RT Article
T1 Religion in the 21st Century: Disciplinary Critique, Global Restructuring, Categorical Diversity
JF Implicit religion
VO 24
IS 3/4
SP 381
OP 304
A1 Beyer, Peter 1949-
LA English
YR 2021
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1963104382
AB Religion as a category and object of study in (Western) academia has undergone a sequence of upheavals over the last several decades, responding to significant transformations in global society and as a reflection of internal disciplinary developments. This paper focuses on such transformations and developments principally within the disciplines the sociology of religion and religious studies. After summarizing these transformations, it presents three interrelated arguments: a) Both transformations, in the disciplines and in the larger social context, are the latest versions of very long discussion and development that have their roots in the nineteenth-twentieth century foundation of religion as an analytic category, in the imperial/colonial spread and glocal appropriation of the category of religion, and in the "Westphalian" institutional modeling of religion with the modern nationstate. b) The current transformations in the "religious field" are a reflection of a decline in that modeling, yielding further uncertainty about how religion should be conceived. c) The ideas of religion and secularization should not be discarded, but should be contextualized in a broader diversity of categorization that goes beyond the binary modeling of religion/not-religion (or secular). A systems-theoretical approach informs all three arguments.
K1 Religious Studies
K1 sociology of religion
K1 Globalization
K1 recent theories of religion
K1 religions and nations
K1 Religious Change
K1 Secularization
DO 10.1558/imre.23665