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Explore a rigorous but accessible guide to contemporary approaches to the study of religion from leading voices in the field  The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion delivers an expert and insightful analysis of modern perspectives on the study of religion across the humanities and the social sciences. Presupposing no knowledge of the approaches examined in the collection, the book is ideal for undergraduate students who have yet to undertake extensive study in the humanities or social sciences.  The book includes perspectives from those in fields as diverse as globalization, cognitive science, the study of emotion, law, esotericism, sex and gender, functionalism, terror, the comparative method, modernism, and postmodernism. Many of the topics covered in the book clearly hail from religious studies, while others are grounded in other areas of academia.   All of the chapters contained within are written by recognized authors who show how their chosen discipline contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon of religion. This book also includes topics like:  A comprehensive exploration of multiple approaches to religious study, including anthropology, economics, literature, phenomenology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology  A review of various topics germane to the study of religion, including the study of the body, cognitive science, the comparative method, death and the afterlife, law, magic, music, and myth  A selection of subjects touching on modern trends in extremism and violence, including chapters on terror and violence, fundamentalism, and nationalism  A discussion of the influence of modernism and postmodernism in religion   Ideal for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students in humanities and social science programs taking courses on religion and myth, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion will also earn a place in the libraries of specialists working in the fields of Religious Studies, Theology, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Science, History, and Philosophy.   

This prestigious Companion offers the most comprehensive survey to date of the study of religion. Featuring a team of international contributors, and edited by one of the most widely respected scholars in the field, The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion provides an interdisciplinary and authoritative guide to the subject. * Examines the main approaches to the study of religion: anthropology, the comparative method, economics, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology. * Also covers a diverse range of topical issues, such as the body, fundamentalism, magic, and new religious movements * Consists of 24 essays written by an outstanding team of international scholars * Reviews, within each chapter, an outline of a particular subfield and traces its development up to the present day * Debates how the discipline may look in the future * Represents all the major issues, methods and positions in the field

This review praises William Paden's focus on some of the key issues in the study of religion. It questions Paden's position on three topics: (a) the relationship between evolutionary psychology and functionalism; (b) the compatibility of Durkheim with Eliade; and (c) the 'newness' of Paden's new comparativism.

The history of the modern study of myth can be divided into two main categories: that which sees myth as the primitive counterpart to natural science, itself considered overwhelmingly modern, and that which sees myth as almost anything but the primitive counterpart to natural science. The first category constitutes the nineteenth‐century approach to myth. The second category constitutes the twentieth‐century approach. Tylor and Frazer epitomize the nineteenth‐century view. Malinowski, Eliade, Bultmann, Jonas, Camus, Freud, and Jung epitomize the twentieth‐century approach. The question for the twenty‐first century is whether myth can be brought back to the physical world, but in a way compatible with science. The case of the myth of Gaia will be considered as a possible way of doing so.

Jason Blum proposes a middle ground to accommodate both phenomenology and social science, or naturalism. Blum splits interpretation from explanation: phenomenology interprets, social science explains. He thinks that because the topic is the experience of what the subject takes to be the sacred and not of the sacred itself, the experience is safe from naturalism.

Abstract The conventional view is that at least in the West there is a clear-cut and insurmountable divide between human beings and God. This article argues that the divide is neither clear-cut nor insurmountable. Three disparate cases are considered: the conception of God in the Hebrew Bible, traditional and contemporary conceptions of heroism, and the status of celebrities.

The topic of the March 2011 symposium in Zygon is “The Mythic Reality of the Autonomous Individual.” Yet few of the contributors even discuss “mythic reality.” Of the ones who do, most cavalierly use “myth” dismissively, as simply a false belief. Rather than reconciling myth with reality, they oppose myth to reality. Their view of myth is by no means unfamiliar or unwarranted, but they need to recognize other views of myth and to defend their own. Above all, they need to appreciate the grip that any belief aptly labelled myth has—a grip that holds at least as much for a false belief as for a true one.

It is usually assumed that, as an approach to religion, or to culture in general, functionalism is passé. Functionalism has been superseded by structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Yet the appeal of functionalism as an explanation of the existence or persistence of religion has meant the continuing appearance of functionalist works on religion, which hail mainly from the social sciences. This article focuses on the philosophical problems posed by functionalism. Some of those problems are hoary. Others, while already recognized, were presented in their classic form in 1959 by Carl Hempel. Only those social scientists with philosophical proclivities were ever affected by Hempel's challenge. Their unanimous response has been to try to meet the challenge, and the fate of functionalism has been assumed to rest with the response to Hempel. This article presents responses by philosophers themselves to Hempel. It concentrates on the response by Robert Cummins, who defends functionalism in biology and, by implication, social science by recharacterizing it—and in turn making Hempel's challenge irrelevant. What a functionalist approach to religion guided by Cummins' depiction of functionalism would look like is offered.

First published in German in 1909, Otto Rank's original The Myth of the Birth of the Hero offered psychoanalytical interpretations of mythological stories as a means of understanding the human psyche. Like his mentor Sigmund Freud, Rank compared the myths of such figures as Oedipus, Moses, and Sargon with common dreams, seeing in both a symbolic fulfillment of repressed desire. In a new edition published thirteen years after the original, Rank doubled the size of his seminal work, incorporating new discoveries in psychoanalysis, mythology, and ethnology. This expanded and updated edition has been eloquently translated by Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman and includes an introductory essay by Robert A. Segal as well as Otto Rank's 1914 essay \"The Play in Hamlet. \"