New Patterns for Comparative Religion ─ Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective

The cross-cultural study of religion has always gone hand in hand with the worldview, sciences, or intellectual frameworks of the time. These frames, whether focused on psychology or politics, gender or colonialism, bring out perspectives for understanding religious behavior. Today one of our common civic worldviews is represented in the shift from scriptural to evolutionary history.

Bringing together into one volume for the first time the work of professor emeritus William E. Paden, this volume tracks the history of one of religious studies' leading scholar's attempts throughout his career to see what religion looks like when seen as a set of evolved behaviors, and as such, as part of a wider species-level, global tapestry.

Paden argues that although comparativism has been challenged as too culture-bound, too western, or too gendered, cross-over categories and concepts between religious traditions cannot be avoided. Arguing that there are recurrent patterns of human behavior common to our species and that thereby underlie all cultures, he proposes that the missing link in the Religion/Evolution debate is comparative religion, a global, cross-cultural perspective on religious behaviours throughout time. Each article is contextualized within this overall trajectory of thought within Paden's work and the history of the discipline as a whole.