The present collection examines the many different ways in which religions appeal to the authority of science. The result is a wide-ranging and uniquely compelling study of how religions adapt their message to the challenges of the contemporary world.

Assesses Mircea Eliade's contribution to the contemporary understanding of religion and the academic study of religion.

[Originally publ. Mouton 1973 (Religion and Reason, 3)]

This volume explores the ways in which religion became the object of scientific research in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most obvious is the development of an increasingly autonomous science of religion (with founding fathers like Max Müller and C.P. Tiele). However, within anthropology (Tylor, Frazer), sociology (Durkheim, Max Weber), and psychology (William James), religion also came to be seen as a separate entity to be studied comparatively. To capture this wide field this book focuses on the emergence of the discourse on religion in a broad academic context, among different disciplines. The emphasis is on general socio-historical developments, rather than on individual biographies. Part I deals with the institutionalization of science of religion in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. Part II focuses on boundary disputes between the emerging "sciences of religion". Part III examines new conceptualizations of religion underlying the new endeavour ("ritual", "magic", "survival").

Since its founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

Randall Styers seeks to account for the vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that it can best be explained in light of the European and Euro-American drive to establish and secure their own identity as normative.

This book examines the rise and demise of the psychology of religion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the United States. It considers the formation of the psychology of religion as an international movement, an enterprise whose goal was to refashion the science of religion at the turn of the century. Drawing on published sources and archival accounts, the chapters engage with the work of notable figures including William James, C.G. Jung, and Pierre Janet, placing it alongside lesser-known practitioners such as Ernest Murisier, James Henry Leuba, James Pratt, and George Albert Coe. In addition to probing the intellectual background and professional context for the emergence of this sub-discipline, the book examines the development of key concepts and methodologies among psychologists of religion and offers arguments both for the rise of the discipline as well as for its demise in the early decades of the 20th century.

A penetrating critique of the dominant approach to the study of religion, The Politics of Spirit explores the historical and philosophical scaffolding of the phenomenology of religion. Although this approach purports to give a value-free, neutral description of religious data, it actually imposes a set of metaphysical and evaluative concepts on that data. A very harmful ethnocentrism has resulted, which plagues the academic study of religion to this day. Analysis of the history, core texts, and discursive structure of phenomenology of religion reveals how this ethnocentrism is embedded within its assumptions. Of particular interest is the revelation of the extent to which Hegel's ideas—over those of Husserl—contributed to the tenets that became standard in the study of religion. Tim Murphy argues that the poststructuralist concept of genealogy, as derived from Nietzsche, can both describe religion better than the phenomenological approach and avoid the political pitfalls of ethnocentrism by replacing its core categories with the categories of difference, contingency, and otherness. Ultimately, Murphy argues that postmodern genealogy should replace phenomenology as the paradigm for understanding both religion and the study of religion.