It is often qualitative, almost journalistic, in nature. After spending a night drumming and chanting over the youth, the old man prepares to leave, taking with him all food and water. This approach is known as comparative religion. Volume 1: Regional, Critical and Historical Approaches and Volume 2: Textual, Comparative, Sociological and Cognitive Approaches – Edited by Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz, and Randi R. Warne religion. The objective historian seeks to accumulate all the evidence and data he or she can to discover as close as possible to what really happened in past events. Concerned with how humans make their lives meaningful as cultural individuals. New Approaches to the Study of Religion. A religion has meaning in a contemporary context in part because of its connections with the past. The extraordinary range of methods and frameworks can be helpfully summed up regarding the classic distinction between the natural-scientific and human-scientific approaches. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists are working together to critically investigate religion as a cultural factor that is so influential in the modern world. FLORENCE MARY FITCH; THE HISTORICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF THE BIBLE, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume I, Issue II, 1 January 1933, Pages 1 In describing such beliefs it is impossible to say that it makes no difference whether they are true or false. influential approach to religion, formulating an essay on this subject poses serious difficulties. Sociology in general looks at people’s dynamics and explains a group’s influence. world religions: a historical approach (pdf) by solomon a. nigosian (ebook) A concise, balanced, and reasonably priced introductory text, World Religions takes a historical approach to the ideological and cultural aspects of several religions. The study of religion can roughly be divided between descriptive and historical inquiries on the one hand and normative inquiries on the other. Historians, however, in the study of religion, often come to it with presupposed philosophical ideas about what could or could not have happened. Phenomenology of religion is distinct from historical, sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and theological approaches to the study of religion. Defining “reli-gion” has been a major enterprise within the discipline right from the begin-ning, but, so far, without conclusive results. I. Thus a developmental conception of the past dominates in the method of the modern historian. The Comparative Study of Religions World Religions: A Voyage of Discovery, Fourth Edition, considers one religion at a time, chapter by chapter. Sociology is one such approach that this essay will be looking at through its founding fathers Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. The historical approach applies historical methodologies to the study of these issues. In this department, religion is addressed in all its forms and appearances. Looks at how humans organize their lives as members of societies. This course introduces students to the variety of academic approaches to the study of religion and to the procedures and sources used in writing academic papers in religious studies. USES OF THE TERM. ★ Historical approach to the study of religion: Add an external link to your content for free. The study of the history of religions examines events in the past. The study of religion raises these questions also, but when the culture under study puts a great deal of importance on beliefs in magic and witchcraft that the anthropologist finds it hard to share, the same questions arise in still more acute form. 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