The academic study of religion draws on several disciplines. This page outlines the approaches used in the articles on this site.
Approaches
- Historical study places texts, people and institutions in their time and asks what the surviving evidence can support.
- Textual scholarship compares manuscripts, traces how texts were transmitted and studies their language.
- Comparative study sets traditions side by side to understand each more clearly.
- Archaeology recovers material evidence, from inscriptions to buildings.
- Theology and philosophy examine the internal reasoning of each tradition.
Working with sources
Primary sources are the scriptures, commentaries, inscriptions and documents produced within a tradition or period. Secondary sources are later studies of them. Good practice reads primary sources in reliable translations, notes which translation is used, checks claims against more than one scholarly account, and separates what a tradition teaches from what historians can establish.
Describing traditions accurately
Each tradition deserves to be described as its adherents understand it before it is analysed from outside. See our Editorial Policy for the conventions this site follows.