William E. Paden - Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion
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Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion
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From Gods, to ritual observance to the language of myth and the distinction between the sacred and the profane, Religious Worlds explores the structures common to all spiritual traditions.
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Religious Worlds : The Comparative Study of Religion ; With a New Preface
author
:
Paden, William E.
publisher
:
Beacon Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0807012297
print isbn13
:
9780807012291
ebook isbn13
:
9780807012123
language
:
English
subject
Religion.
publication date
:
1994
lcc
:
BL48.P22 1994eb
ddc
:
291
subject
:
Religion.
Page iii
Religious Worlds
The Comparative Study of Religion: With a new Preface
William E. Paden
Page iv
Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108
Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
1988, 1994 by William E. Paden All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
04 03 02 01 00 6 7 8 9 10
Text design by Hunter Graphics
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paden, William E. Religious worlds: the comparative study of religion / William E. Paden. [2nd ed.] p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8070-1229-7 1. Religion. I. Title. BL48.P22 1994 291dc20 93-43025
Page v
CONTENTS
Preface to the 1994 Edition
vii
Preface to the 1988 Edition
xiii
Introduction
1
One Religion and Comparative Perspective
1 Some Traditional Strategies of Comparison
15
2 Religion as a Subject Matter
35
3 Worlds
51
Two Structures and Variations in Religious Worlds
4 Myth
69
5 Ritual and Time
93
6 Gods
121
7 Systems of Purity
141
8 Comparative Perspective: Some Concluding Points
161
Notes
171
Index
187
Page vii
PREFACE TO THE 1994 EDITION
In the five years since Religious Worlds was published, the need to understand the plurality of culture and religion has become even more apparent. Issues of pluralism indeed seem to have become part of the tasks and riddles of civilization itself. The profound differences between human worldviews have not been erased by information technology or international business networks, with their appearance of having so easily unified the surface of the globe. Beneath the surface, the earth is still a patchwork of bounded loyalties and hallowed mythologies, a checkerboard of collective, sacred identities. The theater of ethnic and religious diversity has not gone away. The variety of human worlds, with all their conflicts, is still there despite the facade of unity.
Pluralism refers not only to cultural diversity but also to the many kinds of "knowledges" or lenses humans use to perceive and construe their universe. With increasing clarity we see how inevitably the world forms itself according to our different frames of reference. A chemical lens will only register a chemical world; a poetic lens uncovers a poetic world; a religious lens yields a religious world. These multiple frames whereby telescopes picture the universe one way and religious symbols picture it another simply coexist. Alter the lens and you alter the data; change the receiving channel and you change the program; switch groups and you exchange one world for another.
Models of knowledge based on an exclusive, privileged, single lenswhether that of the sciences or the religions or white middle-class Americanshave come under challenge. In a new, pluralistic setting, in this new openness to the many
Page viii
architectural possibilities of what we take to be the world, the study of religious diversity has a definite role to play.
When in 1963 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the practice of prayer in public schools, it advocated at the same time that the comparative study of religions should be an indispensable part of education. Yet the study of religion has long been controlled by what might be called the interests of private ownership, that is, the religious groups themselves, so that the subject matter of "the gods" has until recent times lacked an appropriately unbiased vocabulary parallel to those in the study of the physical and social worlds. There cannot be a study of religion that is not at the same time the study of all religion, just as one cannot have a "geology" based only on impressions of the rocks in one's backyard. Religious Worlds, which works at broadening, purging, and reshaping our otherwise provincial language about religious life, is a small contribution to this new globally oriented era of religious studies and I am gratified that it has found a wide readership in college classes and in Japanese and German translations.
I continue to be impressed by how useful, synthesizing, and far-reaching the concept of "world" is as an organizing category for the study of religion. "World" is not just a philosophical abstraction nor a word for the endless galactic stardust. In more human, experiential terms, it is an actual habitat, a lived environment, a place. It is what we need to understand about others in order to understand their life and behavior.
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