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In a culture increasingly focused on visual media, students have learned not only to embrace multimedia presentations in the classroom, but to expect them. Such expectations are perhaps more prevalent in a field as dynamic and cross-disciplinary as religious studies, but the practice nevertheless poses some difficult educational issues -- the use of movies in academic coursework has far outpaced the scholarship on teaching religion and film. What does it mean to utilize film in religious studies, and what are the best ways to do it? In Teaching Religion and Film, an interdisciplinary team of scholars thinks about the theoretical and pedagogical concerns involved with the intersection of film...
In this groundbreaking study, SherAli Tareen presents the most comprehensive and theoretically engaged work to date on what is arguably the most long-running, complex, and contentious dispute in modern Islam: the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic. The Barelvī and Deobandī groups are two normative orientations/reform movements with beginnings in colonial South Asia. Almost two hundred years separate the beginnings of this polemic from the present. Its specter, however, continues to haunt the religious sensibilities of postcolonial South Asian Muslims in profound ways, both in the region and in diaspora communities around the world. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity challenges the commonplace tende...
Offers more than three thousand articles on the world of religion.
The study of religion encompasses ordinary human social practice and is not limited to the extraordinary or divine. 'Introducing Religion' brings together leading international scholars in the field of religious studies to examine religion as integral to everyday social practice. The book establishes a theoretical framework for the study of religion to analyse prayer, ritual, science, morality and politics in relation to the world's major religions. It will be of interest to students of theory and method in religious studies seeking a clear introduction to the multifaceted nature of religion.
Eric Bain-Selbo argues that the study of religion-from philosophers to psychologists, and historians of religion to sociologists-has separated out the “ends” or goals of religion and thus created the conditions by which institutional religion is increasingly irrelevant in contemporary Western culture. There is ample evidence that institutional religion is in trouble, and little evidence that it will strengthen in the future, giving some reason to believe that we are in the process of seeing the end of religion. At the same time, various cultural practices have met in the past and continue to meet today certain fundamental human needs-needs that we might identify as religious that now are being fulfilled through what Bain-Selbo calls the “religion of culture.” The End(s) of Religion traces the way that the very study of religion has led to institutional religion being viewed as just one human institution that can address our particular “religious” needs rather than the sole institution to do so. In turn, ultimately we can begin to see how other institutions or forms of culture can function to serve these same needs or “ends.”