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Schilbrack presents the data and methods of disciplinary philosophy as contributing positively to the academic study of religion and gives his understanding of religion and of its study based on this contribution. I suggest we go further—the methods of disciplinary philosophy should provide a centralizing paradigm around which the various contributory disciplines of the study of religion might be better and more sustainably organized. Schilbrack adopts an approach that focuses on practice and embodiment rather than doctrine and belief. Again, I recommend going even further, still avoiding eliminative behaviorism but adopting a “philosophical ethology,” and seeking to refine the “superempirical realities” of Schilbrack’s definition of religion with reference to behaviors that produce and surround certain elements of material culture. This, I believe, would advance Schilbrack’s theoretical understanding of both religion and the philosophy of religion, taking it to an even greater level of generality and utility.

David Sloan Wilson argues that religion has evolved in human beings as a group adaptation. Part of Wilson’s argument relies on an analysis of a randomized sample of religions that he selects fromThe Encyclopedia of Religion. One significant methodological problem with this strategy is that Wilson offloads the work of defining the boundaries of each religious tradition to the encyclopedia he uses and allows the category ‘religion’ to do the conceptual heavy lifting in his argument. An examination of the way this category is used by Wilson will demonstrate that an insufficient attentiveness to the use of the word ‘religion’ makes Wilson’s argument circular and invalid. Wilson’s argument would be strengthened by rejecting any causal role for the category ‘religion’ and examining specific practices, rituals, and other acts of identification for an adaptive advantage irrespective of their association with the category ‘religion’.

This article claims to uncover the core problematics that have made the debate on defining and conceptualizing “religion” so difficult and argues that this makes it possible to move beyond radical deconstruction towardsreconstructing the concept for scholarly purposes. The argument has four main steps. Step 1 consists of establishing the nature of the entity “religion” as areified imaginative formation. Step 2 consists of identifyingthe basic dilemmawith which scholars have been struggling: the fact that, on the one hand, definitions and conceptualizations do not seem to work unless they stay sufficiently close to commonly held prototypes, while yet, on the other hand, those prototypes are grounded in monotheistic, more specifically Christian, even more specifically Protestant, theological biases about “true” religion. The first line of argument leads to crypto-theological definitions and conceptualizations, the second to a radical deconstruction of the very concept of “religion.” Step 3 resolves the dilemma by identifying anunexamined assumption, orproblematic“blind spot,” that the two lines of argument have in common: they both think that “religion” stands against “the secular.” However, the historical record shows that these two defined themselves not just against one another but, simultaneously, against athirddomain (referred to by such terms as “magic” or “superstition”). The structure is therefore not dualistic but triadic. Step 4 consists of replacing common assumptions about how “religion” emerged in the early modern period by an interpretation that explains not just its emergence but its logicalnecessity, at that time, for dealing with the crisis of comparison caused by colonialist expansion. “Religion” emerged as thetertium comparationis— or, in technically more precise language, the “pre-comparativetertium” — that enabled comparison between familiar (monotheist, Christian, Protestant) forms of belief and modes of worship and unfamiliar ones (associated with “pagan” superstition or magic). If we restore the term to its original function, this allows us to reconstruct “religion” as a scholarly concept that not just avoids butpreventsany slippage back to Christian theology or ethnocentric bias.

In this response to Knut Melvær’s discussion of “The Spiritual Illusion: Constructive Steps Toward Rectification and Redescription,” I clarify some of the theoretical and methodological background that informed the original article, redress places where Melvær appears to have misread or miscast my positions, and offer some suggestions as to what may really be most at stake in this “spiritual” dispute.

This short paper aims to respond to some of the observations and insights of the five reviewers of our book, The Sacred Is the Profane.

