The Scholarship of 'Cults' and the 'Cult' of Scholarship
Keywords:
Philosophy, Religion, Culture, AcademicsAbstract
The following pages will undertake a critique of the academic enterprise as it manifests in the study of new religious movements, although it
is also, by implication, simultaneously a critique of secular scholarship more generally. My objections to new religion scholarship can be condensed to the observation that most of the literature in the field-whatever its other merits-frequently has the effect of increasing the sense of the
alienness and the otherness of alternative religious groups (thus inadvertently reinforcing rather than undermining popular "cult" stereotypes). Conversely, I want to make the case for a humanistic style of scholarship which, at least as a preliminary move, attempts to give one access to the
lifeworld and to the deeper intentionality of the new religions.
References
Hans-George Gadamer, Truth, and Method (Crossroad Publishing Company: New York, 1975),270.
Patricia Hughes, "The Sacred 'Rae," in Seymour Fersh, ed•• Learning About Peoples and Cultures McDougal, Littell &. Company: Evanston. 1974). 37-38.
Much of this section of the paper is dependent on the discussion in Charles H. Long. "Human Centers: An Essay on Method in the History of Religions," Soundings, 61 (3) (1977).
E.g. Dick Anthony, Thomas Robbins, & Paul Schwartz, "Contemporary Religious Movements and the Secularization Premiss," Concilium, 161 (1983).
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, "The Modern West in the History of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 52 (1) (March 1984),7.
Charles H. Long, "Mircea Eliade and the Imagination of Matter," (Unpublished paper. 1983), 1.
