Skip to content

The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism Hardcover - 2005 - 1st Edition

by Tomoko Masuzawa


From the publisher

The idea of world religions expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, world religions is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language. In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of world religions in modern European thought. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates how new classifications of language and race caused Buddhism and Islam to gain special significance, as these religions came to be seen in opposing terms-Aryan on one hand and Semitic on the other. Masuzawa also explores the complex relation of world religions to Protestant theology, from the hierarchical ordering of religions typical of the Christian supremacists of the nineteenth century to the aspirations of early twentieth-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who embraced the pluralist logic of world religions and by so doing sought to reclaim the universalist destiny of European modernity.

Details

  • Title The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism
  • Author Tomoko Masuzawa
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Pages 384
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Chicago Press
  • Date May 15, 2005
  • ISBN 9780226509884 / 0226509885
  • Weight 1.41 lbs (0.64 kg)
  • Dimensions 9 x 6 x 1 in (22.86 x 15.24 x 2.54 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Religion, Religions
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2004021998
  • Dewey Decimal Code 200.704

About the author

Tomoko Masuzawa is associate professor of history and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of In Search of Dream Time: The Quest for the Origin of Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press.