When Wach began teaching in Leipzig in 1924, the discipline of the history of religions (Religionswissenschaft), which was still in its infancy, faced serious dangers. In his second phase, Wach tried to develop a systematic dimension of the history of religions on the model of sociology. Wach was convinced that the raison d'être of the history of religions is the hidden "religious experience" of humanity.
Goodspeed, A History of the University of Chicago: The First Quarter Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), PF,.
Essays in the History of Religions by Joachim Wach
Master and Disciple: Two Religio-Sociological Studies
The disciple understands the teacher; the student understands the teaching -- the ability of the teacher. John the Evangelist appears in the embodiment of the concept of friend, disciple friend. Certainly, in terms of crucial elements, there is a similarity in the importance of the disciples to the master.
All this is late stylization as it is active in the development legends of the masters.
Mahayana Buddhism
It is realized through the growth of Buddha-mind (cittopada), which is an expression of pure compassion. It is the strengthening of prajna that contributes most to the destruction of the seeds of existence. The heterogeneity in the development of individual systems testifies to a wide range of interpretation.
34;political' in the sense of the ability to find the right means for the moment.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
As the Mezzofanti of his time (Mezzofanti was a multilingual scholar of the eighteenth century, one of the greatest linguists of all time), Humboldt has remained alive in the consciousness of the German people. Under Schleiermacher's student Dohna, Humboldt took over the Ministry of Education from the Ministry of the Interior. To his initiative and planning was due the founding of the University of Berlin, to which Fichte, Hegel,.
Schleiermacher, Marheineke, Gaus and others were signed, as was the reorganization of the Academy and of the Berlin Museum. In his critical study of Goethe's poem Hermann und Dorothea, Humboldt spoke about the building he planned. In art he finds a reconciliation of nature and freedom, which reveals itself in the organic character of the work of art.
His philosophy of history is focused on describing "the effort of an idea to place itself in reality." Poet and. These truly "human" expressions are considered by the great researcher of antiquity to be the expressions of the Greeks. Humboldt devoted two essays to the characterology of the sexes, a problem of great interest to his romantic contemporaries.
Sex should be interpreted as the path to the perfection of humanity, i.e. the balancing of the natural with the moral element. He believes that speaking and understanding should be considered as effects of the ability to express.
Sociology Of Religion
The last phase reflects to a considerable extent the influence of Max Weber's and Ernst Troeltsch's German sociology of religion (especially Robert Will's studies). To Pinard de la Boullaye we owe the best extant history of the study of religion and a. A few words can be said about the role of the comparative method in the study of socio-religious phenomena.
More than the previously mentioned alternatives, it is a matter of principle here. If the sociology of religion system is not broad enough to cover everything, there must be something wrong with it. What about the social background and origins of religious movements and their leaders and theirs.
Size, character, purpose, relationship to the other groups, leadership of the specifically religious group will have to be investigated. The social origins of the group and the composition of its constituency raise two different problems. What is the (theological) self-interpretation of the nature and meaning of its community is the first question.
A satisfactory and distinctive nomenclature will have to be worked out by the student of the general sociology of religious groups. The sociologist is interested in its origin and formation, in the structure and meaning of the Hindu community.
Radhakrishnan and the Comparative Study of Religion
The student of the history of religions will have to ask: Does he do full or adequate justice to both Brahmanism and Christianity. Ramanuja's version of Vedanta to which he adheres is the Brahmanical phase and not the medieval form of Hinduism which represents to him the "religion" of India. The result is the one-sidedness in the presentation and evaluation of the religion of India which we find in so many publications by Western scholars and amateurs.
34; The different religious men of the East and the West must share their visions and insights, hopes and fears, plans and intentions." This is indeed desirable, but in what spirit, and why not in the Spirit of Christ. Jesus' , with the developments that Christianity has undergone in the West.17 In his analysis of the role of intellectualism, scholasticism, social solidarity and activism, and of their historical causes, there is much truth. In this area there are serious errors and much sadness mistakes of the past will have to be undone.
More specifically, however, it must be said that Hindu philosophy does not fully respect the difference that exists between the Indian concept of Avatars and the Christian notion of the "Son of God." The view that. Hinduism with the good points of Christianity."45 An evaluation of the implications of this statement will lead to an affirmative and a negative conclusion. But a combination in the simple sense of addition, even in the sense of a synthesis of Hindu and the Hindu language and negative. Christian religions, it seems.
He is aware of the magnificent way in which Radhakrishnan upholds the ideals of justice, order and freedom. In his book Varieties of Religious Experience, Christian and Non-Christian (1951), the author of this paper attempted to analyze the differences between Christians and denominations.
Religion In America: The Sociological Approach to Religion and its Limits
The definition of its nature in the self-interpretation of the religious group is one of the cardinal principles of faith. Yet it is extremely important to do justice to the nature of the religious group as such. How does it see its own nature in light of the central religious experience that created and sustained it.
The intensity of the religious feeling and the urgency of the religious concern is very different from group to group. I have studied the integration of the religious group roughly in my Sociology of Religions (pp. 36ff.). In the latter case, the structure of the religious group will at no time coincide with other orders such as the social, economic or political.
Depending on the constitution of the group, different functions and order in the culture are defined. Equally fundamental as the problem of communicating religious experiences is the problem of religious authority. I devoted the chapter to a comparative study of the relationship between religion and the state (Sociology of Religion).
Everything is very simple in the case of the intimate religious community where practically all activities can be shared. It is interesting to study in a comparative way the meaning and function of the notion of.
On Teaching History of Religions
They force us to reconsider and reconceptualize the nature, function and method of the discipline thus challenged. Cf. my article on the place of the history of religions in the study of theology in the Journal of Religion, 1948.). There is at least one more doubt in the minds of those who are unwilling or unwilling to admit that the study of the history of religions can be a good thing.
Some will question the identity and coherence of the extensive studies that together constitute the work in our field. In order to relate these data and interpret them as expressions of religious experiences, some notions about the nature of this experience are necessary. Suffice it to say, with regard to the special subject of this paper, that certain demands for the teaching of the history of religion today follow from the brief analysis of the situation which we have written here.
The other consists of an acquaintance with the nature of religious experience, an acquaintance which is, after all, the indispensable prerequisite for the work of the historian of religion. This is not to say that we advocate a flight away from the facts into the realm of the fantastic, but rather a reminder of the teacher to be. An additional problem is the difference in the denominational background of the students in many higher education institutions in the United States.
It is characteristic of the prevailing problems that, although the number of manuals on the history of religions is enormous, the main American standard work is G. They are best entrusted to the most experienced rather than the least experienced professors.
On Understanding
Nietzsche's modern biological philosophy of life with the idea of the unity of all life. Insofar as we are part of the divine creation, we see it in its true nature. The completely similar cannot be understood because any understanding requires a certain separation of subject from object.
For example, the personalities in dramatic poetry are seen through the medium of the poet. After these remarks on the objective problems of understanding, we can briefly consider its subjective conditions, which are the presuppositions for understanding the not completely strange and the not completely familiar. All natural sciences and humanities make their contributions to the enlargement of the empirical self.
We see the result in the evidence of the understanding of the human spirit given by such French and English moralists as Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Chesterfield, Chamfort, Hume, and Vauvenargues. There have been many discussions in hermeneutics about the connection between the synthetic and the Psychologists and sociologists have discussed the possibility of direct and immediate capture of another's personality.
Therefore, we must now turn to the problem of the possibility of limiting and controlling the subjective factor, which we have seen as inevitable. It is true that not everyone can understand everything, but as we have already seen, there is the possibility of verification and control of the presuppositions on which understanding can be based.