Introduction to Religious Studies
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2020
Pages: 189
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$97.24
Introduction to Religious Studies offers undergraduates an extensive survey of: the major methodologies needed for the contextualization and critical examination of religions, the differing structures of belief systems from small-scale traditions to the large World Religions, the varying religious descriptions of what people revere as the Holy, and the oral and written traditions that express and preserve spiritual worldviews. This survey does not heavily focus on Western traditions, but instead provides undergraduates with a sampling from the diverse, religious societies of the world.
At the core of this eBook is the notion that all religious and spiritual systems are a type of human language, one that attempts to communicate with and explain to others the world/Cosmos in natural and supernatural terms. Within this socio-historical examination, students are presented with the idea that religious worldviews employ an entire vocabulary comprised of words, songs, symbols, art, sensations, and rituals for humans who seek to understand, in a spiritual sense, their surroundings, themselves, each other, their Holy, and their sense of “destiny” or the purpose/mystery of life.
CHAPTER 1 What Is Religion?
CHAPTER 2 The Study of Religion
CHAPTER 3 The Holy
CHAPTER 4 The Quest for the Holy
CHAPTER 5 Symbolism
CHAPTER 6 History and Sociology of Religion (Application of Methods)
CHAPTER 7 Religious Communication and Sacred Stories
CHAPTER 8 Religious Language and Oral Traditions
CHAPTER 9 Language: Writing Religiously
CHAPTER 10 Genres of Sacred Stories
CHAPTER 11 Conclusions: Experience, Faith, and Belief
Crystal Lynn Lubinsky, PhD., Director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, researches in various topics related to the field of religious studies, mythology, and comparative religions. For 10 years and counting, she has offered the course, Introduction to Religious Studies, which continues to be a very popular course amongst students from all colleges on campus. This decade of exploring global religious topics with students is the academic adventure from which this textbook Introduction to Religious Studies was born.
After graduating cum laude from University of North Carolina at Wilmington with a double major in History and Religious Studies, for which she earned the Pauline Kallman Award, she went on to New York University to study under William E. Arnal. She received her MA in Religious Studies from NYU in 2002.
While an adjunct, she decided to go abroad and obtain her Ph.D. in Ecclesiastical History at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. While there, she received the Reverend Dr. Murray McGregor Memorial Scholarship awarded by St. Deiniol’s Library for research and two language bursaries gifted from the Fondation Catholique Ecossaise for intensive study at Institut Catholique in Paris, France.
At the University of Edinburgh, she discovered the way patristic and monastic writers characterized gender bending female Christians as “heroic.” This led to her main research focus, Christian mythology, which lies outside of the Bible in hagiographies and martyrologies, to understand the “popular mind” of the larger Mediterranean Christian lay population in late antiquity.
She graduated with her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2012 and published her dissertation within the Studia Traditionis Theologiae Series from Brepols entitled, Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a Holy Womanhood: The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity. Upon her return to the United States in 2012, she accepted a position within the History Department of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
Currently, she teaches the ancient and classical history courses and religious studies courses, specializing in Mediterranean religions/cultures and early Christianity. Making contemporary connections, she has expanded her research to examine the way Christian saints can act as a modern day heroes to the LGBTQ communities. She also compares how all cultures, including both indigenous Peoples and those associated with World Religions, construct mythology, and therefore religious systems, as a type of human language, which is the focus of her textbook.