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Robert S. Ellwood | |
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| Born | 17 July 1933 |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Robert Scott Ellwood Jr. |
| Alma mater | University of Colorado University of Chicago |
| Occupation(s) | University professor and author on world religions |
| Spouse | Gracia Fay Bouwman |
| Children | 2 |
Robert S. Ellwood (born 1933) is an American academic, author and expert on world religions.
He was educated at the University of Colorado, Berkeley Divinity School and was awarded a PhD in History of Religions from the University of Chicago in 1967. He was Professor of World Religions at the University of Southern California from 1967 until 1997 and is now professor emeritus. [1] [2]
Robert Scott Ellwood Jr., was born July 17, 1933, in Normal, Illinois, the son of Robert Sr. and Knola Ellwood. Robert Sr. was a teacher in the high school affiliated with Illinois State Normal University, and a pioneer in the development of sociology as a high school subject. In 1945 the family moved to Chadron, Nebraska, where Robert Sr. became chair of the Education Department at the Nebraska State Teachers College located there.
Robert Jr. graduated from Chadron Preparatory School in 1951, and from the University of Colorado in 1954. He then attended Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, CT, an Episcopal seminary now affiliated with Yale Divinity School. He graduated and was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 1957. He pastored Christ Church, Central City, NE 1957-1960.
In 1961-62 Ellwood served as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy. While stationed in Okinawa and Japan he became interested in Japanese religion, and world religions generally. Reading the works of Mircea Eliade led to an interest in Eliade's structuralist and phenomenological approach to religion as a way of understanding similarities and differences in religions. As a consequence, in 1963 he entered the University of Chicago Divinity School's history of religion program led by Eliade, receiving the Ph.D. in 1967 after a final year of study in Japan. In 1967 Ellwood became a professor of religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, serving there until retirement in 1997.
In 1988 he received a Fulbright Research Grant to study new religious movements in New Zealand, and spent six months there working in the national library in Wellington. He also taught briefly in the Universities of Cape Town and Natal in South Africa, and after retirement at Auburn University in Alabama. He was named Distinguished Emeritus Professor by U.S.C. in 2002, and Alumnus of the Year by the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2009.
As professor of religion at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Ellwood mainly taught courses on Eastern religions and the history of religion. His first book, The Feast of Kingship, about the Daijōsai or Japanese imperial accession ceremony, was based on his Ph.D. dissertation. Subsequently, given the tremendous spiritual ferment in California in the late 1960s, he became interested in new religious and spiritual movements in America, doing an informal survey of them in Los Angeles and publishing Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America.
He also wrote on the history of American religion in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as textbooks on world religions, religious studies, and Japanese religion. Cycles of Faith presented a theory of the comparative development of world religions. The Politics of Myth was a discussion of the controversial political histories of C.G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. A late series of three books offered a comparative view of mythologies.
Ellwood's approach to comparative religion has been fundamentally structuralist, phenomenological, and empathetic. He has sought through religion's material expression in art, architecture, rite, and practices to understand empathetically its inner meaning for adherents, always allowing for an immense range of individual responses, but recognizing also that religious forms have as it were a language of their own. In Cycles of Faith he further considers that the history of individual religions may have an internal dynamic of their own, as well as responding to outer history.
In 1965 Ellwood married Gracia Fay Bouwman, also a student in the University of Chicago Divinity School and subsequently an instructor in Evansville College, Indiana. They had two children, Richard Scott Lancelot (b. 1974) and Fay Elanor (b. 1977).
In 1976 he joined the Theosophical Society in America, serving as vice president of that organization 2002-05. He has also served as a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church, Province of the United States of America, a small denomination informally affiliated with Theosophy. He offered a few books of popular spirituality through the Theosophical publishing house, Quest Books. After retirement he and Gracia Fay moved to Krotona, a Theosophical community in Ojai, CA.
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Christian mythology is the body of myths associated with Christianity. The term encompasses a broad variety of legends and narratives, especially those considered sacred narratives. Mythological themes and elements occur throughout Christian literature, including recurring myths such as ascending a mountain, the axis mundi, myths of combat, descent into the Underworld, accounts of a dying-and-rising god, a flood myth, stories about the founding of a tribe or city, and myths about great heroes of the past, paradises, and self-sacrifice.
Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.
Religion and mythology differ in scope but have overlapping aspects. Both are systems of concepts that are of high importance to a certain community, making statements concerning the supernatural or sacred. Generally, mythology is considered one component or aspect of religion. Religion is the broader term: besides mythological aspects, it includes aspects of ritual, morality, theology, and mystical experience. A given mythology is almost always associated with a certain religion such as Greek mythology with Ancient Greek religion. Disconnected from its religious system, a myth may lose its immediate relevance to the community and evolve—away from sacred importance—into a legend or folktale.
