Core Of Religion Research Articles

What Really Matters

What Really Matters Meredith B. McGuire (bio) In his 1985 study of popular religious expression in early 20th century Italian Harlem, Robert Orsi observed that Italian Americans made a distinction between "religion" and "church," with religion referring to "what really matters" in their lives.1 I welcome this new book, because Orsi compellingly demonstrates why all scholars of religion ought to examine carefully our implicit assumptions about what is "religion" and to refocus on "what really matters" in the practice and experience of the people whose religions we purport to understand. I hope that sociologists of religion, in particular, will consider Robert Orsi's critical challenge, because our field has been blind to "what really matters" in people's religious lives. Especially in the United States, sociology has too narrowly focused on religious organizations and groups (researching, for example, membership and participation rates), assuming that church affiliation somehow represents the "religion" of persons involved in that organization. When sociology has considered the religions of individuals, our discipline has typically focused on individual participation in those religious organizations and their activities, as well as measures of individual affirmation or non-affirmation beliefs of church-prescribed beliefs and values. Orsi amply demonstrates the seriousness of the mistakes we make when we over-emphasize "belief" as the core of religion. If we want to study "what really matters" in people's religious lives, scholars of religion need a whole different understanding of what we call "religion." Robert Orsi applies a critical historical perspective to the social construction of knowledge and thought produced by our scholarly disciplines studying religion. He argues that both our methodologies and our theories are deeply influenced by modernist assumptions, inherited from our 18th and 19th century scholarly progenitors, such that researchers cannot recognize many people's religious expressions as "religion." This modernist bias results, not only in the failure to comprehend people's religions, but also in the uncritical use of moralizing dichotomous conceptual distinctions, embedded in our very definitions of religion and religiosity. Orsi asserts, "The mother of all religious dichotomies—us/them—has regularly been constituted as a moral distinction—good/bad religion" (183). When scholars researching religion uncritically [End Page 107] accept such dichotomies and the definitional boundaries they substantiate, not only do we fail to comprehend people's religions, but also we contribute to the prejudices and antagonisms used to justify both subtle and overt violence toward the religious Other. Historians can offer a valuable corrective perspective, reminding scholars who study religion that conceptual categories (e.g., sacred vs. profane, religion vs. magic) are themselves the result of long periods of contestation, the results of which have been profoundly shaped by power and domination. Anthropologists, likewise, expose the narrow, Western cultural presuppositions embedded in our scholarly concepts.2 In my opinion, it is difficult to distinguish the modernist bias (amply unmasked by Orsi) in our scholarly concepts from the protestant bias, especially in the conceptual framework of the sociology of religion. By "protestant" I mean constellation of ideas that gained currency in the Reformation era, influencing Catholic, as well as Protestant, notions of religious belonging and the boundaries delineating acceptable/unacceptable belief and practice. A good example is the notion that people as individuals (rather than as families or tribes) make voluntary choices of their religious "belief-system" (understood as a coherent creedal package, promulgated by a specific religious organization). Another example is the concept of religious commitment as bonds with an identifiable religious group whose members are religiously qualified individuals, as judged by "right" moral standards and "correct" beliefs. Historically "Protestant," such ideas are now embedded in many scholars' conceptual frameworks.3 We need to expose such biases in our conceptual tools and find ways to move beyond the narrow image of religion to which they have constricted us. These ideas are, themselves, social products of a long period of conflict and contestation—between and among Catholics and Protestants alike—that some historians call the "long Reformation," roughly 1300 to 1700 CE. Historian Edward Muir has argued that this "long Reformation" resulted in an enormous shift in perspective in Western Christianity: previously, the boundaries of encouraged (as well as minimally acceptable...

Ithamar Gruenwald. Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel. The Brill Reference Library of Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 2003. xii, 278 pp.

Ithamar Gruenwald's recent book brings together various essays the author has published over the last few years, each seeking to rethink aspects of ritual theory, especially as applied to the rituals of ancient Israel. After introducing his themes and approach in the first chapter, Gruenwald addresses (in Chapter 2) what he calls the “economic ethos” of ancient Israel, speculating that “in the history of ancient Israel, the transition from ethos to religion is connected to the passage from nomadic lifestyle to an urban one” (p. 67). The third chapter reexamines the relationship between myth and ritual. The last three chapters are devoted to ritual theory as it pertains, respectively, to rabbinic halakhah (Chapter 4), biblical sacrifice (Chapter 5), and the “Lord's Supper,” as related primarily in the writings of Paul. Throughout the book, Gruenwald emerges as an emphatic spokesperson for the non-symbolic nature of rituals in general, and of biblical sacrifice in particular. While this book is wide-ranging in scope, a significant portion of chapters 2 and 6 are devoted to the stated theme of chapter 5: biblical sacrifice. Because Gruenwald himself believes that “sacrifices constitute the core of religion” (p. 189), perhaps the best way to review his complicated book briefly is to examine his approach to this particular ritual structure.

Comment on Segal's "Have the Social Sciences Been Converted?"

Robert Segal argues that social science can appropriately religion only if the social scientists are themselves believers, and he thinks that contemporary historians of religion embrace current social scientific research because they assume that social scientists agree with the perspectives of those they study. He suggests that since such writers as Peter Berger and Robert Bellah explain religion nonreligiously they are ignoring a nonempirical reality which is the core of religion. Segal sees these efforts as inappropriate because they are reductionistic, and to him religion cannot be reduced to the level of social science.

Rudolf Otto: The Context of His Thought

In Otto's mature philosophy of religion, as presented in Das Heilige, religions are viewed as consisting of both rational and non-rational elements. While religions have to do with theoretical and moral ideas, they are nonetheless not finally dependent on these. Rather, these rational components are ultimately referable to an object or ‘subject’ that can only be apprehended in a non-rational ‘unique original feeling-response’ that is the innermost core of all religions. The analysis of this non-rational numinous core of religion, and of its connection to religion's rational factors, is the overall aim of Das Heilige, indeed of Otto's work as a whole.

Is Providence Credible Today?

Much of the recent debate about religion has concerned itself either with the bare existence of God or with the fact of Jesus Christ, and has not directly brought into the discussion the question of providence and the allied topic of prayer. It is as if the whole area were so problematic that thought has tended to polarise around these two points, God in heaven and Jesus of Nazareth in history, and as a result has virtually by-passed this subject, although one would have thought that it lay very close to the living core of religion. Yet this neglect is not without precedent in the past. It is worth recalling that Immanuel Kant, although he was profoundly critical of the traditional ways in which the existence of God had been proved and the foundation of religion laid, none the less believed himself that there is a legitimate foundation for religious belief in man's consciousness of value, in his awareness of what Kant called the categorical imperative; and this more practical, this less severely theoretical approach to the reality of religion, may well be regarded as an important pointer towards the truth. None the less the fact remains that Kant himself held that ‘the purpose of prayer can only be to induce in us a moral disposition. … To wish to converse with God is absurd: we cannot talk to one we cannot intuit; and as we cannot intuit God, but can only believe in him, we cannot converse with him.’