RELIG200 Lecture Notes - White Guilt, Michel Foucault, Bruce Lincoln

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Religious Studies
• Course: RELIG200
• Professor: Glen Fairen

Document Summary

For arnal, neither substantive or culturalist definitions are really not all that serviceable. They all rely on us already knowing what religion is in the first place. They do not describe, but just re-entrench what we already knew. If we didn"t know what religion was in the first place, these definitions would tell us anything. We can treat religion as an arbitrary category of the scholar"s invention, created for its usefulness. (infamous j. z. smith quote) The only reason we want to define religion in the first place is because it is so important to some kinds of everyday discourse. Divorcing our definitions from everyday life ignores why we want to explain it in the first place. Sometimes actual believers (emic) take up our definitions and read them back onto themselves. Treat religion as a concept we need to explain, not as the way we can undertand things we call religion. Hermeneutic reading of the use of the word religion