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History 1

By Timothy Fitzgerald

ISBN-10: 0195300092

ISBN-13: 9780195300093

Lately students have all started to query the usefulness of the class of "religion" to explain a particular kind of human adventure and behaviour. In his final publication, The Ideology of non secular stories (OUP 2000), Timothy Fitzgerald argued that "religion" used to be no longer a personal zone of human life that may be separated from the general public realm and that the research of faith as such was once hence impossibility. during this new ebook he examines a variety of English-language texts to teach how faith grew to become remodeled from a really particular type indigenous to Christian tradition right into a universalist declare approximately human nature and society. those claims, he exhibits, are implied via and regularly specific in theories and techniques of comparative faith. yet also they are tacitly reproduced through the humanities within the rather indiscriminate use of "religion" as an a priori legitimate cross-cultural analytical inspiration, for instance in historiography, sociology, and social anthropology. Fitzgerald seeks to hyperlink the argument approximately faith to the parallel formation of the "non-religious" and such dichotomies as church-state, sacred-profane, ecclesiastical-civil, spiritual-temporal, supernatural-natural, and irrational-rational. a part of his argument is that the class "religion" has a unique common sense in comparison to the class "sacred," however the were continually stressed via significant writers, together with Durkheim and Eliade. Fitzgerald contends that "religion" imagined as a personal trust within the supernatural was once an important conceptual house for the simultaneous imagining of "secular" practices and associations comparable to politics, economics, and the kingdom kingdom. the discovery of "religion" as a common form of event, perform, and establishment used to be in part the results of sacralizing new suggestions of trade, possession, and exertions practices, employing "scientific" rationality to human habit, administering the colonies and classifying local associations. against this, indicates Fitzgerald, the sacred-profane dichotomy has a unique common sense of use.

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This reading is reinforced in other examples: The religious sanction to the political order was highly ambiguous in theory and practice. Religion, or the church, intervened not merely figuratively or theoretically, but to practical effect. Religious asso- introduction 19 ciations could glorify the crown, or justify a rebellion. (Swanson, 1989:99) Again, ‘the religious’ is associated with the church; in contrast the Crown is tacitly associated with the political order, and rebellion as a (political) challenge to it.

Though the change of historical context is well known, it is known in the sense that we know there is an elephant in the room but cannot see it. The discourse on religion and religions, or ‘faiths’ and ‘spiritualities’, institutionalised in universities and schools as religious studies (the secular study of religions), is an extension of this rhetoric, and constitutes a further embedding of the notion that these categories are not acts of rhetorical persuasion but are in the nature of things. 11 Though the history of the emergence of modernity is well known through the writings of historians, the changing ideological functions of ‘religion’ as a category in relation to the emergence of ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ conceived as separate domains tends to get buried from view.

Religious asso- introduction 19 ciations could glorify the crown, or justify a rebellion. (Swanson, 1989:99) Again, ‘the religious’ is associated with the church; in contrast the Crown is tacitly associated with the political order, and rebellion as a (political) challenge to it. 8 Yet in the preface, Swanson apologises for the implication in his title that church and society were two different things in the thinking of the medieval period, and he lucidly expresses and emphasises the point that ‘‘the church was society’’ (1989:ix; my italics).

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Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories by Timothy Fitzgerald


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