The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion

Praise for the previous edition: “This volume, expertly edited and introduced by Segal, collects a series of essays that combine clarity and accessibility with nuance and balance ... and are uniformly of high quality, each with a helpful bibliography that supplements the volume bibliography... This work will command a wide audience, ranging from the general public to religious studies specialists. Highly recommended.” —CHOICE “This is an excellent volume of papers about the study of religion both in conception and execution ... Robert Segal has done a marvelous job in editing the volume and providing a bibliography and index ... a very useful, well constructed and interesting book that should be widely read and used on courses.” —British Association for the Study of Religions Bulletin Now in its second edition, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion offers an expertly compiled and comprehensive overview of contemporary religious studies across the humanities and the social sciences. Truly interdisciplinary in its methodology and featuring an international team of contributors from diverse academic backgrounds, this Companion explores the anthropological, economic, literary, philosophical, psychological, sociological, and theological terrain of religious studies, and presupposes no prior knowledge of the academic study of religion. Each chapter is framed around an approach to religious studies from the vantage point of an adjacent discipline or topic that contributes to our understanding of religion, and is accompanied by its own bibliography to guide further reading. New to this edition are chapters which reflect contemporary trends in scholarship, including gender, science, law, music, emotion, cognition, globalization, and violence. Standard topics like death and the afterlife, ethics, fundamentalism, magic, ritual, and myth, among others, have been rigorously updated to reflect new directions in research and foster discussion among disciplines. Ideal for students and scholars alike, the second edition of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion remains an authoritative resource in the study of religion for anyone working in the fields of religious studies, theology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, history, and philosophy.