The Sacred and Its Scholars ─ Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Primary Religious Data

This volume of essays is devoted to a careful examination of the importance of methodology in the study of primary religious data. The essays focus on the 'Sacred' as an ultimate object of descriptive analysis and critical scrutiny on the part of a select number of North American and European methodologists in the study and teaching of the history of religions and its allied disciplines. The central question to which the contributors respond are these: What is the Sacred? Is it a being or a concept of a being; is it a mental state or an objective reality or something else entirely? Can the Sacred be described as an empirical fact, or as a formal rule for religious inquiry? If the Sacred is a valid category in the study and teaching of religion, then what can be said about the antithesis of the sacred, namely the profane or the secular?
This volume probes these questions with great care in order to justify a number of ways the Sacred can be construed as an indispensable notion for the study and teaching of religion.

Thomas A. Idinopulos, Ph.D., University of Chicago, is Professor of Religious Studies at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. His published books include: Jerusalem Blessed, Jerusalem Cursed: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Holy City From David's Time to our Own (1991), The Erosion of Faith: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Contemporary Crisis in Religious Thought (1971), Land Weathered By Miracles: Historic Palestine From Bonaparte to Ben-Gurion (in progress), Mysticism, Nihilism, Feminism: New Critical Essays in the Theology of Simone Weil (co-editor, 1984) and Religion and Reductionism: Eliade, Segal, and the Challenge of the Social Sciences for the Study of Religion (co-editor, 1994).Edward A. Yonan, Ph.D., University of Chicago, is Professor at the Department of Religion at Millikin University, Decatur, Illinois. His publications include Religion and Reductionism and articles in a number of major journals.