A dying-and-rising god, life–death–rebirth deity, or resurrection deity is a religious motif in which a god or goddess dies and is resurrected. Examples of gods who die and later return to life are most often cited from the religions of the ancient Near East. The traditions influenced by them include the Greco-Roman mythology. The concept of a dying-and-rising god was first proposed in comparative mythology by James Frazer's seminal The Golden Bough (1890). Frazer associated the motif with fertility rites surrounding the yearly cycle of vegetation. Frazer cited the examples of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Zagreus, Dionysus, and Jesus.
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. One of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and interpreter of religious experience, he established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but actually participate in them.
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.
Ioan Petru Culianu or Couliano was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer. He served as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago from 1988 to his death, and had previously taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen.
Comparative mythology is the comparison of myths from different cultures in an attempt to identify shared themes and characteristics. Comparative mythology has served a variety of academic purposes. For example, scholars have used the relationships between different myths to trace the development of religions and cultures, to propose common origins for myths from different cultures, and to support various psychoanalytical theories.
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.
Neo-Theosophy is a term, originally derogatory, used by the followers of Helena Blavatsky to denominate the system of Theosophical ideas expounded by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater following the death of Madame Blavatsky in 1891. This material differed in major respects from Blavatsky's original presentation, but it is accepted as genuinely Theosophical by many Theosophists around the world.
Bruce Lincoln is Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he also holds positions in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, Committee on the History of Culture, and in the departments of Anthropology and Classics. Before his arrival at the University of Chicago, Lincoln taught at the University of Minnesota (1976–1994), where he co-founded the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society.
Myth and ritual are two central components of religious practice. Although myth and ritual are commonly united as parts of religion, the exact relationship between them has been a matter of controversy among scholars. One of the approaches to this problem is "the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory," held notably by the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, which holds that "myth does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual." This theory is still disputed; many scholars now believe that myth and ritual share common paradigms, but not that one developed from the other.
Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is very different from the vernacular usage of the term "myth" that refers to a belief that is not true. Instead, the veracity of a myth is not a defining criterion.
Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa was an eminent Japanese American scholar in religious studies. He was professor emeritus and dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is considered one of the founders of the field of the history of religions. He is particularly known for his outstanding contributions to the study of religious traditions in Asia and intercultural understanding of the East and the West.
Davíd Lee Carrasco is an American academic historian of religion, anthropologist, and Mesoamericanist scholar. As of 2001, he holds the inaugural appointment as Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of Latin America Studies at the Harvard Divinity School, in a joint appointment with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. Carrasco previously taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder and Princeton University and is known for his research and publications on Mesoamerican religion and history, his public speaking as well as wider contributions within Latin American studies and Latino/a studies. He has made statements about Latino contributions to US democracy in public dialogues with Cornel West, Toni Morrison, and Samuel P. Huntington. His work is known primarily for his writings on the ways human societies orient themselves with sacred places.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy is a historical study of the different forms of shamanism around the world written by the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade. It was first published in France by Librarie Payot under the French title of Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l'extase in 1951. The book was subsequently translated into English by Willard R. Trask and published by Princeton University Press in 1964.
Christianity and Theosophy, for more than a hundred years, have had a "complex and sometimes troubled" relationship. The Christian faith was the native religion of the great majority of Western Theosophists, but many came to Theosophy through a process of opposition to Christianity. According to professor Robert S. Ellwood, "the whole matter has been a divisive issue within Theosophy."
Hinduism is regarded by modern Theosophy as one of the main sources of "esoteric wisdom" of the East. The Theosophical Society was created in a hope that Asian philosophical-religious ideas "could be integrated into a grand religious synthesis." Prof. Antoine Faivre wrote that "by its content and its inspiration" the Theosophical Society is greatly dependent on Eastern traditions, "especially Hindu; in this, it well reflects the cultural climate in which it was born." A Russian Indologist Alexander Senkevich noted that the concept of Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy was based on Hinduism. According to Encyclopedia of Hinduism, "Theosophy is basically a Western esoteric teaching, but it resonated with Hinduism at a variety of points."
Robert C. Fuller is the Caterpillar Professor of Religious Studies at Bradley University. Specializing in religion and psychology, and contemporary religion in America, Fuller is the author of 13 books, including Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (1982); Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (2001); and The Body of Faith: A Biological History of Religion in America (2013).
Douglas Allen is an American philosopher, academic, author and an activist. He is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and a Founder of Maine Peace Action Committee at the University of Maine.
