William E Paden
Biographic Data
| ID | 339549 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William E Paden |
| GIVEN NAMES | William E |
| FAMILY NAME | Paden |
| SIGNATURE | PADEN W E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Vermont |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Naturalism and Protectionism in the Study of Religions
How should we study religion? Must we be religious ourselves to truly understand it? Do we study religion to advance our knowledge, or should the study of religions help to reintroduce the sacred into our increasingly secularized world?
Response to Review Panelists
This article consists of replies to the reviewers. For Ambasciano I show that his concern about the taint of epistemic phenomenologies can be largely deflected by understanding the exact contextualization of the materials he questions, particularly their place in the function, structure and serialized nature of the argument. Responding to Segal I try to clarify the evolutionary role of functionalism, the relation of Durkheim and Eliade as I am us…
Studying Religions with the Iron Curtain Closed and Open: The Academic Study of Religion in Eastern Europe, written by Tomáš Bubík and Henryk Hoffmann
Shifting worldviews: Modeling Sacrality in Naturalistic Perspective
In this essay, I offer an exercise in modeling a multifaceted concept of sacrality. I do so within the context of my increasing interest in naturalistic, evolutionary views of human social behavior. I distinguish four genres of behavior and their ethological trajectories where sacrality can thus be re-contextualized, at the same time freeing the term from its essentialized versions in religious studies. The behavioral frames include: making-sacre…
Tracks and themes in a shifting landscape: Reflections on 50 Years of the Study of Religion
The essay reflects on concepts that the author has found useful in navigating decades of changes in the academic study of religion. Among these themes or threads are the notions of reflexive framing and aspectualism, worlds as environments, and the continuing need to discover cross-cultural patterns. Explicating these constitutes the main section. Before that the author begins with a very brief account of how he entered the stream of the so-calle…
Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion
This article focuses primarily on ways in which some of Emile Durkheim's ideas on religion have been, and can be developed, particularly his central category of sacrality. The factor of the ‘sacred’ continues to be observable wherever group identities are challenged and put at stake, as in conflicts over ethnic and national autonomy, in loyalty to tribes and sects, in human-rights issues, and in domestic wars over such things as the inviolability…
Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion
Comparative Religion and the Whitehouse Project: Connections and Compatibilities
Harvey Whitehouse's ambitious and productive project on memory, transmission and religion arrives at a time when serious cross-cultural comparativism in religious studies is lacking and uncertain of its method ological underpinnings in a post-Eliadean, postmodern age. Yet coin cidentally, and quite against the grain of postmodern cultural studies, the new cognitivist approaches to religion are making a strong case for acknowledging panhuman unive…
Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations
This paper explores one way of addressing current skepticism about cross-cultural comparisons. The typical challenge to comparativism is that it either imposes or suppresses cultural meanings; religion, as a form of culture, is contextual and hence intrinsically incomparable. In contrast, I advance a model that identifies panhuman forms of behavior shared by any culture. Differences in historical religious life, in turn, can be described as cultu…
Prototypes: Western or Cross-Cultural?1
Sacred Order
Sacrality and worldmaking: New categorial perspectives
The category of the sacred in particular and the role of transcultural concept-formation in general have undergone an obvious crisis. For the most part, "the sacred," if not an empty label, has been linked with theologism, and transcultural concepts have been condemned for their general non-comparability and colonialist intent. The author approaches the matter of transcultural templates through an analysis of certain concepts of sacrality. With s…
What is Religion: Origins, Definitions, and Explanations
What is Religion? consists of fourteen essays written by a selection of scholars who represent a wide spectrum of approaches to the acedamic study of religion. Each of the essays is an effort not only to take stock of the present controversy concerning appropriate methodologies for the study of religion, but also to take one giant step beyond that to formulate a precise definition of religion. Given the considerable confusion today about what it …
A new comparativism: Reply to the panelists
I am grateful for these thoughtful replies and the questions they pose Readers will immediately see how different are the theoretical frames of the panelists and how this variety of concerns reveals the pluralistic and even territorial character of contemporary theoretical inquiry Hewitt presses political issues about how one handles otherness, Wiebe seeks to locate comparativism in relation to the history of Religionswissenschaft, and Lawson req…
