The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and HistoryDerek R. Peterson, Darren R. Walhof Rutgers University Press, 2002 - 221 עמודים Is religion an obstacle to enlightenment? Popular and scholarly opinion says that it is. In a world gripped in a clash of civilizations, the virtues of tolerance, reason, and freedom seem to be under siege by religious absolutism. This collection of historical essays argues that the conventional wisdom on religion makes sense only as a strategy of intellectual and political control. The authors study how nationalists, state officials, missionaries and scholars in the West and in the colonized world defined and redefined the relationship between the political and the religious. Recasting and representing religious beliefs and practices, the authors show, was for modernizing elites a means of consolidating new political communities. |
תוכן
Why Study Indian Buddhism? | 19 |
Rethinking Religion | 37 |
Intertextuality | 59 |
Modernity Religion | 79 |
Islam in Museums from | 133 |
Ozark | 156 |
World Religions and Secularization from | 179 |
Literacy in the Eye of the Conversion Storm | 190 |
Selected References | 209 |
About the Contributors | 215 |