This document discusses comparative studies of religion including philosophy of religion, comparative philosophy, psychology of religion, and cultural studies. It examines how power works in religious traditions across individual and social realms, and how traditions establish hierarchies of power and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. It also explores how people achieve selfhood and status through axes of power like gender, race, and social class. Examples given include whether women can attain highest religious authority and how caste continues to impact India. The document is interested in how people describe their access to power and the enduring power of religious belonging and identities. It is attracted to points of conflict and peacemaking in religious traditions to understand violence and non-violence movements.

2. Comparative Study of
Religion
 philosophy of religion
 comparative philosophy—how to compare concepts from
different cultures, how to compare models of personhood or
subjectivity in different cultures
 psychology of religion
 and cultural studies (critical theory and religion)—how the
overlapping layers of cognition and biology, selfhood and
kinship, language and the arts speak through us while we
speak through them

3. How power works in
religious traditions
 Spectrum – from individual experience to social realms of
power
 How do people describe their experiences of power
 How do traditions establish hierarchies of power
 Who belongs, who doesn’t, from the outside (social) to the
inside (sense of self) of exclusion/inclusion dynamics
 One of the most complex and ambiguous relationships is
found in women’s descriptions of their roles. As 50% or
higher of religious community, essential to understand.

4. How do people achieve
selfhood or status?
 Axes of power by which people organize their traditions
 gender,
 racialized identities,
 and social status (including class, caste, and marginalized
people)
 Examples: Can women attain the highest levels of religious
authority? How does caste continue to work even though it
was officially forbidden in the Indian constitution?

5. How do people describe
their access to power?
 The enduring power of belonging in or to a religious
tradition. Religious identities are:
 Resilient—conservative (retain tradition) and progressive
(motivated to make contemporary meaning of life)
 Flexible—people negotiate all the time with doctrine
 Embodied, muscular memory of ritual practices including
prayer, birth, marriage, death rituals, belonging. Of interest
to medicine, sociology, psychology, cognitive
sciences, politics.

6. My interest: Social Justice
and Structural Peace
 Attracted to points of conflict, points of peace-making to
understand what’s going on.
 Why is the contact between religious traditions so often
fraught with violence?
 Why have major non-violence movements been driven by
religiously inspired people?
 One of the most complex and ambiguous relationships is
found in women’s descriptions of their roles. This makes for
powerful understanding.