Hobbes - Introduction to Religious Language

Chapter 1

Work on religious language started in the 1980s after Jean Pierre van Noppen
- explored the question of “where is god”
Muslim sermons (Esimaje, 2014) or (Malmstrom, 2016) and Prayers (Shoaps 2002)
Main questions to ask
- what counts as religious language?
- who uses it?
- where can it be found?
- what are its distinctive features?
- what purposes does it serve?

closed vs open definitions of religion
closed - rooted in distinction between the secular and the sacred
- about limits, around how you define this wrt to spirit or faith, especially with something immaterial or supernatural or otherwise trasncendent entity.
- closed religion sees religion as the same as religious institutions, and their adherents, beliefs, rituals, traditions, and practices
- what about religious language within secular spaces? AA for example, speaks of a higher power
open definitions of religion
- durkheim’ian sense of religion as sacred
- resolves to an open sense of what religion is and could be (is metaphysics a religion? is AA a religion?), but even this involves drawing boundaries
  - but religion as a connelly “political settlement” proves the impossibility of discussing what religion is
studies around ideaology and collective identity as a response to linguistics
- what is an ideology? from van Dijk
  - ideologies are a set of beliefs
  - they are axiomatic
  - they are socially shared
  - they are gradually acquired
- difference between ideology and religion? ideology is typically resistance against mainstream societal norms
role of the “sacred” in religion
- is classical arabic sacred?
- following edward baily people tend to use the term ‘implict religion’
- thinking about what religion does, religious language is space-creating