商品簡介
Understanding religion from a Confucian, Muslim, and Native American viewpoint
Western Christianity has been long been used as a famed model for all religious life, resulting in an uneven tendency to highlight certain aspects of religion, such as religious beliefs and formal organizations, while paying less attention to others.
Rather than simply criticizing such limitations, Alternative Sociologies of Religion offers three fresh and intriguing possibilities. James Spickard imagines what the sociology of religion would look like had it arisen in different cultural contexts by asking pressing questions like: What would scholars see if they had been raised in Confucian China? What could they learn about religion from Ibn Khaldun, the famed 14th century Arab scholar? What would they better understand, had they been born Navajo, whose traditional religion certainly does not revolve around beliefs and organizations?
Through these thought experiments, Spickard clearly demonstrates how non-Western readers would be better prepared to understand factors including: who maintains religious communities, the relationships between religion and ethnicity as forms of social solidarity, and the role of embodied experience in religious rituals.
The book makes a compelling call for a more global perspective in the social sciences. By seeing beyond the the Euro-centric view of intellectual life, the volume offers a stimulating challenge for the contemporary study of religion.