The purpose of this paper is to assess Durkheim’s approach to religion and the validity of the time-honoured principle of the social determination of mental representations. The thesis to be defended is that Durkheim was essentially right in understanding religious ritual as a symbolic language. But he was wrong both in his social deterministic theory of mental representations and in his definition of religion as an exclusively social phenomenon. As current evolutionary sciences have amply demonstrated, human mental architecture has been shaped by a long evolutionary process and cannot be easily reconfigured through cultural indoctrination. Two consequences can be derived from this. First, religious ideas can successfully colonise human minds thanks to their ability to parasitize on biologically evolved human cognitive structures. Second, due to their counterintuitive properties, this colonisation can only succeed if those ideas are culturally transmitted through a special language.

Proposals for a scientific study of religion have never been realised because, Daniel Dennett argues in Breaking the Spell, religion is surrounded by a spell that protects it from the critical inquiry characteristic of other academic fields of study. Dennett suggests two reasons for proposing such a study anew at this time. The first is political, namely, major policy decisions are currently being made on the basis of perceptions about religion; the second is theoretical, namely the establishment of an evolutionary psychology and of a cognitive science of religion which can provide the basis for such a study. Surprisingly, a number of those scholars in the field who are well-known for advocating precisely such a scientific study of religion have reacted negatively to Dennett's proposal. Do their very reactions confirm his thesis that an enchanting spell surrounding religion remains unbroken?

The Equality Framework Directive requires member states to prohibit discrimination in employment on grounds of (inter alia) religion or belief. Defining the scope of the phrase 'religion or belief' is complicated and has given rise to debate in the United Kingdom, particularly with reference to belief which is not self-evidently 'religious'. The UK Regulations which implemented the Directive contained a definition referring to 'religion,… religious belief, and… similar philosophical belief'. This definition was subsequently changed, adding a specific reference to lack of belief, and removing the word 'similar'. This adds complexity to an already difficult area. This article considers the effect of these changes, identifies difficulties they cause and suggests a way of avoiding them.

Responding to Neyrinck & Hutsebaut and to Van Uden, Pieper & Alma (both in this edition), the author addresses the topic of receptivity, a religious coping style that does not involve a personal view of God. Although Neyrinck & Hutsebaut focus on receptivity in relation to religious styles and Van Uden, Pieper & Alma deal with receptivity and coping, both research teams note that in the secularized context of the Netherlands religious coping concepts with all too personal God views fail to measure an important religious style. The author discusses some conceptual and methodological issues in this research and reflects on the theological ramifications. He critiques the interpretation of the Receptivity subscales and argues that the relation to the sacred is the distinguishing element. Finally, he offers some preliminary theological reflections on receptivity and the sacred in light of a dynamic understanding of transcendence and a relational definition of religion.

I had the honor of interviewing Clifford Geertz at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, USA, on October 18, 2000. The interview focused on Geertz's theoretical conceptions, the tradition on which he draws, the critique he has encountered, and on interpretive anthropology's future development. Of particular interest was the clarification of his much-debated method, his definition of symbol and his famous definition of religion as a cultural system. Geertz emphasizes his attempt to exercise an applied pragmatic phenomenological and hermeneutical method without any general theory (or philosophy) of meaning, phenomenology, or culture. He maintains that he only has a conceptual framework inspired by different scholars, which nevertheless has consistent focus and perspective, i.e., meaning and symbol. In relationship to this, Geertz defines his symbol within the Peircean semiotic tradition. Therefore, the term symbol is understood as a sign (an index for example), which becomes a symbol via a cultural interpretation. Furthermore, his definition of religion as a cultural system is, in his view, a nonessentialistic definition and therefore is not—as Talal Asad claims—ethnocentric. Although it is Geertz's opinion that interpretive anthropology has been influenced by postmodernism, he predicts that interpretive anthropology's future development will be in reasonable continuity with its past. In my closing comments I tentatively suggest that Geertz may have a theory of interpretation because of his definition of the symbol, his unavoidable assumptions, and his unique method, which has the capacity of grasping the cultural specific in a general way.

