Religious Studies: A Global View

Association for the Study of Religion, including the current president, Giulia

Sfameni Gasparro, current vice-presidents, Halina Grzymala-Mosczcinska and

Helena Helve, and the current general secretary, Kim Knott.

Scholars from Western Europe, especially France, have been instrumental

in introducing questions of gender into the humanities, in particular Hélène

Cixous, Catherine Clément, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monqiue Wittig

(see Poxon 2005; Joy, Poxon, and O’Grady [eds] 2003). None of these writers,

however, is academically grounded in religious studies, and their work is

rarely discussed by mainstream Western European historians of religion. In

general, feminism has made less of an impact on religious studies in Western

Europe than in the US. Queer theory and questions of masculine religion, too,

have not yet found grounding in this region.

Emerging issues and perspectives

Western Europe is not a homogeneous academic landscape. Moreover, to a

large extent its scholarly agendas are transcontinental. Many current issues

and challenges are global, among them: the emergence of New Religious

Movements, alternative religions and Pentecostalism/charismatic Christianity

since the 1950s; the transcontinental spread of the New Age movement since

the late 1970s (Hanegraaff 1996: 10–12); the continuous, multifarious, and

ever changing involvement of religion in politics; and the invention of modern

mass media including television and the Internet. Some theoretical paradigms

are also transcontinental in scope, including feminism, postmodernism, and

post-colonialism—although the latter has not been pursued to the extent that

one might expect given European history. Cognitive approaches have not

found much resonance outside of Denmark and Finland. Cultural studies,

largely a British invention, have not had a great effect on the study of religion

on the continent. In Germany, there is a growing interest in economic

approaches (Gladigow 1995; Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaftvol. 8, no.

1 [2000]) as well as in the aesthetics of religion (Cancik and Mohr 1988;

Lanwerd 2002, 2003; Mohn 2004). Since the 1980s the geography of religion

has been an emerging field of study in France, Germany, and Britain, but mostly

outside departments of religious studies (Vincent, Dory, and Verdier [eds] 1995;

Bertrand and Muller 1999; Rinschede 1999; Park 1994).

Sociologists of religion have studied the contemporary religious land-

scapes in various countries (Hervieu-Léger 1992; Davie 2000a, 2000b; Halman

and Riis 2003; Friedli and Purdie 2004), and historians are increasingly

interested in various aspects of religious history, including that of the

contemporary world (e.g. Brown 2001; Lehmann 2004). Disciplines such as

folklore studies, art history, musicology, and law also maintain an on-going

interest in religion.

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MICHAEL STAUSBERG