ABSTRACT
The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields.
The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments.
Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections:
- Asian Origins: religious formations
- Missions, States and Religious Competition
- Reform Movements and Modernity
- Popular Religions
- Religion and Globalization: social dimensions
Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |62 pages
Asian origins: religious formations
chapter 2|17 pages
Revealing the Vedas in ‘Hinduism'
chapter 3|16 pages
Dual belief in Heaven and spirits
part |46 pages
Missions, states and religious competition
chapter 6|13 pages
The localization of Roman Catholicism
part |68 pages
Reform movements and modernity
chapter 10|16 pages
Engaged Buddhism in 1920s Japan
part |102 pages
Popular religions
part |126 pages
Religion and globalization: social dimensions
chapter 19|20 pages
Reading gender and religion in East Asia
chapter 25|17 pages
Globalising the Asian Muslim Umma
part |21 pages
Conclusion