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OverviewThere has long been a trend in religious studies that denies that religion can be an effective category for historians to use across time and cultures. In History and the Study of Religion Stanley Stowers takes on this assessment by demonstrating a theory of religion that answers the criticisms raised by those claiming that religion is not a useful concept. Drawing on his many years of researching and teaching the history of ancient Christianity in the context of the Mediterranean cultures, he offers a detailed and comprehensive account of how religion serves as a valuable, and even necessary, theory. Stowers argues that religion is a social kind, a real and relatively stable cross-cultural entity in the social world. Through key developments in philosophy, cognitive psychology, and social theory applied to examples from the ancient Mediterranean and ethnographic analyses, he illustrates the usefulness for creating social theory and historical explanation. The beginnings of Christianity can be explained as arising from ancient Mediterranean religion, which consisted of three sub-kinds: the religion of everyday social exchange, civic religion, and the religion of literate and literary experts. Christianity emerged primarily from a social field of the experts in interaction with the other two sub-kinds so as to produce a fourth sub-kind, the religion of literate experts with political power. For this last, Stowers discusses topics such as the Christian movement's success in the Roman Empire, whether it was a socially and morally superior form of religion, how it was socially constituted in comparison to other religion in the Empire, its relation to philosophy, whether it was monotheistic, and its most fundamental social dynamics. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Stanley Stowers (Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus, Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus, Brown University)Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc Dimensions: Width: 16.50cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 23.60cm Weight: 0.726kg ISBN: 9780197775677ISBN 10: 0197775675 Pages: 400 Publication Date: 20 September 2024 Audience: College/higher education , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: To order  Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us. Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. History and the Study of Religion Part 1: Religion as a Social Kind 2: Realism and Anti-Realism About Religion 3. Theorizing Social Kinds 4. Theorizing Religion as a Social Kind Part 2: Religion and Social Theory 5. Social Theory: The Search for the Magic Glue and the Status of Religion 6. Thinking the Ontology of Religion: Toward a Better Social Ontology Part 3: Christian Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean as a Test Case 7. Early Christianity as Evidence for Socially Superior Religion 8. The Formation of Christianity: Freelance Literate Experts, Literate Experts with Political-Institutional Power, and Non-Expert Insiders 9. Explaining the Evidence of Ancient Christian Formation 10. Concluding Arguments: Does Kinds Theory Aid Social Ontological Analysis? IndexReviewsAuthor InformationStanley Stowers taught in the areas of ancient Mediterranean religion and philosophy and the theory of religion at Brown University from 1981 until his retirement in 2013. He has written five books and some sixty articles and chapters in books. He directed many dissertations in the areas of Christianity and religion in the Roman Empire, Hellenistic philosophy, and the study of religion. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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