The author comments on Leonardo Ambasciano's book An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge (2019) and develops the line of its argument that a fideistic, sui generis, confessional History of Religions tradition continues due to the tacit support from scholars, institutions and organisations. Gnosticism is presented as a case study, showing how it exemplifies core critiques of HoR, and is supported by the same scholars and institutions, particularly the IAHR. The author then considers the recent British Academy report into Theology and Religious Studies in the UK to argue that the HoR tradition in contemporary Religious Studies is not a "problem to be solved", but rather something at the very basis of the discipline. The argument is therefore made that there cannot be a truly scientific academic study of religion while RS exists.
This paper is a reply to the commentaries by David G. Robertson and Konrad Talmont-Kaminski on An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge (2019) and published in this same issue of Religio: Revue pro religionistiku. Topics discussed herein include: the need for a consilient and cross-disciplinary research programme for cognitive historiography; pseudoscience in Religious Studies; the epistemological study of disciplinary ignorance-making (or Agnotology); and cross- and inter-disciplinary proposals to support an overhaul of the field's method and theory (i.e., Virtue Epistemology, Virtue Ethics, Philosophy of Expertise, Management Studies, Evolutionary Epistemology, Cognitive Historiography, History and Philosophy of Science).
This article aims to critically evaluate the current state of research into the Protestant and Catholic Churches in the Chinese context. It introduces two main academic discourses on Christianity in China; it also mentions some challenges connected to the use of the triple-market approach proposed by Yang Fenggang, and extensively used by many scholars of Chinese religions today. Instead of employing the market approach, I believe in the need to confront the main discourses with empirical data. In the article, I use the example of the official Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which is categorised as a "red" religious market supporting communist rule. As such, the churches united under this body are often neglected by researchers, as they are perceived as "unproblematic" – and, therefore, do not support the narrative of Christian groups victimized by the Chinese government. Nonetheless, the Christian churches (or any religious groups within the "red" market) need our scholarly attention, as choosing cooperation instead of opposition is not unproblematic – and various processes of negotiation between a religious group and the government should be included in the research.
The article discusses Donald Wiebe and Luther Martin's paper "Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion". The central thesis of the two authors is that Religious Studies are not and probably can never be a "scientific" discipline. It is argued that the reasons given by the two authors to support their thesis are unconvincing and contradictory. Their suggestion that the study of religion should subscribe to an understanding of science that abandons the concept of agency and reduces human behaviour to "natural" causes is criticised on theoretical and methodological grounds. In fact, it is not possible to completely forsake hermeneutics and to study religion using the methods of the natural sciences because these methods do not allow us to identify religious behaviour. Therefore, the Study of Religion, of course, cannot be a discipline of the natural sciences. However, as a social science, the Study of Religion is no less possible than the social scientific study of any other subject.