Abstract
Peter Moore wants us to think differently about religion and, indeed, to be open to creative reinventions. As a long-time teacher at the University of Kent and a student of Ninian Smart, he is steeped in the Comparative Religions tradition that is reflected in both the analytical style and the wide range of examples in this book.
Its twelve short and accessible central chapters could easily be assigned in undergraduate religious studies classes or used to inform the reader who routinely encounters multiple religious traditions and the arguments of sceptics. Each chapter takes up an aspect of the study and perception of religion – from the struggle to define the subject itself to authority, morality, idolatry, cosmology, and more. Throughout, Moore challenges both religious apologists and sceptics. With each theme, in turn, he presents what each camp commonly believe it to mean, and then asserts that both are wrong (or at least incomplete). Religion is (or can be) better than that, he says.
The overemphasis on belief, for example, is “in part due to intellectualizing tendencies within religion itself and in part a response to sceptical and scientific attacks upon religion. . .” (41). His treatment of practices gives primary attention to ritual and prayer, arguing that sceptics misunderstand things if they think the point is to achieve some end, but religions stumble when they turn these things into routines without joy. He similarly argues for ways to rescue “myth,” “symbol,” “icons,” and other words misused in attempts to understand religion.
Moore’s argument often utilizes close readings of the various ways words can be defined, on identifying ‘types,’ or on an examination of historical sources for various (mis)understandings. But it rests on a foundational assertion that the way religion works – as a human construction – is no different from the way other human institutions of art, science, politics, law, and education work. We should not, therefore, hold religion to standards of sincerity or perfection that we would not apply to these other inventions. Nor should we be any more afraid to subject religion to re-imagining.
Still, Moore does think there is something distinctive about this particular human invention. “Religion is what happens when human beings respond to what, in generic terms, can be called the sacred or the transcendent” (228). It is evident in the universal impulse to find meaning in the world, to ritualize the defining events in our lives, and to acknowledge the occasional extraordinary experience. He is unwilling to discount the reality of those experiences, even as he points out that, for their effect, they inevitably depend on human constructions of language, practice, theory, and institution – the four dimensions that anchor his analysis. But in the end, it is clear that experience is foundational for him. Readers who find these basic premises convincing will see a great deal of benefit in this book.