Elements of a new comparativism1
While the field of religious studies is witnessing considerable creative work in socio-historical, cognitive, and hermeneutical analysis, it is less clear, with a few notable exceptions (Smith 1978, 1982, 1987, 1990, Poole 1986), how comparativist models have been advanced Indeed, comparativism has been widely perceived to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution But if it is the comparative, cross-cultural nature of religious subj…
Before “The Sacred” Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy
Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion
Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion
Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion
Before "the Sacred" Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy
Critics have objected that concept of as used in Eliadean phenomenology of religion is too theological and ontological to be appropriate for modern religious studies.2 They claim that expression, the sacred, refers either implicitly or explicitly to an a priori religious reality—to an object that is transcendent, mysterious, wholly other, unknowable, and which therefore is not ultimately an object for analysis. Thus linchpin concept that once def…
Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion
Before "the Sacred" Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy
Critics have objected that concept of as used in Eliadean phenomenology of religion is too theological and ontological to be appropriate for modern religious studies.2 They claim that expression, the sacred, refers either implicitly or explicitly to an a priori religious reality—to an object that is transcendent, mysterious, wholly other, unknowable, and which therefore is not ultimately an object for analysis. Thus linchpin concept that once def…
Sacred Order
Elements of a new comparativism1
While the field of religious studies is witnessing considerable creative work in socio-historical, cognitive, and hermeneutical analysis, it is less clear, with a few notable exceptions (Smith 1978, 1982, 1987, 1990, Poole 1986), how comparativist models have been advanced Indeed, comparativism has been widely perceived to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution But if it is the comparative, cross-cultural nature of religious subj…
Shifting worldviews: Modeling Sacrality in Naturalistic Perspective
In this essay, I offer an exercise in modeling a multifaceted concept of sacrality. I do so within the context of my increasing interest in naturalistic, evolutionary views of human social behavior. I distinguish four genres of behavior and their ethological trajectories where sacrality can thus be re-contextualized, at the same time freeing the term from its essentialized versions in religious studies. The behavioral frames include: making-sacre…
A new comparativism: Reply to the panelists
I am grateful for these thoughtful replies and the questions they pose Readers will immediately see how different are the theoretical frames of the panelists and how this variety of concerns reveals the pluralistic and even territorial character of contemporary theoretical inquiry Hewitt presses political issues about how one handles otherness, Wiebe seeks to locate comparativism in relation to the history of Religionswissenschaft, and Lawson req…
Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations
This paper explores one way of addressing current skepticism about cross-cultural comparisons. The typical challenge to comparativism is that it either imposes or suppresses cultural meanings; religion, as a form of culture, is contextual and hence intrinsically incomparable. In contrast, I advance a model that identifies panhuman forms of behavior shared by any culture. Differences in historical religious life, in turn, can be described as cultu…
Before "the Sacred" Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy
Critics have objected that concept of as used in Eliadean phenomenology of religion is too theological and ontological to be appropriate for modern religious studies.2 They claim that expression, the sacred, refers either implicitly or explicitly to an a priori religious reality—to an object that is transcendent, mysterious, wholly other, unknowable, and which therefore is not ultimately an object for analysis. Thus linchpin concept that once def…
Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion
Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion
Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion
Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion
Before “The Sacred” Became Theological: Rereading the Durkheimian Legacy
A new comparativism: Reply to the panelists
I am grateful for these thoughtful replies and the questions they pose Readers will immediately see how different are the theoretical frames of the panelists and how this variety of concerns reveals the pluralistic and even territorial character of contemporary theoretical inquiry Hewitt presses political issues about how one handles otherness, Wiebe seeks to locate comparativism in relation to the history of Religionswissenschaft, and Lawson req…
Elements of a new comparativism1
