10. The Crisis of World Religions and the Critique of Essentialism
Discourses of Crisis and the Study of Religion - Lauren Horn Griffin
Michael P. DeJonge [+]
University of South Florida
Michael P. DeJonge is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of South
Florida. He teaches in the areas of the history of Christian thought, theories and methods in religious studies, modern religious thought, and theoretical issues in religion and politics. He is the author of Bonhoeffer’s Theological Formation (Oxford, 2012), Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther (Oxford, 2017), and Bonhoeffer on Resistance (Oxford, 2018).
Description
In what follows, I argue that the philosophical rejection of essentialism that fuels critics of WRP is embedded in a broader critique of the substance metaphysics in which essentialism is most at home. When compared with this philosophical rejection, essentialism critiques of WRP are often imprecise and superficial: imprecise in their accounts of essentialism and superficial in their reception of this philosophical rejection. Deeper engagement with this philosophical rejection of essentialism would encourage naming essentialism specifically as an ontological doctrine and rejecting essentialism by appropriating a non-substance metaphysics.