The recognition that ecological problems often extend beyond nation-state boundaries has prompted environmentalists, politicians, and academics to call for and generate problem-solving discourses meant to be global in perspective. Free-market rhetoric has emerged as one of the more prominent of the global discourses, even though the free market's commodification of human beings and nature causes many environmental problems. To discredit this economic rationality, many scholars have compared it to religion. These comparisons are intriguing, but they have lacked the critical analysis necessary to appear as anything more than name-calling. This paper clarifies the definition of religion and uses it to examine the origins of economic rationality's fundamental presupposition—that greedy self-interested competition generates more social benefits than altruistic cooperation—within eighteenth-century Natural Law vs. Ecclesiastical Law debates. Despite economic rationality's adoption of sophisticated empirical methods and mathematical rigor over the past two centuries, it is a religion because it retains vestiges of the Protestant Christian and Stoic beliefs of how social life is governed by supernatural intervention when it uncritically promotes policies based on that presupposition. Recognizing economic rationality is a religion may benefit those who are striving to develop systems of governance based on democratic principles by leading to a greater understanding of economic rationality's normative attraction.

Sociologists of religion have long debated the definition of religion. In this article, I survey the debate and find a partially hidden consensus. This debate, in conjunction with recent criticisms of the concept "religion" in religious studies, and by drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion oflanguage games, provides helpful pointers for developing a non-essentialist conception of religion. I argue that "religion" (as a phenomenon and as a concept) is a historical and social construction, but that this does not require us to dispense with the concept altogether.

This chapter analyzes the complexities and dialectics of the concepts of religion and secularism in Israel and in the Hebrew language, as well as the manifestations of these complexities in Israel's socio-political dynamics. It examines some of the theological and practical aspects of religion and secularism in Israel, as well as the tensions and contradictions between religion and secularism. The first part of the chapter analyzes the apparatus of Jewish-Israeli religion and secularism. This analysis focuses on parts of the linguistic and theological background of Israel's definition of religion, and on secularization processes and their impact on the formation of Israel's political identity. The second part of the chapter addresses few manifestations of the religious and secular formations in various spheres of Israeli socio-political life. The chapter concludes by pointing to current changes in the formation of the religious and the secular in Israel, changes that may be labeled "post-secularism". Keywords:Hebrew language; Israel; Jewish religion; post-secularism; religion; secularism; socio-political dynamics

The meaning and application of the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution are currently a matter of intense and increasingly intractable public debate. The academic study of religion can make a positive contribution to this debate by inviting its participants into a conversation about human religion that is already struggling with problems of definition and of language and that wishes to affirm the existence and importance of human religion without establishing a particular definition of religion, without unconsciously theologizing. A close examination of the legal debate can, in turn, serve the purposes of scholars of religion. The politically charged context of First Amendment jurisprudence provides an interesting laboratory in which to test theories of religion.

In this book, Saler focuses his attention on the problems attending the definition of religion in various academic discourses. In the introduction, he begins his exploration of the conceptual options regarding religion by contrasting essentialist and nominalist approaches to the task of definition which lead, respectively, to the use of digital and analogue scales in representing religions. In chapters 1 and 2, he pays particular attention to the role of the notion of the transcendent. He reviews the nature and value of various types of monothetic definitions. In the final three chapters, Saler attempts to provide an alternative way of putting the notion of religion to use

Fundamentally, speaking of religion as a non-instrumental kind of consciousness fails to say what religion is. The failure is not that of lacking a definition of religion but that of not having characterizations of it for purposes of establishing how it comes to be liked to health. The very research question of the health consequences in individuals of a social phenomenon such as religion falls within what Georges Gurvitch long ago termed microsociologie - or in English, microsociology. At a first impression, one can distinguish healthy behavior that a religion may encourage from states of mind that have health effects but are themselves effects of religiosity. Thus religions that discourage the abuse of alcohol, the consumption of caffeine, and smoking, or that encourage fasting can be said to have beneficial health effects, but in addition to that there is a whole universe of health outcomes that are related to psychological stress. Keywords: Georges Gurvitch; health; microsociology; psychological stress; religion; social phenomenon

