Method Today - Redescribing Approaches to the Study of Religion - Brad Stoddard
9. Religion and Description
Method Today - Redescribing Approaches to the Study of Religion - Brad Stoddard
Daniel McClellan [+]
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Daniel O. McClellan works as a scripture translation supervisor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He completed his PhD in theology and religion at the University of Exeter in 2020. His research deploys the methodological lenses of cognitive linguistics and the cognitive science of religion to interrogate conceptualizations of deity, of scripture, and of religious identity within the Bible and its reception. His first book, YHWH's Divine Images (SBL Press, 2022), is an open-access volume that develops a theoretical framework for the intuitive logic of divine images and demonstrates how that logic undergirds the Bible's representation of entities like the Ark of the Covenant, the Angel of the Lord, and even the text of the Torah itself.
Description
This paper argues that the practice of description is frequently understood as definition, which is too often precisely prescription. It contends that reduction to necessary and sufficient features is alien to the natural development and use of conceptual categories like religion, and so an alternative approach to description is recommended.