Dr. Stephen Ogden
LIBS 7023
RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Religion: LIBS 7023
 Introduction
 Subject of academic study.
 Course practices.
 Literary justification.
 Definition of the term.
 Anthropological status.
 Range of comparative project.
 Concept of Faith
DR. STEPHEN A. OGDEN
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stephen_ogden@bcit.ca
2011-2012: Instructor, BCIT Liberal Studies
2003-2010: Lecturer, SFU English Department
1979-2012: IT Specialist, Manager, Technician
 2003, 2010: Lecturer in Religious Studies, History
and Philosophy of Science—SFU Department of
Humanities
 Academic publications and conference papers:
science and religion.
Religion:
Subject of Academic Study
 academic study treats religion as a subject of
description and analysis.
 academic study is not partisan, personal, nor
prejudiced
 academic study looks at religion as follows:
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Origins
Development
Defining characteristics
Human effects
Philosophy (nature of its claims to truth and validity )
Academic Study: Limitations
 Academic study is uniquely valuable but limited.
 academic—empirical—study is effective solely for
subjects accessible to empirical study: a necessary (a
priori) truth.
 empirical (weight, height, measure, etc.) study returns
material evidence accessible by the senses:
 the statement ‘only what is accessible by the senses is
real’ is a limiting statement of dogma; an ideological
declaration; not a necessary truth.
 academic approach to one’s love life, family life, or
personal loyalties (sport teams, patriotism, fashion &
decor, etc.) is inadvisable…even absurd.
 Examples: instrument limits—“if you are a hammer
the whole world is a nail.” ….
Academic Study of Religion:
“Describe”
 Description—clearly, accurately, exhaustively recording the
salient and identifying details—is a self-evident human
benefit.
 Academic study has high social value for making and
cataloguing proper description.
 Challenges:
 not all description is empirically straightforward
 ineffable qualities are often the most important: are even the
defining qualities: e.g. patriotism.
 partisanship interprets neutral description as offense
 do you want someone giving a neutral description of your mother?
your fiancé? your country? your Vancouver Canucks?
 the emotional dimension is real and of equal worth to the rational
 a rational description of pædophilia is incomplete without the
emotion: description of pædophilia limited to solely empirical is evil:
the correct term is ‘sexual abuse of children.’
The Extremist’s Problem with
Description
 For an extremist (of any and all kinds and
partisan affiliations), the following are true.
 Of what the extremist approves, a neutral
description is effectively a criticism (if you don’t
love it you must be against it.)
 Of what the extremist disapproves, a neutral
description is the same as an approval (if you don’t
hate it you must be for it.)
 Dialectic is the only hope. As will follow….
Academic Study of Religion:
“Analyse”
 To analyse is to break into parts.
 E.g. chemical analysis
 Plato: “cut up each kind according to its species along its natural
joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might
do...”
 All-but impossible to properly understand an unknown
object without analysis (and, conversely, an unknown part
remains meaningless without knowledge of its whole.)
 Problems
 “Our meddling intellect \ Mis-shapes the beauteous form of
things: \ —We murder to dissect.”
 Analysis can fail to find the defining quiddity of an important
whole:
 vivisection, ‘team chemistry’, national character, etc.
Course Website
 www.BCITReligiousStudies.blogspot.com
 Syllabus
 Assignment details
 Rules and Regulations
 Preparation information
 Random posts on interesting, useful, or entertaining
stuff, relevant to the course.
 Opportunity for published student comment.
Course Method
 Four contemporary novels: one for each of four
major world religious belief systems.
 Read the novels ahead of class.
 Lecture on the historical, cultural, doctrinal, and
liturgical description of each belief system.
 Dialectical approach: after description, first a
favourable and then a critical analysis of the
religion—followed by the students’ conclusion of the
dialectic, done in small groups.
 Each class, a short, online, article on the lecture topic
of the week will be assigned. Students will read the
article, analyse it in group setting, and present
consensus conclusion to class.
