The Academic Study of Religion Explained
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- čas přidán 15. 11. 2017
- Religious studies draws inspiration from multiple academic disciplines: sociology, anthropology, history, neuroscience, biology, psychology, political science..so no matter what you're interested in, you can probably find a home in religious studies!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/religionforbreakfast
Facebook: religionforbreakfast
Twitter: @andrewmarkhenry
Blog: www.religionforbreakfast.com
Andrew's religious studies book recommendations: amazon.com/shop/religionforbre...
Special thanks to the Religious Freedom Center for helping to film and edit this video. The Religious Freedom Center is a nonsectarian organization based out of the Newseum in Washington D.C. They are developing online curriculum to help public school teachers to improve their religious literacy in the classroom. This video is part of two classes I helped to design: RLIT 100 Religions of the World, and EDU 300 Teaching About Religion in Public School. If you are interested in signing up for one of these courses, head on over to: www.religiousfreedomcenter.org...
Buddhism footage is from my friend and colleague Jenn Lindsay. Check out her CZcams channel at: / jenniferslindsay
Special thanks to another friend and colleague, John Balch, for help describing the scientific study of religion. Follow him on Twitter at @PerplexedMonist
Sir I am so glad I found your channel. I found the motivation to do my master's thesis for political science on religious literacy and its effect on perception and political behavior. Been meaning to find a way to intersect my major with my interest in religious studies. So thank you! :D
How did your thesis go?
Thank you so much for making this video -- it is extremely useful for a person contemplating a doctoral degree in religious studies!
I'm in my first year of studying Religious Science and going through your videos before my exam in Religious Theories is so helpful, I can not thank you enough! There really should be more channels like this out there, but I'm glad that at least you are around, providing such quality content.
What religion do you study?
@@ousali1340 where I study, it is required that you get an introductory class in world religions, as well as religious theory, but then the rest is your pick. I've specialized myself in Christianity, Judaism, ancient religions, and new religions, as well as taking a class on religion and gender. Besides that, I also have a minor in social anthropology, as well as some other courses :)
@@helenaandrzejewska2490 thank you
As always an incredible and informative video! Keep it up and I can't wait to see what's next.
This is great! Another that I will add to the videos I include for my own online class: introduction to the study of religion.
BTW, I like the simple, abstract background in this video. Avoids distractions and flows well when you switch between your own image and other images - stable background gives better continuity throughout the video.
Glad you like the format. I'll be playing with this "standing in front of a green screen" format for a few future videos too.
Hope your students enjoy the vid!
I have actually been pretty interested in Religious Studies for awhile but Philosophy of Religion really cemented it.
In addition to the content, the looks of this video are really great! :)
Solid, as always.
Loved this ❤
Great content.
As usual, very good video. However, something on the phenomenology of religion as a criticism of the tendency toward reductionism and explanation that you mention would have been helpful.
Hey, love your videos. Can you recommend a channel that focuses on Shintoism, Buddhism, and/or Greek mythology from an academic perspective?
Very interesting indeed! Funny enough I always found it odd that the english language doesn't really have a separate 'job title' for scholars of religious studies; in Sweden we have: 'religionsvetare' and 'religionshistoriker' as the job title for scholars of religion and historians of religion. Very good video as allways!
Psychologist. Part of how and why the mind chooses to accept fictional stories as true. Self deception. Cognitive dissonance.
All religions are made in earth.
I left Islam when I read the Qur’an and the biography of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam
Now I live in Iraq and I can't talk about it even with my family I might be killed, and society will reject me, it's very difficult for me
and many Arabs leave Islam every day, but they cannot announce that because they may be killed and of course society rejects them.
Religion is a complex adaptive system
It still remains because it was able to eliminate the problem of the free rider and overcome the state of social defection
I have sometimes used the word 'threskiology' (θρησκεία).
@ReligionForBreakfast Being a religion science student in The Netherlands I always find myself explaining why I study religion science. They always assume I am religious myself. It's funny the first 10 times but gets slightly annoying. Keep up the great video's I used your video on Freud for a exam (philosophy of religion). Thanks
+victor van boxtel Yeah I need to explain it all the time too. People often don’t realize that you can study religion just like any other aspect of humanity.
Glad to hear you found the Freud video helpful! Hope you did well on the exam.
Does it also encompass the philosophy of religion?
I know this question comes pretty late and that it probably won't get answered, but in the slim chance that it is I am going to make, since i discovered you channel recentely (via your religion in Zelda video, curiously) and I'm frankly in love with it .
As someone very interested in the history and practice of religion and as an applied linguist by formation, would you know some scholar who approaches it from the perspective of linguistics. To clarify, I know that Felicitas Goodman and J. Samarin made some studies on the phonetic and prosodic characteristics of glossolalia (or "speaking in tongues"), but I was wondering if any similar studies were made on the characteristic (be it syntactic, lexic or prosodic) of ritualistic speech, or the influence of religious differences on the formation or preservation of language varieties (Pensylvanian Dutch comes immidiately to my mind, although that would be more sociology of language than linguistics, I guess).
That's odd, I'm studying Religion studies and linguistics since some weeks, but I haven't really asked myself yet whether there are some inspiring scholars who combine both disciplines. So yeah, I definitely would appreciate some recommendations, too. :)
Great
And of course, then you have the methods of study some religions create to study themselves, generally called "theology". It is...somewhat unclear how useful these are in helping people understand religion, aside from letting outsiders understand that particular religion better.
