Intro to university talk

1. WHAT IS
RELIGION?

2. THE ANSWERS I EXPECTED…
INTENSIONAL?
• Beliefs
In a God or gods
In the supernatural or spiritual
In a Holy text
In a creed or creeds
• Practices
Communal (e.g. rituals, worship)
Individual (e.g. prayer,
meditation)
• Ethics
• Superstitions/ prejudices
OSTENSIVE
• Judaism
• Christianity
• Islam
• Bahá'í
• Jainism
• Hinduism
• Buddhism
• Sikhism
Intensional definitions
provide necessary and
sufficient conditions for
something to be a member
of a set – in this case, for
something to be ‘religion’.
Could any of these be an
‘essence’ of religion?
Something without which
religion would not be what it
is?

3. THE QUEST FOR
AN ESSENCE
And the emergence of a discipline

4. WHY DOES DEFINING RELIGION
MATTER?
1.What is within the scope of our study?
2.What are is the best method of
interpreting explaining it?
3.What (if anything) unifies religious
phenomena?

5. FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER (1768
–1834)
‘religion is neither a knowing nor a doing, but a
modification of feeling, or of immediate self-
consciousness’
‘the consciousness of being absolutely dependent’
the longing to ‘be absorbed in the greater’, to pass
‘beyond the self’.

6. ESSENCE AND METHODOLOGY IN THE
STUDY OF RELIGION
 ‘sick men’s dreams’ (David Hume)
 ‘the opium of the people’ (Karl Marx)
 ‘belief in spiritual beings’ (E. B. Tylor)
 ‘propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are
believed to direct or control the course of nature and human life’ (James
Frazer)
 ‘illusion’, ‘wish-fulfilment’ (Sigmund Freud)
 ‘something eminently social’; ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices
relative to sacred things’ (Emile Durkheim)
 ‘what the individual does with his own solitariness’ (Alfred North
Could an insider
agree with any of
these definitions?

7. STUDYING RELIGION AT UH: YEAR 1
SEMESTER A:
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD
RELIGIONS
• Judaism
• Christianity
• Islam
• Buddhism
SEMESTER B:
RELIGION AND THE
CONTEMPORARY WORLD
• Methodology in the study of religion
– Sociology
– Psychology
– Phenomenology
– Theology
• Contemporary debates about religion
and society
– Religion and feminism
– Religion and homosexuality
– Religion and the environment
– Religion and the media

8. QUESTIONS?

9. RECOMMENDED READING
Capps, Walter E., Religious Studies: The
Making of a Discipline. Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1995.
Chryssides, George D. and Ron Geaves,
The Study of Religion: An Introduction
to Key Ideas and Methods. London:
Bloomsbury, 2013.

10. WHO WAS THAT?
DR BRENDAN LARVOR
b.p.Larvor@herts.ac.uk
Reader in Philosophy