WHAT IS CRITICAL RELIGION AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Critical Religion's entry point is the understanding that religion is not a thing that is simply there 'in the world'. While many people would claim that they know a religion 'when they see one', there are ongoing debates in Religious Studies on how to define the very subject of the discipline, or whether it should be defined, or whether in academic discourse we should even have a term 'religion' that is wrought with so many complexities and associations with conflict and violence.

The word 'critical' here should be understood in a positive sense: scholars of Critical Religion seek to illuminate the various uses of the category 'religion' and reflect on the consequences that follow from some communities and their practices, texts, behaviours or objects being labelled as either 'religious' or 'non-religious'.

This edited volume contains contributions by the following authors:

Fiona Darroch

Paige Medlock

Francis Stewart

Melanie Barbato

Per-Erik Nilsson

Alexander Henley

Carolina Ivanescu

Timothy Fitzgerald

Brian Nail

Andrew W. Hass

Alison Jasper

Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan

Naomi Goldenberg

Cameron Montgomery

Katja Neumann

Michael Marten

Mitsutoshi Horii