Herbert Marcuse once observed that religion contains a "basic ambivalence," that is, an ambivalence that persists as a result of the unresolved tension between "the image of domination and the image of liberation" at the heart of religious consciousness.' For Marcuse, religion denies the hope for peace, justice and happiness that it once aroused in human beings by teaching them "to appreciate the facts in a world of alienation."2 The link between religion and the desire for a just world identified by Marcuse derives from Marx's definition of religion as "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world ... the spirit of spiritless conditions."3 For Marx, religion detaches the legitimate desire for justice on earth from concrete historical struggles, with the result that human beings are directed to find their happiness m illusions, rather than in the actual conditions of their life experience. That is why for Marx the critique of religion is central to "the premise of all criticism": with the abolition of religion and its compensating illusions, the "task of history" as the establishment of "the truth of this world1'4 becomes possible. The idea that the abolition of religion is requisite to the struggle for social transformation is predicated on the recognition that, in the words of Max Horkheimer, "[dissatisfaction with earthly destiny is the strongest motive for acceptance of a transcendental being." Following Marx, both Horkheimer

Historically, human rights can be explained within a very precise framework underpinned by some basic ideas regarding the role of the state and the position of the individual. Two factors contributed to the relative decline of human rights in the Western value scale. First, the events of 11 September 2001 did not pass without lasting consequences. Second, lasting problems concerning the elaboration of a solid, multicultural society in Western Europe had its consequences for the relationships between religion and state. Security concerns and problems connected with the elaboration of multiculturalism means that restrictions to human rights have become a real issue. These restrictions can be the traditional ones, including a narrow definition of religion or an extension of limitations to religious freedom. Yet, another method can be used as well; namely, contractual religious freedom. This technique offers possibilities for monitoring religious activities in an offensive rather than a defensive way.Keywords: contractual religious freedom; human rights; multiculturalism; Western Europe

The general subject of the - what we would propose to call - political science of religion is the relationship between politics and religion as it is and as it should be. Researching the connection between politics and religion would be unnecessary if all human beings were irreligious or all conflicts in this world were eliminated, and humankind remained in the status of the communio sancta . For representatives of the political scientists' guild the most uncomfortable and difficult question is that of understanding religion, i.e. the concept or definition of religion. The experience of the religious community as a society can be definitive for the model of society as such or the political society of politically active citizens. The supreme basic norms and values of the constitution function as the ultimate measure of judgement of the decisions of the executive powers (government and administration), legislation and jurisdiction. Keywords: political science; political society; religion; religious community

This article surveys three traditions in defining religion. It proposes an operational definition in the Tylorian tradition expanded with the definer proposed by the anthropologist Jan van Baal, to wit, the non-verifiability/non-falsifiability of the addressable "meta-empirical reality." Dealing with religion as a social institution, I offer tools for the analysis of religion as postulated communicative events within believed networks of relationships between believers and their non-verifiable/non falsifiable beings or (addressable) reality.

This chapter draws a Canadian example as a case study, through which the notion of the ‘global’ is examined. It explores the notion of women’s agency and its links to global context through a Supreme Court of Canada decision. State establishment of rules regarding religious groups and the degree to which religious freedom is supported are integrally bound with ideas about agency, harm, nation preservation and the dangerous other. The chapter uses the example of polygamy as an entry point into the issue of the state, religion, and globalization to make the argument that the local is implicated in the global, and vice versa. The very definition of religion is affected by global flows and that the ways in which we define or think about what constitutes religion is implicated in the ways that states respond to groups and individuals who engage in particular practices as part of their faith. Keywords: Canada; globalization; religious freedom; Supreme Court

This chapter provides an overview of the extensive literature on globalization and rehearses the arguments advanced in the globalization theories proffered. The globalization debate could thus be considered a proxy for theoretical debate in social science and in some instances it can be observed that the term ‘globalization’ is used with different ideological overtones. One of the problems of having a definition of globalization is similar to having a definition of religion or of New Religious Movements (NRMs): however many aspects a definition may capture, sufficient exceptions are found to render the definition invalid or only partially applicable and thus lay such definitions open to challenge. Global communication is used in the wider sense of the term, including electronic communication, physical transport, all types of media and media discourse about NRMs, virtual and real networks. Keywords: electronic communication; globalization; New Religious Movements (NRMs); social science

