Abrahamic Religions

Reading this monograph brings many rewards. Among them is the chance to engage a thoughtful handling of two scholarly aggregations, or constellations, that currently prevail in the academic study of religion. Historically minded humanists and social scientists populate one constellation. They gravitate toward diachronic specificity. The other constellation includes phenomenologists and metaphysically inclined theologians. They incline toward timeless essentials, stable identities, and abstract universals. One measure of the practical difference between the two constellations is the number of precautions taken by the historically minded humanists and social scientists to avoid the impression that their scholarship is religion by other means. In this monograph, as in his other publications, Aaron W. Hughes makes no mystery of his astral affiliation. Early on in the Introduction, he argues that the recent lumping together of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam within the irenic category of Abrahamic religions is “a form of wish fulfillment and ecumenicism. Like many of the terms and categories we employ in the academic study of religion, it is artificial and imprecise, a modern projection that we then transcribe onto the historical record. The danger of employing such generic categories is that they blur our understanding ...” (3).

Aesthetics · Christianity · Constellation · Epistemology · Genizah · Humanism · Judaism · Metaphysics · Political science · Problem of universals · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies