Berea College

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<em>By Jeff B. Pool, Ph.D.<br>Eli Lilly Chair in Religion and Culture Professor of Religion<br>Chairperson, Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality</em>

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In this essay, I offer an answer to the following question: “Why should one study religions and spirituality or religious and spiritual phenomena?” Several important reasons recommend the neutral, non-religious, descriptive, or phenomenological academic exploration, examination, and analysis of religions, religious communities, or religious traditions, specifically, and human spirituality, more generally. Many scholars and numerous academic departments that dedicate themselves to this field of studies have identified the same or similar reasons and factors as well.1 Although the discussion that follows most certainly contains many if not most of the major reasons and factors that strongly encourage a neutral, non-religious, descriptive, or phenomenological academic exploration, examination, and analysis of religions and human spirituality, I do not claim to present an exhaustive list. I offer eighteen reasons, however, that strongly recommend studies of religions and spirituality or religious and spiritual phenomena.

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The Faculty of the Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality presupposes working definitions for the major terms in the departmental name (“religions” and “spirituality”), as well as for the notion of human “culture” from which the phenomena emerge to which those two major terms point. Those three major conceptual presuppositions identify and define the purpose and work of the Department, as well as the objects of its studies.

The departmental Faculty acknowledges the complex history of the concepts that the name for the Department presupposes.1 For that reason, clarifying the academic field of study to which the name of the Department refers requires definitions of the major terms in the departmental name. The name for the Department, “Department for Studies of Religions and Spirituality,” explicitly attests to two of the three most obvious principal conceptual presuppositions that inform and establish this academic field of study, but also implicitly points to a third conceptual presupposition that the two explicit conceptual presuppositions themselves presuppose: (1) the concept of “religions,” which identifies human phenomena that both arise from and, in turn, shape human cultures; (2) the concept of “spirituality” that designates an essential dimension of human experience, of which religions or religious communities themselves constitute one family of ways through which individual humans and their societies express the spiritual dimension of human life; and (3) the concept of “culture” that most generally refers to a key feature of human life from which both human spirituality and human religions themselves emerge and which, in turn, help to shape culture itself. The following definitions and descriptions of these three conceptual presuppositions begin with the most general and move to the most specific of those three concepts: from the concept of “culture,” through the concept of “spirituality,” and to the concept of “religions.”

In this essay, I explore a popular contemporary notion or concept: “academic studies of religions and spirituality.” First, I identify an erroneous distinction between academic studies of religious phenomena and religious studies of such phenomena that the larger concept sometimes presupposes, considering several significant problems in that distinction. Second, I propose a more useful distinction with which to characterize academic studies of religions and spirituality.

Essays