Timothy McLean when people study Theology, it helps them understand what their beliefs are in relation to their particular god(s)/entity. Also, then comes the comparing and contrasting of that system of belief vs others or non belief for that matter.
Religious Studies = the study of man's worship practices.
Theology = the study of God and His character/nature.
Heyhey! What are your thoughts on the classical myth models? Like the dying and rising god, the dismembered sacrificial creator? Do you think that they are anachronistic or simplistic?
Great question, I hope to do a video on these soon (I'm actually writing a review of CrashCourse Mythology, which uses these models EVERYWHERE).
In short, I'm not a fan (Campbell and Huston Smith in particular). I wouldn't call them "anachronistic," but they definitely don't account for cultural context as much as they should. The whole mission to find "archetypal monomyths" (i.e. dying and rising gods), implies that we can find universal themes that permeate all cultures across time. The thing is....different cultures interpret these themes differently. Even something universal like "death" will be interpreted differently if you are a Hindu or a Christian. So categories like "dying and rising gods" are too divorced from their respective cultures to have any use as an explanatory category. Its like inventing a category called "Gods that look like humans." The category is too reductive and lacks cultural context to be of any use to us. Scholars like J.Z Smith and Russell McCutcheon have largely dismantled these categories if you would like some extra reading.
ReligionForBreakfast I find them fascinating from a linguistics point of view. Deities and mythemes are so similar to vocab and grammar for the purposes of reconstruction... it just seems like a lot of long bows are drawn.
ReligionForBreakfast I’m glad you commented here cause I’ve been wondering what your thoughts were on Campbell. I read Hero With a Thousand Faces a few years back and though I’m really glad I read it, I definitely thought it needed some rounding out. I think there probably are some psychological truths shared by almost all humans. However, myth is far more than a reduction of these universal concepts into stories; it is often very profoundly influenced by its cultural context, local politics, audience expectations, and even geography.
Great work on this channel btw, the quality of your content is very impressive, especially given its relatively low profile. Keep up the good work dude!
So many other fields at play in religion it’s wild
Don't drink & discuss religion kids ! the more one studies religion, the more angry religious people get when you try to tell them something factual in a discussion ..;)).
This may interest you islam& science by Dr zagloul Najar. Quran & modern science by Dr Zakir Naik. 😊
Lol no
Zakir naik is the last Prophet after Muhammad, isn't he?
@@ananyapaul5062 lol is that joke?
@ReligionForBreakfast... As long as you're not afraid to confront the absurd claims, the dogmatism and the negative impacts of religion instead of placating and cherry picking only the mundane and benevolent parts. Would you be prepared to do that? If not then I cannot take you seriously.
You should watch "DISGUSTING Things From My Theology Degree" by CosmicSkeptic for a somewhat different point of view.
Isn’t theology different from religious studies? They work on the assumption that God x is real, etc. depends on the religion
Theologist
The following is meant to be a constructive criticism. I hope you don't take too much offense. I find this video to be severely lacking in substance - anyone, whether they have a degree or not, can tell you as much. In this day and age, there are already so many people on CZcams doing this kind of educational videos, but most of them aren't really experts in the subject so the things that they can tell you are either can be easily garnered from wikipedia or similar resources, or just make unsubstantiated claims altogether, so their attempts at "educating" often do not go very far. Most of the time, they have to bank on being entertaining, doing skits and stuffs, akin to adding some spice into a thin soup. Sure a watery soup that is well-spiced can still be nice, but ultimately it isn't going to be very fulfilling.
I believe that as an actual researcher, and presumably a lecturer, in the subject, you can say much more than this. Make a video that actually shows people that what the subject you are studying actually means something, whether in intrinsic terms or extrinsic ones, and not videos that seem to me to be maybe useful for some trivia contests at best. Be a real teacher, not an infotainer. Although I have to admit that maybe most people just don't care about the real meat and vegetables and just want to be filled with GSM and salt and sugar...
I appreciate the feedback. This certainly was a basic video, but I disagree with your assessment about its importance on CZcams. From my experience in this field, very few people even know what the academic study of religion is. I frequently get people asking: "Oh...so that means you are a priest, right?" Or "Oh cool, I'm not religious, so I'm not interested in religious studies." I felt it was important to produce a 5 minute video that gives a high-school level synopsis of what the field even is. Several high school teachers have already emailed me and said they are including it in their syllabi.
So, perhaps this video wasn't for you as someone who knows more about the field, but I know from personal experience that there are thousands of people out there that simply need to be told: "Hey, you can study religion as a sociologist/archaeologist/neuroscientist/psychologist/etc"....even though that may sound banal.
This video is especially useful as a "hook" for Intro to Religious Studies or even Comparative Religions (World Religions) students. I think it's perfectly useful as a 5 min video to get students interested, to lead into the first few weeks of class, or even to have as a link on a course flyer to give students an idea of what an Intro to Religious Studies might be about (which is often NOT World Religions & instead the kind of stuff presented in this video.
If the person above wants a full on lecture-video, they can sign up for classes at a local college/university. You don't owe free classes to anyone. Unless your landlord & grocery store & doctor etc. accept your love of teaching as payment, these kinds of videos are perfectly appropriate & VERY useful to those of who actually teach religion in higher education.
Sociology, Psychology are not Science.
You don't even know you're a Theolgoist. Pass
He’s not a theologian