Critical Religion Reader

WHAT IS CRITICAL RELIGION AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Critical Religion''s entry point is the understanding that religion is not a thing that is simply there ''in the world''. While many people would claim that they know a religion ''when they see one'', there are ongoing debates in Religious Studies on how to define the very subject of the discipline, or whether it should be defined, or whether in academic discourse we should even have a term ''religion'' that is wrought with so many complexities and associations with conflict and violence.
The word ''critical'' here should be understood in a positive sense: scholars of Critical Religion seek to illuminate the various uses of the category ''religion'' and reflect on the consequences that follow from some communities and their practices, texts, behaviours or objects being labelled as either ''religious'' or ''non-religious''.

This edited volume contains contributions by the following authors:

Fiona Darroch
Paige Medlock
Francis Stewart
Melanie Barbato
Per-Erik Nilsson
Alexander Henley
Carolina Ivanescu
Timothy Fitzgerald
Brian Nail
Andrew W. Hass
Alison Jasper
Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan
Naomi Goldenberg
Cameron Montgomery
Katja Neumann
Michael Marten
Mitsutoshi Horii