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Transcendence and Reductionism in Religious Studies: Eric Sharpe On Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Transcendence and Reductionism in Religious Studies: Eric Sharpe On Wilfred Cantwell Smith TRANSCENDENCE AND REDUCTIONISM IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES: ERIC SHARPE ON WILFRED CANTWELL SMITH ANTONIO R. GUALTIERI Sharpe probes two salient features of religious studies as understood and practised by Wilfred Cantwell Smith who is characterized as having exercised a "considerable impact on the field of religious studies". (282) First he addresses the question of personal meaning as the proper focus of religious studies, and, second, the place assigned to transcendence. The first aspect is discussed more fully in the 1975 first edition of Comparative Religion, and the second in the revised edition of 1986. With respect to personal meaning, we may observe a certain ambiguity in Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion (1963) in which religious 48 faith is characterized as 1) the meaning of the historical tradition and 2) the relationship to transcendence. Though perhaps much ignored in practice, there is nothing singular about the exhortation to historians of religion to discern the meaning that devotees discover in or assign to the perceptible elements of their traditions. Eliade and Bleeper amongst others had said as much. Smith did, however, add a particular forcefulness to this personalist hermeneutic. At the Indiana Conference of 1964 he argued that, "What http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Brill

Transcendence and Reductionism in Religious Studies: Eric Sharpe On Wilfred Cantwell Smith

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 1989 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0943-3058
eISSN
1570-0682
DOI
10.1163/157006889X00178
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

TRANSCENDENCE AND REDUCTIONISM IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES: ERIC SHARPE ON WILFRED CANTWELL SMITH ANTONIO R. GUALTIERI Sharpe probes two salient features of religious studies as understood and practised by Wilfred Cantwell Smith who is characterized as having exercised a "considerable impact on the field of religious studies". (282) First he addresses the question of personal meaning as the proper focus of religious studies, and, second, the place assigned to transcendence. The first aspect is discussed more fully in the 1975 first edition of Comparative Religion, and the second in the revised edition of 1986. With respect to personal meaning, we may observe a certain ambiguity in Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion (1963) in which religious 48 faith is characterized as 1) the meaning of the historical tradition and 2) the relationship to transcendence. Though perhaps much ignored in practice, there is nothing singular about the exhortation to historians of religion to discern the meaning that devotees discover in or assign to the perceptible elements of their traditions. Eliade and Bleeper amongst others had said as much. Smith did, however, add a particular forcefulness to this personalist hermeneutic. At the Indiana Conference of 1964 he argued that, "What

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Method & Theory in the Study of Religion – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 1989

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