The term "religion" originated from the Latin noun religio, that was nominalized from one of three verbs: relegere (to turn to constantly/observe conscientiously); religare (to bind … See more

Before religious studies became a field in its own right, flourishing in the United States in the late 1960s, several key intellectual figures explored religion from a variety of … See more

There is some amount of overlap between subcategories of religious studies and the discipline itself. Religious studies seeks to study religious … See more

Western philosophy of religion, as the basic ancestor of modern religious studies, is differentiated from theology and the many Eastern … See more

Throughout the history of religious studies, there have been many attempts to define the term "religion". Many of these have been monothetic, … See more

Interest in the general study of religion dates back to at least Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 550 BCE – c. 476 BCE) and Herodotus (c. 484 BCE – c. … See more

A number of methodologies are used in Religious Studies. Methodologies are hermeneutics, or interpretive models, that provide a structure for the analysis of religious phenomena. See more