The following notes provide some additional information to items discussed in the site's main text; in some cases they provide links to sites that open in a new browser window. Clicking the [< Back] button at the end of each note returns readers to the page on which each note appeared.

1. For example, in the preamble to the 1901 Constitution of the state of Alabama we read, "We, the people of the State of Alabama, in order to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almight God, do ordain and establish the following Constitution and form of government for the State of Alabama." [< Back]

2. Although Alabama's Attorney General at the time--Bill Pryor, who as of 2004 was appointed to a position on the Federal U.S. Appeals Court--successfully prosecuted the Chief Justice, he had previously defended him (prior to Moore's election as Chief Justice). When Moore was a County Judge in the late 1990s Pryor unsuccessfully defended the Judge's right to post the Commandments in his own county courthouse. Examples of local news coverage of events surrounding the monument and trials can be found here. Judge Roy Moore's own web site can be found here. Additional information on religion and civil liberties in the US can be found here. [< Back]

3. Although Tylor's definition obviously reinforces a still common presumption--that religion is primarily defined in terms of a belief system involving immaterial beings--he nevertheless made a significant improvement on past efforts to define religion by selecting "spiritual beings" rather than "God" or "gods." This change enabled cross-cultural work among a variety of data that, prior to Tylor, would easily have been dismissed by scholars inasmuch as it would have been compared to the so-called Christian revelation and judged inadequate. That Tylor also proceeded naturalistically, seeing religion as an element of human history and culture, helps to ensure his place in the field's history despite his emphasis on religion as an internal, cognitive element. [< Back]

4. Durkheim's study of the social function of ritual systems takes as its data the social system of the Australian Aborigines, in particular the system of social organization based on what was once widely known throughout nineteenth-century scholarship as the totem--an animal or plant that comes to symbolize the group. He studied this group not because it was assumed to be the most ancient and thus pure origin from which modern social systems have evolved (an assumption earlier scholars might have shared), but, instead, because Durkheim believed that such a small scale society, with a low division of labor (that is, a society not based on a high degree of specialization when it comes to the tasks required to reproduce the life of the group), contained fewer uncontrollable variables and thus provided a better test cast to develop his theory. Once developed from this case, Durkheim believed his findings could be generalized to all human communities. [< Back]

5. The Euthyphro was likely written sometime around 380 BCE. Sometimes it is published today on its own, but often it is included as part of a collection of four Platonic dialogues that narrate the trial, conviction, and eventual death of Socrates, who is condemend to death by drinking poison (the other dialogues included in this collection are entitled: Apology, Crito, and Phaedo). An online English version of the text of the Euthyphro can be found here. [< Back]

6. Martin's book on ancient Greek religion--which has been translated into a variety of languages--is among the best known introductions to this area of scholarship. It is a particularly important period and region to study for those interested in the Graeco-Roman social world from which the earliest forms of Christianity arose. [<Back]

7. Penner--who was the co-author (along with Edward Yonan) of a classic essay in the field, "Is a Science of Religion Possible?" Journal of Religion 52 (1972): 107-33--is among the best known contemporary advocates of a structuralist approach to the study of religion. For further information on this approach, see Edmund Leach's article, "Structuralism," and Jeppe Sinding Jensen's follow-up article, "Structuralism: Further Considerations," Encyclopedia of Religion 2nd. ed. Vol. 13 8748-60. Macmillan, 2005. [< Back]

8. Although Freud discusses religion at a variety of places in his many writings, this brief essay may be the most succinct statement of his views on the common function played by obsessive compulsive disorders, on the one hand, and ceremonials, or rituals, on the other. [< Back]

9. Wittgenstein goes on to ask, "How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: this and similar things are called 'games'. And do we know any more about it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what a game is?--But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none has been drawn" (section 69). [< Back]

10. Subtitled, "Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa," Chidester's book chronicles in detail the gradual movement among Europeans--upon first making contact with the people of southern Africa--from first concluding that the locals had no religion whatsoever (because their beliefs, practices, and institutions did not match the prototype operating in the colonialists' minds), to eventually seeing their local practices as indeed being religious, despite the judgment that they were merely primitive or degraded forms of religion. His study is therefore a useful example of how prototypes are often used as norms. [< Back]

11. Alston, a well-known Christian philosopher of religion who taught philosophy at Syracuse University, adds: "If it is true that the religion-making characteristics neither singly nor in combination constitute tight necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a religion, and yet that each of them contributes to making something a religion, then it must be that they are related in some looser way to the application of the term. Perhaps the best way to put it is this. When enough of these characteristics are present to a sufficient degree, we have a religion" (p. 142). Of course the difficulty with such an approach to definition is that we have not theorized what counts as "enough ... characteristics" and "sufficient degree." [< Back]

12. Lincoln is citing Talal Asad's critique of Clifford Geertz attempt to arrive at a universal definition of religion; see Asad's Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, chpt. 1. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. [< Back]

13. Tim Fitzgerald, author of The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford University Press, 2000), is a well-known critic of how the category "religion" is employed by scholars who do cross-cultural studies. "Why," he asks in the introduction to this book, "do competent and even brilliant scholars continue to publish books and articles on the religious of non-western societies when, often by their own admission, it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible to fit the word with a legitimate referent?" His answer? The category "religion," as traditionally defined, is one among a number of tools whereby those who study other cultures extend, authorize, and reproduce a particular image of world and its organiztion--an image that has political and economic implications. "'Religion'," he therefore concludes, "was part of the complex process of establishing the naturalness and ideological transparency of capitalist and individualist values" (9). [< Back]

14. The title of Lakoff's book refers to the manner in which things are classified in traditional Dyirbal, one of the indigenous languages of Australia. "Whenever a Dyirbal speaker uses a noun in a sentence, the noun must be preceded by a variant of one of four words: bayi, balan, balam, bala. These words classify all objects in the Dyirbal universe" (92). Scholars interested in understanding the use of this classification system have therefore studied the emic principles whereby, for example, men, bats, the moon, rainbows, and most fishes are commonly preceded by bayi whereas women, some fishes, most birds, fire, and dangerous things are commonly preceded by balan. One such principle is called the domain-of-experience principle, such that things which generally occur together in experience are linked cognitively, such as fish and fishing implements. Though a series of other principles also come into play, some of which take priority when a category falls into more than one domain. [< Back]

15. This collection of seven essays, covering a variety of topics (from data derived from ancient Babylon and Judaism, to such more contemporary issues as attempts to understand the actions of those social movements commonly known as "cults"), has attained the status of a modern classic in the study of religion. Despite the wide variety of data examined in the book, it is possible to read it as an extended mediation, supplemented by a rich amount of cross-cultural information, on how to go about doing comparative scholarship. For this reason, those who are interested in studying what is commonly known as "method and theory" have found Smith's work to be particularly important. [< Back]

16. For Weber's similar comment elsewhere, see his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 47. Talcott Parsons (trans.). Roxbury Publishing Co., 1996. [< Back]

17. Smith is also the author of Classifying the Universe: The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste (Oxford University Press, 1994), which examines the manner in which the inherited Indian system that divides labor and roles embodies and thereby puts into practice a system of order and thus power. [< Back]

18. This essay, entitled simply "Classification," is a survey of the importance placed upon studies of classification systems in other disciplines. Smith concludes that both those systems named as religions, as well as the very systems that name these movements as religions, are classification systems that deserve considerably more scholarly attention. [< Back]

19. This following is taken from Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 1997). [< Back]