Building Religions 21: Phenomenology

One of the challenges in approaching the subject of religion, whether creatively or academically, is that of recognizing one's own presuppositions about what religion is. In my post on the work of J. Z. Smith, I brought up the example of Spanish explorers in the New World who failed to recognize signs of religious life among native islanders because they couldn't see anything resembling a temple. They took their own experiences with religions—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and perhaps some knowledge of Classical paganism—and used those as the map by which to interpret the new situation in which they found themselves.

Building Religions 6: Ritual

Building Religions 6: Ritual

I haven't done much work in ritual studies, so I'm only going to cover a few scholars and their theories -- the classics, so to speak. Most of what I have to say will be applicable primarily to fantasy settings, which tend to be a bit more ritual-heavy, and they can apply equally well to descriptions of religious or magical rites. As I've mentioned before, the boundary between the two can be fluid. Let's start by running through the authors that I've covered already and what they have to say.

Building Religions 5: J.Z. Smith

Building Religions 5: J.Z. Smith

Jonathan Z. Smith doesn't have the same range of influence as the other authors that I've mentioned in these posts. Most of his work is on comparative religion as a discipline, so that even when he's dealing with primary sources, it's generally with the ultimate goal of using them to question the work of some earlier scholar. That said, however, there are a few of his that I think writers and gamers can get some mileage out of.

Building Religions 4: Religion and Magic

Building Religions 4: Religion & Magic

I'm going to take a detour here and focus on a theme rather than a single author. For the first several decades of the academic study of religion, it seemed like everyone had to, at some point, work out definitions of religion and magic that would make clear to their readers why the two were different. It's only been recently, however, that scholars have started to ask the question of why it was so important for that distinction to be made, and what the definitions were intended to do.