Summary Kripal Midterm Religion, Culture, and Global
Encounters
Chapter 3; The Skill of Reflexivity and Some Key Categories
We think and write within a historical consciousness: a form of mind that is keenly aware of how it is
shaped, sighted and blinded by its particular space-time location and all that has led up to this
particular perspective, place, or position.
The History of Religions
Two things:
1. Used as the expression to refer to the full historical sweep of humanity’s religious experience,
from prehistory to the present day ( adjective: general)
2. Used as the expression to refer to a particular lineage within the professional study of religion
that emphasized the comparison of religious forms across space and time.
To understand the nature of religion, one must approach the historical material as both
- A collective of individual parts (difference)
- A single, species-wide whole (sameness)
The individual parts can only be understood through the large whole, and the large whole can only be
understood through its individual parts.
The comparative method 4 basic stages:
1. Collection and description
2. Classification and the naming of patterns
3. Comparison toward
4. Some sort of general theory of religion
Central here are historical scholarship, translation, detailed studies of individual societies, working
theories, and the philosophical implications to which they alle inevitably point. (theorizing stage).
Bruno Latour: long cultural projects around coining, debating, defining, and rejecting particular terms
are essentially magical battles because those who enter them recognize the astonishing power of
words.
Comparison can shift the meaning of a religious event
Miracles are taken to be irruptions into ordinary reality that function as “signs” of the holiness of a
saint, the power of a local deity, or a pilgrimage site.
meant to increase and undergird faith.
Collection, classification, and comparison allow us to theorize about deeper dynamics and patterns
that may not be shared by any single religious tradition being studied and that, in fact, go directly
against local exclusive truth claims.
Radical comparative thinking often displays some version of what we will call the both-and.
one of the surest markers of rich and nuanced comparative thinking
We must acknowledge that every perspective will bring some things into sharp focus and will make
others entirely invisible and that these two processes of focus and erasure are not all incompatible.
The principle of extremity
The “microscope” of our own comparative practices might be called the principle of extremity
argues that we will best understand the deepest dynamics of religious experience by focusing on the
, most extreme and extraordinary instances. The extreme and extraordinary focus and magnify
dynamics and patterns that are otherwise invisible in the more “normal” or ordinary range of religious
experience.
The Skill of Reflexivity
Reflexivity is the most basic and important skill one needs in order to study and compare religions
well.
the intellectual ability or spiritual capacity to step out of oneself and one’s society and reflect
critically on how one is thinking or how one is not thinking but being thought by one’s culture,
religion, place, and time.
also the key to judging between adequate and inadequate comparative practices.
The level or sophistication of a comparative practice can also be judged by its scale
- how many historical data
- how much humanity one has put on the table of comparison
the more material on the table, the more sophisticated the comparative practice.
Comparative practices are not neutral
Skilled comparative practices will always strive to be accurate with respect to the historical and
textual facts and fair in their insistence on applying the same critical standards to each religious
system, preferably after having already applied them “at home”, to the system the comparativists live
in.
Comparative practices are never value-free the very existence of the discipline depends on this
value: the development of a worldview that cherishes a neutral position vis-à-vis the various religions
as well as an ability to see the internal coherence and logic that empowers each of them.
Humanities:
1. all those fields of study within a modern college or university that attempt to understand and
analyze, with the tools of critical reason, whatever human beings do and make.
2. Technically: all those fields of study that attempt to understand and analyze the nature and
construction of meaning, value, beauty, and narrative in the history of humanity as these have
been crystallized in fields like philosophy, language, religion, literature, and art
3. Still technically: all those forms of modern thought that assert that reality is not just made up
of matter, numbers, objects, and causality (which is what the natural sciences assert), but also
the experiences, meanings, values, words, subjects, and stories
4. Most technically: the study of consciousness coded in culture.
humanities as a whole assume in principle that all human beings share a common human nature
and that their cultural productions can therefore be studied with similar methods and tools within a
common field.
Religious believers believe that one is first and primarily a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, etc, and only
secondarily a human being. human beings need a particular culture or community to become fully
human
Humanities perspective: human beings do need culture, language, and community to become fully
human and fully conscious but not a particular one.
Defining culture
Generally refers to the entire network or web of institutions, laws, customs, symbols, technologies,
and arts that constitute the life of a particular society and hence cultivate, control, and contain
consciousness in very precise and specific ways.
Cultural anthropology and initiation rites
Initiation: a comparative category that names any set of formalized activities and teaching through
which a person’s social or religious identity is transformed or redefined.
