Understanding Theories of Religion

Ivan Strenski is Holstein Family and Community Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, USA. He served as North American editor-in-chief of the international journal Religion from 1979 to 2004, and is the author of numerous books, including Why Politics Can't Be Freed from Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Émile Durkheim (ed. 2009), The New Durkheim: Essays on Philosophy, Religious Identity and the Politics of Knowledge (2006), Thinking about Religion: A Reader (ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (2003), and Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (2002).

• Preface to the Second Edition: Understanding, Instead of Just Thinking vii1 Introduction: Understanding Theories of Religion is Better than Just Being Critical 1Part I The Prehistory of the Study of Religion: Responses to an Expanding World 72 Jean Bodin and Herbert of Cherbury: True Religion, Essential Religion, and Natural Religion 93 Understanding Religion Also Began with Trying to Understand the Bible 19Part II Classic Nineteenth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion: The Quest for the Origins of Religion in History 314 Max Müller, the Comparative Study of Religion, and the Search for Other Bibles in India 335 The Shock of the “Savage”: Edward Burnett Tylor, Evolution, and Spirits 456 The Religion of the Bible Evolves: William Robertson Smith 557 Setting the Eternal Templates of Salvation: James Frazer 65Part III Classic Twentieth-Century Theorists of the Study of Religion: Defending the Inner Sanctum of Religious Experience or Storming It 758 Understanding How to Understand Religion: “Phenomenology of Religion” 779 How Religious Experience Created Capitalism: Max Weber 9310 Tales from the Underground: Freud and the Psychoanalytic Origins of Religion 10611 Bronislaw Malinowski and the “Sublime Folly” of Religion 11812 Seeing God with the Social Eye: Durkheim’s Religious Sociology 12913 Mircea Eliade: Turning Back the “Worm of Doubt” 142Part IV Liberation and Post-Modernism: Race, Gender, Post-Colonialism, the Discourse on Power 15514 From Modernism to Post-Modernism: Mostly Michel Foucault 15715 Theorizing Religion with Race in Mind: Prophecy or Curiosity? 17116 Sex/Gender and Women: Feminists Theorizing Religion 18917 Another “Otherness”: Post-Colonial Theories of Religion 21618 Conclusion: Being “Smart” about Bringing “Religion” Back In 241Index 254