Why Study Religion?

Richard B. Miller is a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Religion, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture, and the award-winning Interpretations of Conflict: Ethics, Pacifism, and the Just-War Tradition; Casuistry and Modern Ethics: A Poetics of Practical Reasoning; and Terror, Religion, and Liberal Thought.

• Acknowledgments I. A Crisis of Rationale Chapter 1: On Justifying the Study of ReligionChapter 2: The Ethics of Religious Studies II. A Regime of TruthChapter 3: Interpretation, Comparison, and the History of ReligionsChapter 4: Scientific Rationality and Causal ExplanationChapter 5: Existential Symbolism and Theological Anthropology Chapter 6: Embodied Practice and Materialistic Phenomenology Chapter 7: Genealogy, Ideology, and Critical Theory Chapter 8: Philosophy, Normativity, and Metacriticism III. Purposes, Desires, and Critical HumanismChapter 9: Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism 1. The End of Religious Studies 2. Acts and Moral Agency 3. Critical Humanism 4. Four Values 5. Exemplary Works in the Study of Religion 6. Critical Humanism and the Ethics of Religious Studies Epilogue: Critical Humanism as a Vocation

This brilliant book is both a powerful criticism of the current state of religious studies and an impassioned plea for an entirely new approach.... Essential.