Religious Studies: The Shaping of a Field and a Guide to Reference Resources

Abstract

As with most modern academic disciplines, religious studies emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a discrete area of inquiry. Prior to that time, most scholarly literature on religion had an apologetic purpose; that is, it was designed to promote the beliefs and practices of a particular religion or reli gious style. Many writers took as their task advancing religious faith and assumed that readers were members of religious groups espousing their own creeds or dogmas. Few were interested in ! examining the phenomenon of reli gion itself or the ways in which religion and culture were intertwined in virtually every human society. In Euro-American society, much writ ing on religion took for granted the superiority of the Christian or per haps the Western biblical tradition, and when other religious traditions came under scrutiny and were con trasted with Christianity especially, they were generally seen as inferior and somehow less worthy. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, some scholars began to realize that religious expression and experience cut across cultural lines, that in their own context all religions had internal integrity, and that religion manifested itself in simi lar patterns wherever it occurred. Most scholars agreed that human beings in all places and all times sought to endow their experience with meaning and that the pro cess of doing so was the basic religious enterprise. Such realization gave birth to the modern academic study of religion or the discipline of religious studies. This essay will first look at religion or religious studies as an academic discipline by identifying selected key figures whose theories and interpretations continue to shape the field of religious studies. Then it will briefly annotate selected reference works that provide basic information about