2. Read the text again. Structure the information in the form of a mind map. Use your mind map to summarise the text.

* Appendix 1 p. 145

Unit 5. New view on religion?

1. Read the text and answer the questions.

1. What is the role of religion in our society?

2. How do Media resources change the view on religion?

3. Has religion transformed in our world of globalisation?

Religion has been one of the great uplifting and unifying forces of human history. The word itself derives from an ancient Latin term meaning “to bind together”, and the religions of the world have often brought diverse groups together in pursuit of higher moral or spiritual goals. In this way religion has not only strengthened the bonds of community but also provided many of the basic moral principles on which societies have been built. The world's art and literature have been greatly shaped by religion, and modern theater traces its origins to ancient and medieval religious rituals. Not least important, religion provides comfort and consolation and a guide for understanding life's trials and triumphs, wonders and tragedies. Religion has also been one of the most divisive and destructive forces in history. The Crusades and the Muslim invasions of India are perhaps the best-known examples of this tendency, but there have been numerous other incidents of violence and social unrest inspired by religious hatred. In the modern world, religion has been used to justify the oppression of women, the destruction of monumental works of art, and the murder of countless thousands of innocent people.

We have entered the new millennium in the middle of a conversation that has been building to a crisis throughout the 20th century between people who live religion and people who study it, sometimes to justify it, sometimes to challenge it, sometimes to satisfy their curiosity about it. Religious faith is an explicitly contested issue in politics - locally (prayer in school), nationally (the influence of Christian values upon legislative and judicial policy), and internationally (Islam being the most prominent but by no means the only religion in the headlines) - but many participants in these encounters are genuinely trying to understand one another's positions.

Religion has always been a matter of life and death, not only in terms of its own functions (baptism and burial) but also as a rallying point for deciding the life - more often the death - of large groups of people labeled infidels. Generally speaking, however, in the past it was deemed sufficient to know one's own religion in order to go to war to defend it against infidels; now we have begun to understand that we need a broader - dare we say encyclopedic? - understanding of other peoples' religions if we want not to go to war, and not to be infidels ourselves.

The growing prominence of newspaper and television coverage of religious factors embedded in world-shaking events taking place around the globe has unfortunately not been matched by an equally deepening, or even broadening, understanding of those issues. The pressures on politicians and journalists to make judgments about religion quickly, often on the basis of ludicrously inadequate knowledge, has eroded rather than nurtured the public availability of reliable information. And the presence of an enormous and steadily growing body of misinformation on the Internet is surely part of the problem, not part of the solution. This is precisely the moment, therefore, to assemble a body of knowledge that is as objective and authoritative as possible, and the critical need for such knowledge explains why so many encyclopedias of religion have appeared in recent years. We need to know, for instance, not only how many Muslims there are in the world (in the United States they are more numerous than Episcopalians), but how many different ways there are to be a Muslim, and what the different groups among them believe and do.

In some parts of the world, especially in North America and Europe, scholars of religion, as distinct from theologians , have generally studied the religions of other times and places, and in those contexts, the study of religion may make a real contribution to deparochialisation.

Scholars of religions are found throughout the world, on every continent and in every religious tradition. It is not merely the object of study that is global. The scholars who are at work crafting knowledge about religions are spread throughout the globe, too.

But while the study of religions is a global enterprise, it largely lacks a global vision. Conceptions of the discipline or field remain decidedly parochial, both explicitly in theoretical analysis and implicitly in scholarly practice. That is true in North America and Western Europe; where even with the best of intentions scholars may be dismissive of or completely unaware of scholarly work being done elsewhere. It is also true in other parts of the globe, where scholars, when they look outside of their own regions, generally look to North America and Western Europe for instruction and guidance. In this respect, the study of religions is not much different from other humanistic disciplines. The 'asymmetric ignorance' that Dipesh Chakrabarty ascribes to history is largely true in the study of religions, too: 'Third-world historians feel a need to refer to works in European history; historians of Europe do not feel any need to reciprocate' (Chakrabarty 2000: 28). In the production of knowledge as in many other arenas, globalisation too often implies Europeanisation or, especially since the end of World War II, Americanisation.

There are distinct signs today that a global community of scholars of religions is emerging. Such global opportunities for religious studies arise, of course, as a result of innovations in the technologies of communication and transportation that have produced what theorists of globalisation, following David Harvey (1990), are fond of calling time-space compression. Unlike two hundred years ago, when international communication largely depended upon the physical transmission of letters or persons by very slow means, scholars today have virtually immediate access to their counterparts almost everywhere in the world via telephone, email, and videoconferencing. Electronic media have accelerated the speed and volume of the transmission of scholarly work and as a result its availability. In addition, since the introduction of the Boeing 707 in 1958 rapid and relatively inexpensive commercial jet air travel has not only increased the accessibility of fieldwork sites but has also made it possible for scholars from around the world to meet relatively frequently, consult, and collaborate with one another face to face. To be sure, not everyone has equal access to the benefits of these technologies. The structures of the global scholarly community in religious studies, like the structures of other global communities, reflect differences in power and access to economic resources.