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| He is commonly regarded together with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx as one of the founders of the science of sociology. He is remembered for his use of “ideal types” in the explanation of social action, his famous book on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and his pioneering work in the sociology of religion. |
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| A religious ethic that demands sobriety, frugality and discipline, and which Max Weber associated with certain forms of Protestantism to which he attributed an important role in the emergence of modern capitalism. |
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| This practice, which involves charging interest for loaning money, was considered a sin by the medieval Catholic Church. |
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| A type of “purposeful exaggeration” employed by the sociologist Max Weber for organizing, analyzing and explaining various kinds of sociological phenomena. Examples of Weberian ideal typologies in include the three different types of social authority, traditional, legal and charismatic; as well as distinction between inner-worldly and otherworldly asceticism, and between magicians, priests and prophets. |
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| An important early twentieth-century American intellectual who held the first chair of psychology at Harvard University, and whose Gifford Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience has become an acknowledged classic in the field of religious studies. |
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| A term used by William James to refer to the characteristics of mystical experiences whereby those who have such experiences claim to have gained knowledge or insight into the ultimate nature of reality. |
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| A term used by William James to refer to the pessimistic religious temperament of people inclined to maximize, rather than to minimize or overlook, the presence of evil in the world (at least prior to undergoing a conversion experience that changes their outlook). |
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| A term used by William James to refer the feature of mystical experiences whereby the content of such experiences cannot be adequately conveyed in language. |
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| A term coined by the German scholar, Rudolf Otto, to refer “the holy minus its moral factor.” Otto claimed that the essence of religion is the feeling of “the numinous,” i.e. something fundamentally mysterious which inspires both awe and dread. |
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| A philosophical position defended by William James and others according to which the truth and value of ideas are judged by their usefulness. |
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| James’s Definition of Religion |
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| For the purpose of his famous Gifford Lectures The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James defined religion as “the feeling, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.” |
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| A term used by William James to refer to systems of thought about religious experience that help to convey and explain it within particular cultural communities, and is distinct from the psychological core of religious experience that James thought remains the same across cultures. |
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| A Romanian scholar who spent most of his professional life in France and at the University of Chicago, where he trained many U.S. scholars of religion, and whose major works include The Sacred and the Profane (1957), Patterns in Comparative Religion (1947), and The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949). |
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| Clifford Geertz used this term to refer to the method of anthropology that he helped to pioneer in his own ethnographical work and in essays collected in a volume entitled The Interpretation of Culture. |
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| This 20th-century American social scientist, who was a major influence on Geertz, argued that human groups function on three levels of organization: individual personality, social system, and a separate cultural system. |
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| This pioneering British anthropologist did fieldwork among the Azande and Nuer peoples of southern Sudan, and wrote a book on Theories of Primitive Religion in which he pointed out the short-comings of grand theories of religion such as those developed by Tylor, Frazer, Freud and Durkheim. |
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| A term used by Mircea Eliade to refer to the site of a hierophany or manifestation of the sacred that comes to be viewed by “archaic man” as “the very axle, the central pillar, around which the whole world is seen to turn.” |
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| story told by archaic peoples of how the world first came into being |
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| A theory defended by Ludwig Buechner in a famous book called Force and Matter (1855) where he argued that all of nature, every element, structure and organism—including the human organism—could be explained as a produce of matter and motion. |
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| He held the first chair of psychology at Harvard University, and published a major work on The Principles of Psychology in 1890. |
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| He conceived of Judaism and Christianity as a kind of revolt against the archaic myth of the eternal return. As a result of this revolt, history itself came to be regarded as a theophany as specific historical events like the Exodus and the life of Christ were viewed as unique historical occasions of revelation. |
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| This influential historian of religion argued that some religious symbols are “bigger” than others in the sense of being more universal or complete, and therefore better able to convey the nature of the sacred. |
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| In a famous essay entitled “The Will to Believe,” he sought to defend “our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.” |
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| The doctrine of predestination is closely associated with the theology of this leader of the Protestant Reformation in Geneva. |
