or religion consistent with these later insights may look like.

In his new book, Paden argues that evolutionary theory creates new and fertile ground for the comparative study of religion. I suggest that extending Paden’s argument to embrace new theories of cultural evolution will continue to broaden our ability understand the origins of both the similarities and differences in religions across societies. Religions are cultural systems and as such an understanding of our shared biology can only explain a limited amount of what religion is and does. I discuss how new cultural evolutionary theories that examine cultural variation and cultural change based on how humans learn and transmit cultural content and can improve the theoretical foundations of comparative studies of religion. Exploring different mechanisms of cultural learning can help explain why certain features of religion are found across a wide variety of religions while others are only found in specific groups.

This article employs the trinary framework to interrogate American religious freedom and religious actors’ interaction with theusstate. It focuses on issues of governance and the classification and management of state subjects and their activities, showing how these lived effects are entwined with more “academic” or intellectual concerns about the categories religion and superstition. The article uses “superstition” in two ways. First, it is a term many Americans, from jurists to popular writers to academics, have used to describe human activities, often with racial assumptions and implications built into the framework. Second, scholars today might use the term, as part of the trinary, as an analytical device. The argument is that because the United States guarantees religious freedom, the state (or, more specifically, a particular state agent) must classify beliefs and practices as religious. This leaves a third category of activities that are clearly not secular but are also not religious, because they are not protected. Thus, we might call this third category “superstition” or “the superstitious.” The article tests this framework with two brief case studies drawn from the early and late twentieth century, respectively.

Many scholars have expressed fears that naturalism will homogenize religion, thereby reifying the concept and distorting the academy’s perception of local cultures. Yet this fear is misplaced. In fact, recent advances in cognitive science, most notably regarding the development of interactional theories of cognition, lend significant support to conceptualizing religion heterogeneously. In this paper I first explore Russell McCutcheon’s rationale for fearing naturalism. I then obviate McCutcheon’s fears by demonstrating how the interactionalist perspective in cognitive science both promotes a heterogeneous understanding of human behavior as well as refutes sui generis religion. I conclude by recommending fusing insights from interactionalism with a ground-up, sociological approach to “religion” such as Timothy Fitzgerald’s, which results in research methodology that is appropriately sensitive to the natural differences of behavior that have been historically identified as religious.

While a generation of theorists assumed that secularization was a necessary outcome of modernization, a newer group of scholars have argued that Western Christendom constructed a normative binary opposition between the “religious” and the “secular,” which it then attempted to impose globally. This putative binary has been interrogated in a number of ways. This paper articulates a productive recent line of approach, I initially proposed inThe Invention of Religion in Japan, 2012, which was to introduce a third term—“superstition”—into the model. Succinctly put, “superstition” was often seen as both the false double of “religion” and a crucial enemy of scientific truth and the secular state. Thus, I argue focusing on the excluded term in this trinary can provide insights into the way in which all three categories are mutually constituted. It also opens the door for the re-theorization of “secularism” and its historic ideological features.

1The article challenges the unexplained subject matter of emotions and affects in the study of Islamophobia. As a first step, I will pinpoint how scholars in the field of political and social sciences construe affective dimensions of Islamophobia as irrational in opposition to rational behavior and interest in politics and thereby virtually exclude emotions and affects as suitable subjects from scholarly discourse. In contrast, I will suggest analyzing Islamophobic discourse in line with approaches defining affects and emotions both as historically and linguistically mediated. Therefore, particular attention is given to a historiographical approach to emotions with regard to a theory of practice and to the so-called ‘affective turn’ in the field of religion. Furthermore, I am arguing that a distinct historiographical stance towards Islamophobia and emotions in the study of religion allows us to readdress historical (e.g., colonial, Orientalist, and postcolonial) layers structuring debates on Islam until today.

Philosophers and other scholars of religion are increasingly recognizing that if philosophy of religion is to remain relevant to the study of religion, its scope must be expanded well beyond the confines of a highly intellectualized and abstract “theism.” Means of engendering this expansion include methodological diversification—drawing upon thickly described accounts of religious life such as those afforded by ethnographies and certain narrative artworks. Focusing on the latter, this article engages with the question of whether works of narrative fiction—literary or cinematic—candophilosophy of religion in ways that illuminate what D.Z. Phillips characterizes as the “radical plurality” of contemporary religion. Closely examining the examples of Dostoevsky’sThe Brothers Karamazovand especially Soyinka’sDeath and the King’s Horseman, my discussion is contextualized within broader debates over whether philosophy’s purpose is to advocate certain religious and moral perspectives or to elucidate those perspectives in more disinterested terms.

Observing and interviewing Muslim volunteers involving themselves in European charities with a strong religious frame reveals that Islam is more than rituals and beliefs but a complex system of ideas providing an original perception of the society, the environment and the individual. Therefore, the terms and categories gravitating around “religion” appear limited when trying to define Islam accurately for social sciences. The way Muslim volunteers practice their Islam is not limited to ritual performance; they try to find practical implementations of the ethics of Islam in areas like banking, charity, consumerism or democracy. These volunteers blur the boundaries of the concepts of “sacred” and “mundane,” thereby redrawing the limits of what is “religious” and what is not. After discussing the limits of the category of “religion” for describing Islam, this article follows French sociologist Edgar Morin’s theory of complex systems, suggesting the study of Islam as a matrix. On a wider perspective it will aim to bridge conceptual gaps in the study of religions, trying to find a more flexible concept that can also apply to other systems of ideas, cultures, beliefs and principles.

“Belief” in the study of religion has been vexed by complexities underlying the relationship between language, cognition, and religious behavior. Drawing on anthropological, sociological, and psychological literature, this article discusses the degrees and textures of “belief” to highlight the inadequacies of language and the variety of motivations for participating in rituals. Particular emphasis is given to discrimination, implicit bias, and the issue of discrepancy. The article argues that dual-process models of cognition provide a richer account of “belief” and then goes on to map an epistemological distinction between belief and acceptance as a viable methodology for the investigation of “belief” in the study of religion.

The problem for Study of Religions (sor) in the academy is the dearth of successful theory-as-explanation in the field and the consequential domination of the public square by other voices namely theology, apologetics, humanist study that privileges belief and New Atheism. There is theory-as-critique aplenty and it is applied to both religious truth claims and to explanatory theories about religion. Scholars ofsorhave the critical tools, methods, expertise and weight of scholarship to error check and to disprove naturalistic explanations but finding explanatory ground to stand on is very hard indeed. This piece argues that it is important to renew and revitalise the search for explanation.