Religious studies, also known as the study of religion, is the scientific study of religion. There is no consensus on what qualifies as religion and its definition is highly contested. It describes, compares, interprets, and explains religion, emphasizing empirical, historically based, and cross-cultural perspectives.
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.
The University of Chicago Divinity School is a private graduate institution at the University of Chicago dedicated to the training of academics and clergy across religious boundaries. Formed under Baptist auspices, the school today lacks any sectarian affiliations.
Judith Plaskow is an American theologian, author, and activist known for being the first Jewish feminist theologian. After earning her doctorate at Yale University, she taught at Manhattan College for thirty-two years before becoming a professor emerita. She was one of the creators of the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion and was its editor for the first ten years. She also helped to create B'not Esh, a Jewish feminist group that heavily inspired her writing, and a feminist section of the American Academy of Religion, an organization of which she was president in 1998.
The Immanent Frame is a digital forum that publishes interdisciplinary perspectives on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. It was formed in conjunction with projects on religion and the public sphere at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Initially conceived as an experimental blog that invited multiple contributions from a number of leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences, The Immanent Frame was established in October 2007 by an SSRC team led by program director Jonathan VanAntwerpen, who served for several years as editor-in-chief.
Mark Juergensmeyer is an American sociologist and scholar specialized in global studies and religious studies, and a writer best known for his studies on comparative religion, religious violence, and global religion. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.
Steven Joseph Engler is a Canadian scholar of religion, Professor at Mount Royal University, Professor Colaborador in the Graduate Program in Ciêncas da Religião at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (Brazil), and affiliate Professor in the Department of Religion at Concordia University.
Christian Konrad Wedemeyer is an American scholar and political and social activist.
Religion is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of Religious studies, edited by the religion academic scholars Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler. It was founded in 1971, with close ties to the Religious Studies program at the University of Lancaster. That program was founded and chaired by Ninian Smart, and he served as the chairman of the first editorial board. Four companies have published the journal over the years: Oriel Press (1971–72), Routledge & Kegan Paul (1973–80), Academic Press (1981–2000), Elsevier (2001–2010), and currently Routledge.
Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas is an American author and educator. She is associate professor of ethics and society at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Floyd-Thomas is a Womanist Christian social ethicist whose research interests include Womanist thought, Black Church Studies, liberation theology and ethics, critical race theory, critical pedagogy and postcolonial studies.
Hindu studies is the study of the traditions and practices of the Indian subcontinent, and considered as a subfield of Indology. Beginning with British philology in the colonial period, Hindu studies has been practiced largely by Westerners, due in part to the lack of a distinct department for religion in Indian academia. Since the 1990s this has caused some dissent from Hindus, raising questions in academia about the role of Hindu studies in creating postcolonial images of India.
The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, formerly the Journal of Bible and Religion, is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The JAAR was established in 1966, and like the AAR itself, emphasizes a more inclusive religious studies approach to religion rather than a narrower approach emphasizing only social science. It is generally considered the flagship journal for the field of religious studies. It covers current work in religious studies, including the full range of world religious traditions, methodological studies, and book reviews.
Sikhism has often been criticised by non-Sikhs regarding its texts, practices, and societal norms, but Sikhs and other scholars argue that these criticisms are flawed and are based on a biased and poor understanding of the texts, especially of the multiple languages used in the Sikh scriptures. They also argue that most Western scholars who attempted to interpret Eastern religious texts were missionaries and could not overcome the bias they carried with them, irrespective of whether they were translating the Quran, Vedas, Puranas or the Guru Granth Sahib. Sikhism's founder Guru Nanak rejected ritualistic worship and encouraged belief in one God: Waheguru. The veneration and bowing to the Guru Granth Sahib, has often been interpreted by Western scholars as akin to idolatry, as observed by the Hindu faith, which defeats the ideology of Guru Nanak. Other scholars dismiss Sikhism as, either consciously or spontaneously, a syncretism of the Hindu Bhakti and Islamic Sufi movements.
Ann Taves is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a former president of the American Academy of Religion (2010). From July 2005–December 2017, she held the Cordana Chair in Catholic Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Taves is especially known for her work Religious Experience Reconsidered (2009), stressing the importance of the findings and theoretical foundations of cognitive science for modern religionists.
The Religious Education Association is the world’s oldest and largest association of scholars and researchers in the field of religious education. It is a nonprofit member association, serving as a professional and learned society for scholars and researchers involved in the field of religious education. It has several hundred members, most of whom are from North America, with a scattering of members worldwide. REA members are university and college professors, independent scholars, secondary teachers, clergy, church educators, curriculum developers, judicatory executives, seminarians, graduate students, and interested lay-people. REA members come from multiple faith traditions, and no tradition, and study a very diverse array of religious traditions. The REA's leaders are drawn from a distinguished list of educators.
The definition of religion is a controversial and complicated subject in religious studies with scholars failing to agree on any one definition. Oxford Dictionaries defines religion as the belief in and/or worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods. Others, such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, have tried to correct a perceived Western bias in the definition and study of religion. Thinkers such as Daniel Dubuisson have doubted that the term religion has any meaning outside of Western cultures, while others, such as Ernst Feil doubt that it has any specific, universal meaning even there.
M. Gail Hamner is an American scholar, author, and a professor at Syracuse University. Hamner is a Professor of Religion, while also an affiliate in the Faculty of Women and Gender Studies and Film and Screen Studies. She is the author of American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy.
Naomi Ruth Goldenberg is a professor at the University of Ottawa. Her regular undergraduate courses include Gender and Religion, Women and Religions, Psychology of Religion and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Goldenberg is best known for her work in the areas of Feminist Theory and Religion, Gender and Religion, as well as the Psychoanalytic Theory and Political Theory of Religion. She is one of the early members of the Women's Caucus at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature and continues to work on and support scholarship in areas of religion and feminism, psychoanalytic theory, women's issues, gender. Currently, Goldenberg is writing about understanding religions as vestigial states. Her theory demystifies religion in order to continue the feminist critique she articulated in her earlier work.
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American academic, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is currently Professor in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. He also holds affiliated positions in Asian studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Storm's research focuses on Japanese religions, European intellectual history from 1600 to the present, and theory in religious studies. His more recent work has discussed disenchantment and philosophy of social science.
B'not Esh is a Jewish feminist collective based in the United States that was founded in 1981, the group sought to define a reconstructed feminist view of the Jewish tradition and defines itself as a Jewish Feminist Spirituality Collective. The group's basic position is that the Jewish spirituality of women is a political struggle.
