Jeppe Sinding Jensen: The Study of Religion in a New Key – med dedikation

What are the global and cross-cultural phenomena of religion? They are neither things-in-the-world nor things ‘in themselves’, yet we know they are very real because they constitute means by which humans construct their lives. Just as thought, language, society and culture are not illusions, neither is religion.

The Study of Religion in a New Key examines difficulties currently confronting a general and comparative study of religion as a field of inquiry in the human sciences as well as the future prospects of the field. The author proposes a different look at the study of religion, shifting attention from metaphysical ‘givens’ and psychological experiences to the social, symbolic, and linguistic constructions of human habitats. Sinding Jensen illustrates how to study both specific religions as ethnographic or historical facts and religion as a general human and social activity. The Study of Religion in a New Key can be characterized as a handbook in how to perform a theoretically grounded general and comparative study of religion.