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| Max Weber used this term to refer to the unique sense of personal religious authority inspired by representatives of this ideal type, who are often the founders of new religions. |
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| In the religion of the Nuer people, this term refers to the “spirit of (or, in) the sky,” who is considered the creator and sustainer of all things, and the upholder of what is morally upright, good, and true. |
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| Evans-Pritchard’s famous study of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1937) is widely considered to be a classic example of this. |
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| He defines religion as a system of symbols that acts to establish long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence, and clothing them with an aura of factuality that makes them seem uniquely realistic. |
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| In his book, Islam Observed (1968), he described two different “classical styles” of Islam in Morocco and in Indonesia, as well as the challenge to each of them posed by the “scripturalist revolt” during the period of transition from colonialism to national independence. |
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| According to Clifford Geertz, the world as lived (ethos) and the world as imagined (worldview) are fused together under the agency a single set of symbolic forms in this. |
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| In his book, Islam Observed (1968), Geertz associates the “ideologization of religion” with this, which he conceives as a reaction against the secularization of thought associated with modernization. |
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| Unlike motivations, which Geertz claims are “made meaningful” with reference to the ends toward which they are conceived to conduce, these are “made meaningful” with reference to the conditions from which they are conceived to spring. |
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| Because he thinks that, for archaic man, “everything hangs together, everything is connected and makes up a cosmic whole,” none of these can have only one kind of meaning. |
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| Rudolf Otto used these Latin words to refer to the object of an experience of the numinous. |
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| According to Otto, to say that the object of religious experience is a “mysterium” is to say that it is this. |
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| He began his academic career as a legal and economic historian, and wrote his dissertation on medieval Italian trading companies. |
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| This German word means “understanding,” and was used by Max Weber to refer to a systematic or scientific effort to account for human actions by discerning the role of motives or meanings where they figure as causes. |
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| Inner-worldly asceticism, otherworldly asceticism, magician, priest and prophet are examples of these. |
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| He pioneered the “interpretive turn” in American anthropology in the late twentieth century. |
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| In a groundbreaking book E. E. Evans-Pritchard described the custom among these people of consulting a "poison oracle" to determine whether or not witchcraft played a role in certain misfortunes. |
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| As a result of his work as a scientific ethnographer among tribal peoples in British Africa, he became convinced that most anthropologists had been sorely deficient in appreciating the richly poetic habits of speech adopted by primitive peoples. |
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| Despite important differences in other respects, the theories of religion proposed by Max Weber, William James, Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Clifford Geertz share this in common. |
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| In her widely read book, Patterns of Culture (1934), this pioneering American anthropologist argued that culture is the key to understanding even individual personality traits, and that individual psychology shows that culture is a pattern--a kind of group personality shared in common by each member of the group. |
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| Although he came to disagree with him on certain issues, Evans-Pritchard credited this French thinker with recognizing that we cannot understand the culture or religion of primitives until we concede that their whole world may be very different from ours, and have sought to understand how this world functions from the inside. |
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| Critics of pragmatism as a philosophical position have pointed out that whether or not a belief possesses this quality has no bearing on the question of whether or not the belief is true. |
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| William James argues that, from the perspective of pragmatism, while claims about the so-called “metaphysical attributes” of God (like God’s immateriality or indivisibility) are “destitute of all intelligible significance,” the same is not true of disputes about these attributes of God (including divine goodness, holiness, and mercy), which James considers to be “foundations for the saintly life.” |
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| the doctrine of pre-destination |
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| Weber thought of this modern Protestant doctrine as the “logical conclusion” of a great historical process involving the “elimination of magic from the world, which began when the Hebrew Prophets “repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin.” |
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| Mircea Eliade uses this term to refer to a manifestation of the sacred, for example, in a sacred tree or stone. |
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| He who would know must first believe. |
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| Geertz refers to this at one point as “the basic axiom underlying what may perhaps be called the ‘the religious perspective'" (insofar as it is different from the scientific or aesthetic perspective). |
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| Evans-Pritchard considers this to be the fundamental problem with comprehensive theories of religion such as those developed by Tylor, Frazer, Freud and Durkheim. |
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| At bottom the are "just so stories" that cannot be empirically verified. |
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