ABSTRACT
In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, phenomenology of religion became the focus of considerable critical debate, and though its dominance has now been dislodged, many of its basic assumptions about religion continue to inform how religion is studied. Although for some the phenomenology of religion might simply designate a descriptive method, the phenomenological method in the study of religion is rather more than this. Turning to Edmund Husserl's philosophical phenomenology, those who later fashioned themselves as phenomenologists of religion found just the tools they needed, notably their reading of Husserl's interest in studying so-called things in themselves, that is, their essence or substance. If philosophical phenomenology is concerned with how the people come to experience the world, it would seem to differ dramatically from its later misapplication in the study of religion, the latter of which is focused on decidedly non-empirical characteristics.
