|
Product Description
For much of the past two centuries, religion has been understood as a universal phenomenon, a part of the “natural” human experience that is essentially the same across cultures and throughout history. Individual religions may vary through time and geographically, but there is an element, religion, that is to be found in all cultures during all time periods. Taking apart this assumption, Brent Nongbri shows that the idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history—a development that has been projected outward in space and backward in time with the result that religion now appears to be a natural and necessary part of our world.
Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Nongbri demonstrates that in antiquity, there was no conceptual arena that could be designated as “religious” as opposed to “secular.” Surveying representative episodes from a two-thousand-year period, while constantly attending to the concrete social, political, and colonial contexts that shaped relevant works of philosophers, legal theorists, missionaries, and others, Nongbri offers a concise and readable account of the emergence of the concept of religion.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Ancient Mystery Cults (Carl Newell Jackson Lectures)
- Religion in the Ancient Greek City
- The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Cambridge Companions to Religion)
- The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism
- God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts
- A Beginner's Guide to the Study of Religion
- History and Presence
- The Nature of the Gods (Oxford World's Classics)
- An Introduction to Roman Religion
- The Rites of Passage, Second Edition
*If this is not the "Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 8, 2024 06:01 +08.