RELIG200 Lecture Notes - Eucharist, Sui Generis, Postcolonialism

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

Document Summary

Religion as an object of study, focus of a scholarly discipline. This discipline started around 1870 and took awhile to get its footing. We should be like gender-studies or post-colonial studies who are still trying to define their object, but for some reason we are not. For arnal, religion does something, he is a culturalist. You need a culture to have a religion. It cannot exist independently. to be fair, he doesn"t like either substantive or culturalist definitions, but he has more of an affinity for hte culturalist. They deal with some reference to the supernatural. you need a belief to use these definitions, making it hard to qualify and deal with at a scholarly level. you can"t footnote the supernatural (its in the word). You are stuck defining something supernatural or sacred.