A01=Tomoko Masuzawa
aryan
Author_Tomoko Masuzawa
buddhism
Category=QRAC
charles hardwick
christianity
classification
colonialism
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
ernst troeltsch
exoticism
f max muller
frederick denison maurice
hegemony
history
indo european
islam
james freeman clarke
language
multiculturalism
nonfiction
othering
parliament
philology
philosophy
pluralism
postcolonialism
protestantism
race
religion
sacred books of the east
semitic
sociology
sufism
theology
turanian
universalism
world religions
Product details
- ISBN 9780226509891
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2005
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The idea of "world religions" expresses a vague commitment to multiculture alism. Not merely a descriptive concept, "world religions" is also a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language. In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought through a close reading of a variety of sources as early as the seventeenth century. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates how new classifications of language and race caused Buddhism and Islam to gain special significance as these religions came to be seen in opposing terms - Aryan on one hand and Semitic on the other.
Masuzawa also explores the complex relation of "world religions" to Protestant theology, from the hierarchical ordering of religions typical of the Christian supremacists of the nineteenth century, to the aspirations of early twentieth-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who embraced the pluralist logic of "world religions" and by so doing sought to reclaim the universalist destiny of European modernity.
Tomoko Masuzawa is associate professor of history and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of In Search of Dream Time: The Quest for the Origin of Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
