SOAN 223 - Social Sciences and Religion

Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Winter 2013 and alternate years

Scholars still debate the appropriate relationship between social science and religion, with the two most extreme positions assuming the impossibility of a social science of religion, on the one hand, and denial of the validity of religious claims, on the other. Beginning with an examination of the fundamental debates regarding the nature and goals of social scientific inquiry, we examine classical and contemporary analyses of religion in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The major social scientific paradigms - materialist, functionalist, and phenomenological - differ in their implications for understanding and explaining religious phenomena; they provide the context for consideration of questions of reductionism, explanation vs. understanding, insider vs. outsider orientations, and the nature and limits to truth claims made both by social scientists and religious devotees and scholars. Markowitz.