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Discovering religious history in the modern age

Kippenberg, H.G.

9780691009094 - Discovering religious history in the modern age
Secondhand

Article description

This book makes an unparalleled attempt to analyze the rise of comparative religion as a particular response to modernization. In the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, Western scholars began to interpret religions history, drawing on prehistorical evidence, recently deciphered texts, and ethnographical reports. Religions that had been rejected as irrational by Enlightenment philosophers were now studied with enthusiasm. Using comparative methods, scholars identified in their own culture traces of ancient, oriental, and tribal religions--not merely as survivals but increasingly as powerful manifestations of a human existence not subdued by rationality. Hans Kippenberg shows how F. Max Mller, E. B. Tylor, W. Robertson Smith, J. G. Frazer, Jane Harrison, R. R. Marett, E. Durkheim, Max Weber, William James, and Rudolf Otto included in their reconstruction of the religious past a diagnosis of modern culture. Mysticism, soul, ritual, magic, pre-animism, world-rejection, and other notions were developed into a theory, disclosing in modern culture an ignored continuity of worldviews and attitudes.

Specifications

Author Kippenberg, H.G.
ISBN/EAN 9780691009094
Can't be ordered

Article description

This book makes an unparalleled attempt to analyze the rise of comparative religion as a particular response to modernization. In the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, Western scholars began to interpret religions history, drawing on prehistorical evidence, recently deciphered texts, and ethnographical reports. Religions that had been rejected as irrational by Enlightenment philosophers were now studied with enthusiasm. Using comparative methods, scholars identified in their own culture traces of ancient, oriental, and tribal religions--not merely as survivals but increasingly as powerful manifestations of a human existence not subdued by rationality. Hans Kippenberg shows how F. Max Mller, E. B. Tylor, W. Robertson Smith, J. G. Frazer, Jane Harrison, R. R. Marett, E. Durkheim, Max Weber, William James, and Rudolf Otto included in their reconstruction of the religious past a diagnosis of modern culture. Mysticism, soul, ritual, magic, pre-animism, world-rejection, and other notions were developed into a theory, disclosing in modern culture an ignored continuity of worldviews and attitudes.

Specifications

Author Kippenberg, H.G.
ISBN/EAN 9780691009094