While the field of religious studies is witnessing considerable creative work in socio-historical, cognitive, and hermeneutical analysis, it is less clear, with a few notable exceptions (Smith 1978, 1982, 1987, 1990, Poole 1986), how comparativist models have been advanced Indeed, comparativism has been widely perceived to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution But if it is the comparative, cross-cultural nature of religious subj…
What is Religion: Origins, Definitions, and Explanations
What is Religion? consists of fourteen essays written by a selection of scholars who represent a wide spectrum of approaches to the acedamic study of religion. Each of the essays is an effort not only to take stock of the present controversy concerning appropriate methodologies for the study of religion, but also to take one giant step beyond that to formulate a precise definition of religion. Given the considerable confusion today about what it …
Sacrality and worldmaking: New categorial perspectives
The category of the sacred in particular and the role of transcultural concept-formation in general have undergone an obvious crisis. For the most part, "the sacred," if not an empty label, has been linked with theologism, and transcultural concepts have been condemned for their general non-comparability and colonialist intent. The author approaches the matter of transcultural templates through an analysis of certain concepts of sacrality. With s…
Prototypes: Western or Cross-Cultural?1
Sacred Order
Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Variations
This paper explores one way of addressing current skepticism about cross-cultural comparisons. The typical challenge to comparativism is that it either imposes or suppresses cultural meanings; religion, as a form of culture, is contextual and hence intrinsically incomparable. In contrast, I advance a model that identifies panhuman forms of behavior shared by any culture. Differences in historical religious life, in turn, can be described as cultu…
Comparative Religion and the Whitehouse Project: Connections and Compatibilities
Harvey Whitehouse's ambitious and productive project on memory, transmission and religion arrives at a time when serious cross-cultural comparativism in religious studies is lacking and uncertain of its method ological underpinnings in a post-Eliadean, postmodern age. Yet coin cidentally, and quite against the grain of postmodern cultural studies, the new cognitivist approaches to religion are making a strong case for acknowledging panhuman unive…
Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion
Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion
This article focuses primarily on ways in which some of Emile Durkheim's ideas on religion have been, and can be developed, particularly his central category of sacrality. The factor of the ‘sacred’ continues to be observable wherever group identities are challenged and put at stake, as in conflicts over ethnic and national autonomy, in loyalty to tribes and sects, in human-rights issues, and in domestic wars over such things as the inviolability…
Tracks and themes in a shifting landscape: Reflections on 50 Years of the Study of Religion
The essay reflects on concepts that the author has found useful in navigating decades of changes in the academic study of religion. Among these themes or threads are the notions of reflexive framing and aspectualism, worlds as environments, and the continuing need to discover cross-cultural patterns. Explicating these constitutes the main section. Before that the author begins with a very brief account of how he entered the stream of the so-calle…
Response to Review Panelists
This article consists of replies to the reviewers. For Ambasciano I show that his concern about the taint of epistemic phenomenologies can be largely deflected by understanding the exact contextualization of the materials he questions, particularly their place in the function, structure and serialized nature of the argument. Responding to Segal I try to clarify the evolutionary role of functionalism, the relation of Durkheim and Eliade as I am us…
Studying Religions with the Iron Curtain Closed and Open: The Academic Study of Religion in Eastern Europe, written by Tomáš Bubík and Henryk Hoffmann
Shifting worldviews: Modeling Sacrality in Naturalistic Perspective
In this essay, I offer an exercise in modeling a multifaceted concept of sacrality. I do so within the context of my increasing interest in naturalistic, evolutionary views of human social behavior. I distinguish four genres of behavior and their ethological trajectories where sacrality can thus be re-contextualized, at the same time freeing the term from its essentialized versions in religious studies. The behavioral frames include: making-sacre…
Naturalism and Protectionism in the Study of Religions
How should we study religion? Must we be religious ourselves to truly understand it? Do we study religion to advance our knowledge, or should the study of religions help to reintroduce the sacred into our increasingly secularized world?
Sociology (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (15 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Religious studies (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Study and Philosophy of Religion (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works)