One of my goals in both my teaching and research is to work to expand the range of potential topics addressed within philosophy of religion. In religious studies, scholars have been familiar with the concept of “lived religion” and how focusing on it changes how one might study religions. The general idea is that religions should be studied in all their diverse manifestations, how religions are actually practiced--lived--rather than as merely the abstract, often ahistorical traditions or worldviews one may encounter in a World Religions textbook.
There’s a lot of promise in this approach, but philosophy of religion has largely not followed suit. While I’d like to see that change (at least in part), it’s understandable why it hasn’t really happened. After all, philosophy of religion can be a very conservative field. In recent times, it has largely been concerned either with engaging established problems in the field, such as the logic of divine attributes, the adequacy of theistic arguments, the justifiability of certain religious beliefs or engaging central philosophers linked with particular religious traditions or atheism/naturalism. Perhaps it is unclear where one might begin with a philosophy of lived religion. Philosophical approaches to religious claims about gods, the cosmos, or morality have begun with the work of other philosophers or religious intellectuals, not the idiosyncratic practices and beliefs of ordinary people.
In my Philosophy of Religion course, I have students conduct interviews with students outside the course about topics relating to ethics, identity, and attitudes about religions as an activity of collective brainstorming about potential new topics. Here are a two themes that stand out from multiple students’ interviews:
1. Conceptual investigation of cross-cultural forms of atheism. While many people today identify as atheist--especially in China(!!)--it’s not always clear that atheist commitment means a rejection of all forms of religious belief or practice (e.g, prayer, meditation); this includes those who may be committed to forms of atheism derived from Marxism. My sense is that there is a very wide variety of standpoints available that might be labeled as “atheist” beyond what one finds in “Western” treatments of the viewpoint.
2. Pragmatic modes of engaging with religions. While very few people in China will identify with being religious, many people will have experiences of visiting Buddhist or Daoist temples at charged moments in life and saying a prayer or lighting joss sticks because “maybe it will help.” For the most part, my sense is that it would be a mistake to interpret this behavior as implying an unacknowledged belief; rather, this mode of pragmatic engagement with religious practices seems to suggest to a different way of interacting with religious traditions.
Anyhow, I'd like to write more about these topics in the future. My sense is that I'd probably go about analyzing them with some ideas from Wittgenstein's philosophy in mind (esp., from Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty).
