Revising our 'Traditions'
Tradition - A Critical Primer - Steven Engler
Steven Engler [+ ]
Mount Royal University
Steven Engler is professor of Religious Studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. He teaches a variety of courses and research popular Catholicism, Umbanda, Kardecist Spiritism and related spirit-incorporation religions in Brazil, as well as theories and methodology in the study of religions.
Description
This chapter will argue—beginning to pull the book’s threads together—that scholars of religion\s should avoid essentializing tradition by uncritically assuming that religions are static or bear a privileged relation to the past. The concept of tradition will be shown to be at the heart of tensions between religionist and critical/historical approaches in the study of religion, in the sense that the conceptual tensions brought out in the previous chapters are echoes in those debates within the field. (The main example here will be Traditionalism, an early twentieth-century western esoteric current.)