Charles H. Long and the Re-Orientation of American Religious History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8202656 |
|---|---|
| Authors | L Benjamin Rolsky (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 80 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 750-774 |
| Publication date | 2012-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jaarel/lfs045 |
| OpenAlex | W2134806294 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 5 |
THIS REVIEW ESSAY is a re-engagement with historian of religions Charles H. Long and his contributions to the study of religion and American religion and culture. I argue that Long provides scholars of American religious history with a much needed conceptual layering that locates “America” within the contexts of the Atlantic world, modernity, and cultural contact through exchange.1 As such, Long defines his investigations of religion as hermeneutical projects that question the unreflective and unaffected position of the colonizer in the creating and disciplining of knowledge through a discursive stylistic of scientific objectivity and ontological purity. In these ways, Long's work assists scholars in better understanding the epistemological dynamics inherent in the creation of three separate but interrelated subjects of study within the larger practice and execution of American religious history: religion, America, and American religion.2 Long's work in the history of religions discipline founded at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century is representative of the very methodologies and approaches that helped define the modern study of religion. Tracing its American lineage back to the appointment of Albert Eustace Haydon as chair of the comparative religions department at Chicago in 1919, and later to the selection of Joachim Wach as Haydon's successor in 1945, the University of Chicago's history of religions program sought to embody what German scholars of the nineteenth century had termed Religionswissenschaft, or the science of religion. Pioneered by Max Müller in his Introduction to the Science of Religion of 1873, this approach consisted of a comparative philological framework that explored the relationship between the observable world of those under study and the subsequent linguistic descriptions of it. This particular history of religions approach foregrounded a hermeneutical or interpretive method in the study of religion as a direct outgrowth of the philosophies of Rudolph Otto, Edmund Husserl, and Gerardus van der Leeuw. These scholars helped form a phenomenology of religion that encouraged a sympathetic approach to its subjects and their worlds (Petro 2010).
Epistemology · History of religions · Modernity · Objectivity (philosophy) · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Anthropology · History · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Highly cited | No |