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The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion is a scholarly book about the academic study of religion. Edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler , the book was published in the United Kingdom in 2016.
Archaeopress (Oxford) 9781407303345 An Archaeological Guide to Bahrain: 2011 Rachel MacLean Archaeopress (Oxford) 9781905739363 The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion: 2011 n/a (edited volume) Oxford University Press (Oxford) 9780199232444 Temporalising Anthropology. Archaeology in the Talensi Tong Hills, Northern Ghana: 2013
Religion may be defined as "a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs," [1] whereas ritual is "an established or prescribed procedure for a religious or ...
Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology.This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods (surveys, polls, demographic and census analysis) and of qualitative approaches (such as participant observation, interviewing, and analysis of archival ...
The Oxford Companion to World Mythology provides the following summary and examples: [7] [8] Religious stories are "holy scripture" to believers—narratives used to support, explain, or justify a particular system's rituals, theology, and ethics—and are myths to people of other cultures or belief systems.
[3] Some of these scholars (e.g., W. Robertson-Smith, James George Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, S. H. Hooke) supported the "primacy of ritual" hypothesis, which claimed that "every myth is derived from a particular ritual and that the syntagmatic quality of myth is a reproduction of the succession of ritual act."
Animal faith is the study of animal behaviours that suggest proto-religious faith. It is commonly believed that religion and faith are unique to humans, [1] [2] [3] largely due to the typical dictionary definition of the word religion (see e.g. Wiktionary or Dictionary.com) requiring belief in a deity, which has not been observed in non-human animals. [4]
Religion prior to the Upper Paleolithic is speculative, [4] and the Lower Paleolithic in particular has no clear evidence of religious practice. [5] Not even the loosest evidence for ritual exists prior to 500,000 years before the present, though archaeologist Gregory J. Wightman notes the limits of the archaeological record means their practice cannot be thoroughly ruled out. [6]