A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion

Societies are never ordered in ways that serve everyone's interests equally. Religious traditions - possibly more than any other aspect of society - have been developed over time to create, reproduce, and contest that social order. To study religion effectively is to be able to identify who benefits and who does not and how social structures are legitimated, maintained and contested. A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion explains the key ideas and methods in the study of religion and demonstrates how they can be used. The aim is to provide students with a tool-kit of critical concepts for studying religious belief and behaviour. Throughout the discussion all ideas and methods are illustrated with clear case material. The critical concepts draw on sociological, cultural and anthropological thinking and include: classification and essentialism; naturalization and mystification; legitimation and social reproduction; habitus and normalization; and repression and domination. All offer valuable ways of viewing, analyzing, and evaluating social structures. A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion presents students with a very productive and potentially radical way of studying religion, both its past and its present.

Craig Martin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, New York and Executive Secretary of the North American Association for the Study of Religion. He is author of Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion and the Private Sphere and co-editor (with Russell T. McCutcheon) of Religious Experience: A Reader.