In approaching the topic of women in African traditional religions, several methodological issues immediately arise: how to define religion, how to sample religious systems, and how to cope with fragmentary information. Each of these issues demands a rather arbitrary decision which implies that any analysis based upon such decisions must be considered suggestive rather than conclusive. If one defines religion as beliefs and practices associated with spiritual beings, one is likely to neglect important ritual domains dealing with status transformations that involve great and lengthy ceremony but rarely notions of transcendental beings. Moreover, such ritual situations of status transformation frequently involve women in important ritual responsibilities. Consequently, I begin with a Tylorian definition of religion as concern with spiritual beings in discussing religious norms and ideals for women, and move to a more extensive consideration of ritual in my analysis of religious organization and practice. In considering traditional sub-Saharan African religious systems for study, one is confronted not only by the multiplicity of potential units of study but by the diversity in societal complexity ranging from the Southwestern San bands to the Western Sudanic empires. In selecting societies for study, I decided to use Robert M. Marsh's index of social differentiation. 2 Within sub-Saharan Africa, Marsh classi1 This paper was originally prepared for the Wellesley Conference on Women and Development, held at Wellesley College in June 1976. I am grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for support and to Carol Troyer-Shank for assistance while writing the paper. 2 Robert M. Marsh, Comparative sociology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1967, 329-365. Marsh's index of social differentiation in preindustrial societies is based on George P. Murdock's classification of social stratification and population size of the political unit. In the "World Ethnographic Sample" (American Anthropologist 59, 1957, 664-687), "Murdock coded each society according to five categories for each variable." Marsh assigns numerical scores to each of Murdock's categories ranging from o to 4, or from least to most differentiated. Marsh's "Index of Differentiation score for any given society in Murdock's sample is the sum of its score for population size of the political unit and its score for social stratification."

For the science of religion, it is indispensable to have a definition of religion as the starting point of its study. The term science of religion may still be somewhat unfamiliar and sound strange. It only means an approach to the study of religion, using the empirical and scientific method. Basically, the science of religion is not different from any of the disciplines in the fields of natural science and behavioral science. It fulfils the basic requirements of scientific investigation. The basic requirements for science are two, the method of study, and the object of study. As to the former, the science of religion follows the general nature of scientific method, which is to be objective, value neutral and positivistic-positivistic in the sense that all the inquiries must be based upon observable phenomena. The object of study must be open and available for observation by anybody who wants to study it. Now, to turn to the problem of the object of study, religious phenomena, which are the object of study of the science of religion, involve man's value elements. On this point, it is different from natural phenomena. This makes the point of departure for behavioral science from natural science.

Definitions of religion cover a distressingly wide range in consequence of the essentially non-convergent outcome of a struggle to reach agreement about this word. At one extreme, Communism, the very antithesis to religion in most people's minds, has been termed a religion on account of its appearance as a system of intense emotional dedication to doctrinal principles by those within its fold. Recently I heard Felix Greene, the cousin of Christopher Isherwood and of Graham Greene, describe this dedication within Communism; Greene had just returned from five full months in Red China where he even was granted a personal interview with Chou en Lai. The near half a billion Chinese people live in a political and economic system which is controlled by a hard core of just several million Communist Party Members. He continually ran into Chinese youth who described to him their real despair over being refused membership in the Party because of failure to measure up to the fantastically high standards of conduct and commitment required of a Party member.. He likened the Party to a reigious order in every sense of the word in which some of the choice youth of China have evidently "found themselves" through utter and absolute commitment to the Party. They exhibit a selflessness that is frightening in its future implications and renders a stark warning to the apathy and easy-going faiths of so many of us in America in general and in Christianity in particular. Without doubt, the definition of religion is not violated when it is stretched to include Communism, at any rate, when it is stretched to include that element of Communism related to commitment.