Critics for Religious Studies
As
scholarship, academic religious studies has important role for reviewing
religious discourse. This academic study is different from theological studies
or comparative theology. Thus, both of them become the limit of religious
studies even influence how religious studies responds. It
means they are not only separated but also correlated each other. Everything that is happen in theology field will be examined by religious studies,
including its phenomenology and its reaction
toward the world as reality. This relation bring the process how religious studies
constructed. So, if the object of religious studies is not
religion or about religious discourse (Wijsen,
discussing on CRCS Class, 2012), so
it should be more humanities studies and cross cultural,
so it needs multiple inter-disciple for analytical category in academic
context.
Unfortunately
the whole concept of
religion were very Western. Interreligious discourse tends to
more comparatively for what religion is and how it relates to others. Wilfred
Cantwell Smith (1963) wrote how Western scholars in the firstly time
categorizing complex tradition in the box of ‘religion’ based on how they
identity their self. In fact, religions
do not ‘exist’, the scholars create
what is ‘religions’ and explain
‘religion’ based on their definition about their tradition .
The problem is they used this ‘categorizing’ as
reality-criticize. In other critics, Richard King (1999, pp.43) told the
factors of (mis?)-representation of religion in religious studies in
post-colonial, are literary bias, the rise of rationalism, secular humanism,
and Eurocentrism. Those factors become the narrative of
self-contextual for constructing specific identity.
Those problems also show how the
reality can not be translated,
but it must be accepted, that means it needs the role of dialogue. Therefore,
according to Frans Wijsen, interreligious studies can not be compared because of the
untranslatable translability of ‘religion’.
There are some languages as social reality could not be translated in other
language, so scholars should not force the untranslatable language in their
language. In other word, the object of this sciences would be the subject for
them self.
In
the context of Indonesia, religious studies born for continuing the comparative
theological studies as an attempt for religious harmony. In this case, CRCS in
Wijsen’s opinion is still taste ‘western’. Therefore, He suggested making more Indonesianist Religious Studies, which have
special characters for defining religious studies and its tools in observing
religious discourse in Indonesia.
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