7 Ways of Looking at Religion
The Major Narratives
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An ambitious scholar’s lucid analysis of religion’s shifting place in the modern world.
Western intellectuals have long theorized that religion would undergo a process of marginalization and decline as the forces of modernity advanced. Yet recent events have disrupted this seductively straightforward story. As a result, while religion has somehow evolved from its tribal beginnings up through modernity and into the current global age, there is no consensus about what kind of narrative of religious change we should alternatively tell.
Seeking clarity, Benjamin Schewel organizes and evaluates the prevalent narratives of religious history that scholars have deployed over the past century and are advancing today. He argues that contemporary scholarly discourse on religion can be categorized according to seven central narratives: subtraction, renewal, transsecular, postnaturalist, construct, perennial, and developmental. Examining the basic logic, insights, and limitations of each of these narratives, Schewel ranges from Martin Heidegger to Muhammad Iqbal, from Daniel Dennett to Charles Taylor, to offer an incisive, broad, and original perspective on religion in the modern world.
“The book should be a widely read guide to the ideas that structure many of the debates scholars are having today about the meaning of postsecularism and future of religion.” —Geoffrey Cameron, Review of Faith and International Affairs
"What is the future of religion and how should we narrate its past? For all readers interested in these questions, this balanced and concise book is a must read.” —Hans Joas, Humboldt University, Berlin, and University of Chicago
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schewel, associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, compiles seven major narratives that scholars rely on in response to the following question: Why hasn't secularism won out against religion? One line of argument is that advances in scientific knowledge will necessarily end religion's influence while others claim that modernity's ills can only be solved by a return to religion. A third group points out that the conflict between religion and modernity is a particularly Western fixation while another group articulates a cyclical recurrence of the same religious impulses in varying forms. For each narrative, Schewel introduces and carefully unpacks the arguments of three scholars. He does not provide much rationale or context for the scholars he includes, creating a sometimes-jarring juxtaposition of figures, such as when he pairs Hegel, Heidegger, or Rudolph Otto with scholars first published in the past five years. Schewel offers gentle and balanced critiques of each line of argument to highlight its limitations and, in his conclusion, briefly suggests that a nonteleological developmental model is the most compelling and can subsume the others. However, granting this idea more space would make his claim more persuasive. While the work is a little shallow for experts and too advanced for undergraduates, it will work well for beginning graduate seminars both to introduce a range of theories and to model a method of respectful critique.
