Religion and Self Consciousness
500-700 words per question. The textbook to drive the information from is Rodrigues & Harding, Introduction to The Study of Religion. London and New York: Routledge Publishers.
1, The authors quote Jonathan Z. Smith at the end of our textbook:
“Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly selfconscious (sic).”
Based on materials we have covered in class, and in particular the final chapter of the textbook, engage with the quotation by explaining what you think Smith means by this and how you would advise a student of religion to be “relentlessly self-conscious.”
2, Bonjour! Shalom! was released in 1994. This article from the Canadian Jewish News in 2018 (https://web.archive.org/web/20190323105927/https://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/in-outremont-tense-relations-between-hasidim-and-francophones-are-improving) gives us an update on the relationship between the Outrement Hasidic Jews and their Gentile neighbours. Compare this situation with at least one other “clash of darshanas” we have touched on in the course.