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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $61.95

Format:
Paperback
272 pp.
155 mm x 240 mm

ISBN-13:
9780195167696

Publication date:
October 2003

Imprint: OUP US


The Ideology of Religious Studies

Timothy Fitzgerald

In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.

Reviews

  • "A welcome critique of the dubious products marketed by an industry whose shares, Fitzgerald claims, are jointly owned by theologians and practitioners of religious studies." Religious Studies

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Timothy Fitzgerald is at University of Stirling.

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