Studying religion

One that names religion's content — for example E B Tylor's "belief in spiritual beings". Its weakness is that it excludes traditions with no creator god.

One that names what religion does — for example Durkheim's account of beliefs and practices uniting followers into one moral community. Its weakness is that it includes far too much.

One that treats religion as a family of shared features rather than a single test — Ninian Smart's seven dimensions. No tradition has to show all seven.

Ritual, narrative, experiential, doctrinal, ethical, social and institutional, material.

Rudolf Otto's term for what adherents describe as an encounter with something wholly other: mysterium tremendum et fascinans — overwhelming and deeply attractive at once.

Ineffable, noetic, transient, passive.

Because it does not teach a creator god, so a definition built on belief in gods or spirits leaves it outside — a result almost every scholar rejects.

Whichever definition is chosen decides which traditions count, so the choice is itself a claim about what religion is.

Attribution. Ask "who holds this?" before every sentence about a belief, and name them.

An account of a practice given in the community's own categories and for the community's own reasons — the insider's account.

An account given in categories brought from outside the community — social structure, gender, ritual theory. It is analysis, and should be labelled as such.

Bracketing: setting your own verdict on whether a belief is true to one side while you describe what adherents hold and do.

Treating an adherent's own reason as a cover story for a 'real' cause. The tell is the word "really" — "it is really just a social device".

One adherent speaks for themselves, not for a tradition. The IA criteria ask you to consider an interviewee's authority and appropriateness to your question.

Evidence based, balanced and neutral, as opposed to stereotypical and biased — and it must not flatten the internal diversity of a tradition.

"Adherents describe this as…", "In Orthodox Judaism…", "Most Theravada Buddhists hold…", "An observer would also note…".

Reliability, accuracy and perspective — the guide names all three.

What a community sets apart and treats as not ordinary. The profane is everything everyday — the word carries no judgement about worth.

A narrative that carries a community's understanding of origins, order and purpose. It says nothing about whether the events described happened.

A patterned action whose form is part of its meaning — repeated because the repetition matters, not out of empty habit.

A symbol participates in what it points to; adherents often treat the symbol and what it signifies as inseparable, rather than as label and thing.

Transcendent: beyond and outside the created world. Immanent: present and at work within it. Many traditions hold both of the same God.

All-powerful, all-knowing and all-good.

Using a human word of God in a related and greater sense rather than the ordinary one — Aquinas's answer to the problem that all our words come from the created world.

The negative or apophatic way: describing the divine only by saying what it is not. It appears in Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Hindu thought.

One God; many deities; one ultimate reality of which all is an expression; and traditions whose goal is not union with a creator God.