ABSTRACT
A sociotheological worldview analysis can be the basis of both comparative and global studies, showing how epistemic worldviews differ, how they appear to be similar or how common experiences underlie epistemic worldviews across the globe. Different academic disciplines have developed their own reasons for engaging with worldviews. Social psychologists focus on worldviews in order to study how human beings encounter the world. They apply worldview analysis to study the formation of collective attitudes and the way different communities relate to one another. Compared to the social psychologists, anthropologists focus less on the cognitive and perceptive dimension of worldviews and more on the affective and moral dimensions. Anthropologists, by disciplinary habit, have been more disposed to take other people’s perspectives seriously, and thus have accommodated more easily religious points of view. Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis constructed a simple cause and effect relationship between worldview and action, in which differences in worldviews inevitably lead to a clash.
