"Kippenberg is a fine scholar of real integrity. His book is a readable and practical introduction to the rise of the study of religion and culture in Europe as well as an intriguing piece of cultural theorizing. It is serious without being pompous, intelligent without being at all impenetrable, and fresh without being strange."--Ivan Strenski, University of California, Riverside

Winner of the 2008 Christianity Today Award of Merit in Theology/Ethics The History of God In Discovering God, award-winning sociologist Rodney Stark presents a monumental history of the origins of the great religions from the Stone Age to the Modern Age and wrestles with the central questions of religion and belief.

The past quarter-century has seen an explosion of interest in the history of science and religion. But all too often the scholars writing it have focused their attention almost exclusively on the Christian experience, with only passing reference to other traditions of both science and faith. At a time when religious ignorance and misunderstanding have lethal consequences, such provincialism must be avoided and, in this pioneering effort to explore the historical relations of what we now call "science" and "religion," the authors go beyond the Abrahamic traditions to examine the way nature has been understood and manipulated in regions as diverse as ancient China, India, and sub-Saharan Africa. Science and Religion around the World also provides authoritative discussions of science in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- as well as an exploration of the relationship between science and the loss of religious beliefs. The narratives included in this book demonstrate the value of plural perspectives and of the importance of location for the construction and perception of science-religion relations.

The most comprehensive account yet of the human past from prehistory to the present.

How do you study religion and society? In this fascinating book, some of the most famous names in the field explain how they go about their everyday work of studying religions in the field. They explain how the ideas for their projects and books have come together, how their understanding of religion has changed over the years, and how their own beliefs have affected their work. They also comment on the changing nature of the field, the ideas which they regard as most important, and those which have not stood the test of time. Lastly they offer advice to young scholars, and suggest what needs to be done to enable the field to grow and develop further.

This monograph studies the professionalization of History of religions as an academic discipline in late 19th and early 20th century France and Europe. Its common thread is the work of the French Modernist priest and later Professor of History of religions at the Collège de France, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), who participated in many of the most topical debates among French and international historians of religions. Unlike his well-studied Modernist theology, Loisy’s writings on comparative religion, and his rich interactions with famous scholars like F. Cumont, M. Mauss, or J.G. Frazer, remain largely unknown. This monograph is the first to paint a comprehensive picture of his career as a historian of religions before and after his excommunication in 1908. Through a contextual analysis of publications by Loisy and contemporaries, and a large corpus of private correspondence, it illuminates the scientification of the discipline between 1890-1920, and its deep entanglement with religion, politics, and society. Particular attention is also given to the role of national and transnational scholarly networks, and the way they controlled the theoretical and institutional frameworks for studying the history of religions.

The contributions to this volume enter into a dialogue about the routes, modes and institutions that transferred and transformed knowledge across the late antique Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Each contribution not only presents a different case study but also investigates a different type of question, ranging from how history-writing drew on cross-culturally constructed stories and shared sets of skills and values, to how an ancient warlord was transformed into the iconic hero of a newly created monotheistic religion. Between these two poles, the emergence of a new, knowledge-related, but market-based profession in Baghdad is discussed, alongside the long-distance transfer of texts, doctrines and values within a religious minority community from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the mountains of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The authors also investigate the outsourcing of military units and skills across religious and political boundaries, the construction of cross-cultural knowledge of the balance through networks of scholars, patrons, merchants and craftsmen, as well as differences in linguistic and pharmaceutical practices in mixed cultural environments for shared corpora of texts, drugs and plants.