Religion and the Discourse on Modernity

The point of departure for this book is the debate about whether religious studies should privilege explanation or understanding. Engaging with contemporary scholarship in the field, Tremlett argues that the study of religions has always involved the conflation of facts and values and indeed has been structured in advance by the value-saturated discourse on disenchanted modernity. He argues that phenomenological and post-modern approaches to religions lack both theoretical and methodological coherence, and in their stead proposes a Marxist approach to religions that is at once empirical and informed by values pertaining to social justice, freedom and autonomy.

Paul-François Tremlett is a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies and a Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, UK. He has published essays on theory and method in the study of religions, on aspects of religion and culture in the Philippines and on the anthropology of religion on Taiwan.