Three new books and a special offer from Equinox Publishing
Just Published
Textbook Gods
Genre, Text and Teaching Religious Studies
Edited by Bengt-Ove Andreassen and James R. Lewis, both at the University of Tromso
PB 9781781790557 £18.99 / $29.95
272pp
Receive 25% off the retail price using the code Textbook when ordering from www.equinoxpub.com valid until the end of October 2014. Orders shipping to North America will be dispatched from our Connecticut warehouse.
https://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=594
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in textbooks, partly because they have maintained their position as an important genre. Not too many years ago – and perhaps currently as well – many considered textbooks outdated or archaic compared with technological advances such as the Internet and different kinds of educational software. Despite these changes, textbooks for school subjects and for academic studies continue to be in demand. Textbooks seem to constitute a genre in which established truths are conveyed, and may thus represent stable forces in a world of flux and rapid changes.
Textbook Gods offers perspectives on representations of religion and religions in textbooks. The contributions emerge from different contexts, ranging from European countries, to North America, Japan and Australia.
Contents
Bengt-Ove Andreassen
Introduction – Theoretical perspectives on textbooks / textbooks in religious studies research
1 – Torsten Hylén (Dalarna University)
Closed and open conceptions of religion: The problem of essentialism in teaching about religion
2 – Satoko Fujiwara (University of Tokyo)
Establishing Religion through Textbooks: Religions in Japan’s “Ethics” Program
3- Katharina Frank (University of Zurich)
Bad Religions and Good Religions: The Representation of Religion and Religious Traditions in a New Swiss Textbook
4 – Sivane Hirsch (University of Montreal) and Marie Mc Andrew
To Learn about the Other and to Get to Know Him: Judaism and the Jewish community of Quebec as represented in Ethics and Religious Culture textbooks
5 – Barbara Wintersgill
Researching materials used to teach about world religions in schools in England
6 – Carole M. Cusack (University of Sydney)
Representations of Indigenous Australian Religions in New South Wales (NSW) Higher School Certificate Studies of Religion Textbooks
7 – Mary Hayward
Visual engagement: textbooks and the materiality of religion
8 – Suzanne Anette Thobro (University of Tromso)
Cartographic representations of religion(s) in Norwegian textbooks
9 – Bengt-Ove Andreassen
A reservoir of symbols. On the conceptualization of “religion” in introduction books for RE in Teacher Education in Norway
10 – James R. Lewis
Stones and Bones: Indigenous African Religions and the ‘Evolution’ of World Religions
11 – Annika Hvithamar (University of Southern Denmark)
“Christianity” or “the Christianity – that is the question
12 – Jens Andrè Herbener (University of Southern Denmark)
School Bible in the service of The Danish National Church – A Case Study
Methods for the Study of Religious Change
From Religious Studies to Worldview Studies
Edited by Andre Droogers and Anton van Harskamp, both at VU University, Amsterdam
Hb 9781781790427 £60 / $99.95
Pb 9781781790434 £19.99 / $34.95
214pp
Order from our website below and receive 25% off the retail price using the code Methods (valid until the end of October 2014). Books ordered from North America will be shipped from our Connecticut warehouse.
Link to book page with further details and ordering option:
https://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=583&keyword=methods
This is a highly imaginative contribution to the study of worldviews.
Grace Davie, University of Exeter
The world of religious experience is changing much faster than the discipline which claims to study it. Religious studies still uses
Christianity as its measure, still frames the world through the model of five world religions, still largely avoids analysis of key issues around
power, poverty, violence, pollution, science, and social conflict, and still looks to highlight differences rather than commonalities. Methods for
the Study of Religious Change aims to redefine the study of religion as the study of worldviews, of ideas which are active in shaping the world.
It argues that the study of religion should focus on people’s worldviewmaking capacities and should contribute to the critical analysis of
global problems and the promotion of cultural and spiritual respect across religions. Survey chapters on theory and method outline this
new approach while case-study chapters illustrate these ideas with innovative ethnographies of ritual, experience, language, morals and
identity.
Entanglements
Marking Place in the Field of Religion
Russell T. McCutcheon, University of Alabama
PB 9781781790779 £17.99 / $26.95
302pp
Receive 25% off the retail price using the code Entanglements when ordering from www.equinoxpub.com valid until the end of October 2014. Books ordered from North America will be shipped from our Connecticut warehouse.
https://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=604
Entanglements attempts to argue against those who claim that scholarship on the category religion is only of secondary interest, in that it fails to do primary research on real religions. The volume collects eighteen responses, written across twenty years, that each exemplify the inevitably situated, give-and-take nature of all academic debate. These essays call into question the often used distinction between primary and secondary sources, between description and analysis. Published here in their original form, each contribution is accompanied by new, substantive introduction describing the context of each response and explaining how each shows something still at stake in the academic study of religion–whether its the rhetoric used to authorize competing scholarly claims or the difficulty involved in suspending our commonsense view of the world long enough to study the means by which we have come to see it that way.
An ethnography of scholarly practice written mainly for earlier career readers–whether undergraduate or graduate students or even tenure-track faculty–Entanglements tackles the notion that some scholarship is more pristine, and thus more valuable, than others, thereby modeling for scholars earlier in their careers some of the obstacles and arguments that may face them should their research interests be judged unorthodox.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Apologia for an Obsession
1. Naming the Unnamable? Theological Language and the Academic Study of Religion (1990)
2. Ideology and the Problem of Naming: A Reply (1991)
3. Returning the Volley to William E Arnal (1998)
4. Of Strawmen and Humanists (1999)
5. A Brief Response from a Fortunate Man (2000)
6. Who Sets the Ground Rules? A Response to “Comparativism, Then and Now” (2000)
7. Artifacts Not Relics: A Response to “Missing Links in the Study of Religion” (2000)
8. Filling in the Cracks with Resin: A Reply to John Burris’s “Text and Context in the Study of Religion” (2003)
9. A Few Words on the Temptation to Defend the Honor of a Text (2004)
10. Theorizing the Politics of “Religion”: Rejoinder to Robert A. Segal (2005)
11. The Perils of Having Ones Cake and Eating it Too: Some Thoughts in Response (2005)
12. Theses on Professionalization (2007)
13. A Response to Prof. Robert Campany’s “Chinese Religious History and its Implications for Writing ‘Religion(s)” (2008)
14. “As it Was in the Beginning…”: The Modern Problem of the Ancient Self (2010)
15. A Direct Question Deserves a Direct Answer: A Reply to Atalia Omer’s “Can a Critic Be a Caretaker too?” (2012)
16. Recovering the Human: A Tale of Nouns and Verbs (2012)
17. Three Dots and a Dash (2012)
18. The Sacred is the Profane (2013)
Afterword and References