Exemplar: Dr. Chin Banerjee
 Professor Emeritus, SFU
English.
 In upper-division seminar,
gave a derisory reading of
the religious component of
a 17th C. poem by John
Donne—to the open
delight of the atheist
students.
 Week following, gave a
majestic presentation of
the Christian metaphysic
animating the Donne
poem.
 Dialectic.
Benefit of literary site on which to
excavate understanding of Religion.
 Imagination is a clear and definite human cognitive faculty.
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has unique human value.
 Literary authors have Imagination to a superlative degree: like
Einstein, say, has cogitation to a superlative degree.
 In fiction, information and ideas are transmuted into a story.
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Story—narrative—is a human universal: Aristotle explains that human
beings imitate by their nature: homo reddo.
 human beings respond to stories—characters, setting, plot—universally
from birth. “Mimesis.”
 this transmutation of fact and idea removes the ‘film of familiarity’: facts
made invisible by being familiar are shown newly, as if in a mirror.
 untried ideas—political, religious, moral—can be shown in their human
effects: a virtual reality of the future is created.
 A novel allows us to experience religion in variety of aspect:
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personal, familial, cultural, doctrinal, ideational.
 The novelists chosen have a high quality of religious expression.
“Religion”
 A common term, an uncertain meaning.
 The sole scholarly authority on history and
meaning (etymology) of English words, the
Oxford English Dictionary, presents the meaning
as uncertain.
 “….the supposed original sense of ‘religion’ would
have been ‘painstaking observance of rites’, but by
later authors (especially by early Christian writers)
with religāre religate v., ‘religion’ being taken as ‘that
which ties believers to God’. Each view finds
supporters among modern scholars.”
 Cicero: L. relegere (to treat carefully)
 Lactantius: L. religare (to bind)
“Religion”
 Commonly—vulgarly—assumed that ‘God’ is
intrinsic to the concept of religion. However:
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Islam
Sikhism
Buddhism
Jainism
Confucianism
 all in this list have been reputably classed as religions
 yet it is academically credible to view this list as a
descending (or ascending) order of systems of belief
going from presence to absence of ‘God’.
RELIGION:
Modernist & ‘Westernist’ Assumption
 One problem immediately for defining and
classifying (two ways of saying the same thing)
religion, is the on-going development of
understanding of Western civilisation bias in
Science.
 As a fact of anthropology, the scientific method is a
Western invention, and all its assumptions are Western
civilisation assumptions.
 Thus, categorising, dividing, taxonomising, and
comparatively analysing World religions is a Western
project—and one that some non-Western civilisations
reject
 criticising it as, among other things, cultural Colonialism.
RELIGION:
Modernist & ‘Westernist’ Assumption
 For example, the assumption by Western academics
of a separation between religious and secular
spheres is considered (even increasingly by some
Western academics) to be at best arbitrary and at
worst Western civilisation bias: cf. ‘post-colonialism’.
 Even Wikipedia—which is the worst of the three classes of
information repositories—allows this.
 Additionally, the ranking of ‘high to low’ among
religions (in effect from folk animism, e.g. Shintoism
and Druidism, to systematic theologies, e.g.
Hinduism and Catholicism) is increasingly
compromised as being merely another form of
Western intellectual Imperialism.
RELIGION:
PROVISIONAL DEFINITION
 For our present purposes, let us work from a
definition of ‘religion’ that is broad enough to be
free of bias and assumption yet specific enough
to be academically productive.
 this honours Cicero’s derivation ‘to treat carefully.’
 Applying Lactantius’s OED derivation, ‘to bind’,
to the general OED etymology, we can use this
for a working definition of ‘religion’:
A set of beliefs and practices, referencing some larger &
all-encompassing power, system, or idea that is
acknowledged to be Good, and which has the force of
both prohibition and reverence, that binds together a
self-identified group.