Christian Origins and Religious Studies

Reed, Annette Yoshiko

doi:10.1177/0008429815595810

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The crux of their joint statement was the rejection of any political, religious, or ideological agenda and acceptance of objective and scientific inquiry as to the sole purpose of the academics working in this field (Schimmel 1960;McCutcheon 1996). However, concerns like a poor representation of different cultural perspectives and regional contexts (Pye 1989;Geertz 2000;Wiebe 2012) and male dominance of the field (Joy 2005;Reed 2015) could not be pacified. Similarly, the purported connection of religious studies to orientalism (Whaling 1995), colonialism (Hedges 2008;Tayob 2018), and Christian theology (Neville 1993;Milbank 2004) continued to haunt the field.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Study of Religions in Premodern Muslim Civilization: Some Distinctions Concerning Its Disciplinary Status

Akram

2021

Religions

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Scholars have made contesting claims about the nature and scale of works on religions by Muslim scholars before modern times. The present paper explores various primary and secondary sources, especially the classical bibliographical indexes that the scholarly tradition under scrutiny itself produced, and classifies these works into three types: (a) polemics, (b) works that present authentic knowledge about various faith traditions or introduce methodological novelties but carry some degree of apologetic undertone, and (c) descriptive writings on religions which resemble the modern-day academic study of religion. Based on these distinctions and an assessment of the number of works in each type, the paper maintains that a sprouting tradition of descriptive studies of religions existed in the pre-modern Muslim societies, which introduced certain methodical novelties such as comparative method, historiography, and, last but not least, textual criticism, which seems to have heralded the modern biblical studies in some respects. However, this tradition could not mature into a full-fledged discipline at par with many other branches of knowledge that flourished in the heyday of Muslim civilization. These findings imply that the descriptive study of religions other than one’s own is not necessarily a modern Western phenomenon. It can take root in multiple cultural settings.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Study of Religions in Premodern Muslim Civilization: Some Distinctions Concerning Its Disciplinary Status

Akram

2021

Religions

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Of Materiality, Cultic Spaces, and Agency … and Discourse in Between: The Entanglement of Religious Space, Discourse, and Practice in Two Case Studies—Two Mithraea and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

van den Heever

2023

Journal of Early Christian History

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Categorization, Collection, and the Construction of Continuity: 1 Enoch and 3 Enoch in and beyond “Apocalypticism” and “Mysticism”

Reed

2017

Method Theory Study Religion

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Recent decades have seen an intensive reassessment of older scholarly categories within the discipline of Religious Studies, spurring a turn toward more microhistorical approaches in the study of ancient Judaism and Christianity in particular. With an eye to the power and limits of scholarly practices of categorization, this article reflects upon the pairing of “Apocalypticism” and “Mysticism” in modern scholarship on premodern Judaism, focusing on two works commonly cited as exemplary of their connection—1 Enochand3 Enoch. Drawing insights from interdisciplinary research on the History of the Book/Material Texts, it experiments with situating scholarly acts of categorization in relation to other practices of constructing continuity, both ancient and modern. It highlights the potency of anthologies and related textual practices for naturalizing certain categories of comparison and certain trajectories of retrospective connection—for modern scholars no less than for ancient and medieval readers.

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Christian Origins and Religious Studies

Cited by 4 publications

References 47 publications

The Study of Religions in Premodern Muslim Civilization: Some Distinctions Concerning Its Disciplinary Status

The Study of Religions in Premodern Muslim Civilization: Some Distinctions Concerning Its Disciplinary Status

Of Materiality, Cultic Spaces, and Agency … and Discourse in Between: The Entanglement of Religious Space, Discourse, and Practice in Two Case Studies—Two Mithraea and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Categorization, Collection, and the Construction of Continuity: 1 Enoch and 3 Enoch in and beyond “Apocalypticism” and “Mysticism”

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