Reviews for Aspects of Religion Essays in Honour of Ninian Smart

The average rating for Aspects of Religion Essays in Honour of Ninian Smart based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-03-27 00:00:00 Michael Lewenson This is a "big" book, propelled by fertile thinking about all sorts of issues in the study of religion, but especially animated by the need to find a theoretical and methodological path between two unhelpful pretensions: that the religious studies scholar can intuit the essence of religion amidst the welter of data of religions on the one hand, or that the scholar can reduce religions to nothing but various factors that are not at all religious. Both these pretensions suffer from an uncritical belief in the objectivity of scholarly inquiry. Flood seeks, not to abandon objectivity, but to give a critical account of it, based in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and others on language as the means and medium of all cultural (re)generation, and, even more importantly, the "dialogical" constitution of language and language users.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-01 00:00:00 THOMAS MCCARTY This account gives a great amount of history and information on the Protestant Reformation and offers a very critical analysis that many could stand to look into with an open mind. The greater speculation on culture and society as a whole is also very interesting, though the latter part about Orthodoxy is nothing special alongside most Catechisms. The writing was average and good enough, but several parts were written too offensively. While it doesn't bother me on a personal level, I can see it turning away many who might be drawn in to this book due to the author and where he comes from.