Is Philology Relevant? 1999

Temenos - Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion

The discipline of History of religions has changed in Sweden over the latest decades. Its traditional connection to text and language has weakened and its emphasis shifted towards social and contemporary aspects of religion. In this article the societal trends and the reforms in Swedish university politics that lie behind this change are pinpointed and discussed. It is argued that the transformation has been twofold. On the one hand the discipline has grown considerably and expanded into empirical fields, methods, and theories that were alien to it only twenty-five years ago. On the other it has been forced to adjust to a political climate focused on direct social relevance, measurability, and quantifiable efficiency. The article presents the transformation as consisting in four parallel processes labelled the efficiency turn, the altered knowledge contract, the replacement by religionsvetenskap, and the loss of prestige, respectively.

Religious Studies Review, 2006

Method & Theory in The Study of Religion, 1998

Religiographies, 2023

Hans Thomas Hakl, born in Graz (Austria) in 1947, is a lawyer, businessman, and independent scholar in the fields of history of religion, spirituality, magic, and esotericism (Fig. 1). Hakl has presented many papers on these topics in important academic venues and has published several articles and books in prestigious scientific journals and publishing houses. Despite his lack of training in the social and human sciences, Hakl’s research has been generally well-received. Other scholars have criticized Hakl’s shortcomings,1 possible religionist leaning regarding Eranos, and claimed that he implicitly whitewashes the extreme right intellectual Julius Evola.2 Hakl distanced himself from tradi- tionalist politics as destined to “nasty totalitarianism”3 but at the same time the question about how to discuss problematic authors, such as Evola, remains open (see Marco Pasi’s Introduction in this special issue).

„Religion in Kultur – Kultur in Religion“: Burkhard Gladigows Beitrag zum Paradigmenwechsel in der Religionswissenschaft / „Religion in Culture – Culture in Religion“: Burkhard Gladigow’s Contribution to Shifting Paradigms in the Study of Religion, 2021

aware of the impact his work has had on the development of the SoR in Germany and beyond. This volume aims to bring Gladigow's work (back) into conversation, embedding it in the disciplinary history of the SoR and its turn away from an ahistorical understanding of religion as sui generis and towards a multi-perspective discipline, which sees ›religion‹ as a fluent field of research, connected with possibly all areas of culture and, therefore, requiring collaboration with other disciplines and yet providing an integrative framework that reaches beyond a mere collection of perspectives working side by side, as is the case in religious studies. In this introduction, we aim to introduce some of the main interests, concepts, and lines of arguments in Gladigow's work. Here and there, we will make use of our own experience with his work and with the author himself-as supervisor, teacher, colleague, or conversation partner in texts and in person. We will also draw on an informal conversation between Gladigow, Anne Koch, and Alexandra Grieser that the author has generously given permission to use. 2 Gladigow, a classicist by training, erudite in philosophy, sociology, and law studies, and with a lively interest in economics and the natural sciences, is professor emeritus for the Department of the General and Comparative Study of Religion (Allgemeine und Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft) and Classics at the University of Tübingen. His oeuvre comprises of a large number of articles and book chapters written between the late 1960s and the early 2000s 3-a choice linked to his conviction that innovative debates often take place in articles, comparable to the publishing habits in the natural sciences, and that the short form can have a greater impact than a 1000-page volume. His work is embedded in a period of change in the history of the German study of religion when a young generation of scholars-many of whom contributed to this volume-started to renew this academic discipline, which at the time was dominated by the tradition of the phenomenology of religion and had a rather affirmative occupation with religious traditions, isolated from the innovative and critical debates in the historical, social, and cultural sciences. In this phase of renewal, Gladigow played a seminal role. Together with others 6 After his death in 2017, Smith's influence was widely discussed. See Krawcowicz, Imagining Smith forthcoming. We are making this comparison in the light of a meeting between Smith and a group of scholars from Germany at the Annual Conference of the American

Between Philology and Theology, 2013

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual "Brill" typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.

Numen, 2000

Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 2015