Tag: Reductionism


A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 7: Methodological Pluralism

This is an installment in an ongoing series on the American Academy of Religion’s recently released draft statement on research responsibilities. An index of the complete series (updated as each article is posted) can be found here. Hanabusa Itchō‘s (d. 1724) print of the well-known parable of the blindmen and the elephant seemed to me a fitting image to open this commentary on the sixth bullet point in this document. It reads: I won’t quibble as to why the word […]

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The Eternal Return All Over Again

I wrote a post recently in which I critiqued a new book by Brent Plate, saying it (along with other developments in the field, such as the turn toward so-called embodied or lived religion) was evidence that the work of Eliade was still representative of the field, no matter how much distance some may claim separates us today from when he first wrote many of his now famous studies in the history of religions (that is, back in the 1950s). […]

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An Interview with Ann Taves

An interview with Prof. Ann Taves has just been posted — she is a former President of the American Academy of Religion and is well known for her work on religious experience as well as her interest in applying the finding from cognitive psychology to the study of religion. She’s  now at work on a new book, Revelatory Events: Unusual Experiences and New Spiritual Paths, and supervising the interdisciplinary Religion, Experience, and Mind (REM) Lab Group at the University of […]

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It’s All Relative

Relativism, and criticisms of it — “Oh, you’re a relativist!” — strike me as similar to claims of reductionism: the problem isn’t (as critics of reductionism claim) that one reduces one’s object of study to something other than what it already is, but that someone else reduces it to something different than what you want to boil it down to. That not a lot of so-called religious people are walking around spontaneously reporting that they’ve experienced a hierophany of a […]

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