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Garcia, Zacarias E. BS Criminology 1-Alpha

This document provides an assignment for an academic paper on the globalization of religion from a Catholic perspective. It discusses how religion has historically been a driving force of globalization by seeking to spread its message beyond ethnic and territorial borders. While economics is often viewed as the central factor in globalization, religion has fueled the process for millennia and understanding its role is key to understanding the history of globalization. The document also examines debates around defining religion and proposes taking a reflexive and subjectivist approach to bypass problems with producing a fully objective definition.

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Zac Garcia
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2K views1 page

Garcia, Zacarias E. BS Criminology 1-Alpha

This document provides an assignment for an academic paper on the globalization of religion from a Catholic perspective. It discusses how religion has historically been a driving force of globalization by seeking to spread its message beyond ethnic and territorial borders. While economics is often viewed as the central factor in globalization, religion has fueled the process for millennia and understanding its role is key to understanding the history of globalization. The document also examines debates around defining religion and proposes taking a reflexive and subjectivist approach to bypass problems with producing a fully objective definition.

Uploaded by

Zac Garcia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Garcia, Zacarias E.

BS Criminology
1-Alpha

Assignment:

Directions : Write an academic paper on the globalization of religion: conduct a research on this
topic.

“Globalization of Religion: A Catholic (or any religion) Perspective”

Religion has long been a driving force in the process of globalization. In fact, argues Reza Aslan,
“no single force can be said to have had a greater impact on propelling globalization forward than religion,
which has always sought to spread its message” beyond the ethnic and territorial frontiers of its origin
This idea, as shall be made apparent throughout this article, is not controversial or novel thinking, nor is it
meant to be. However, the dominant reasoning on the subject of globalization, expressed by such
influential thinkers as famed journalist Thomas Friedman, places economics at the center of analysis and
skews focus away from the ideational factors at work in this process. Moreover, the economic-centric
approach to the study of globalization is also a Western-centric approach hindered by its need to trace the
origins of this phenomenon to some historically significant period in Europe’s colonial-imperial past, such
as the so-called Great Discoveries. Yet, globalization began long before European explorers set sail
across the vast Atlantic Ocean on journeys that would eventually reveal the existence of the Americas—
indeed, long before the term “globalization” was even coined. The economic-centric approach to
globalization fails, in part, because a force more primal, more enduring, and more important, has been
fueling this process for millennia—and that force is religion. Certainly, though it only represents a piece of
the proverbial puzzle, in many ways to understand the story of religion and globalization is to understand
the history of globalization.

Religion and globalization might seem like equally ineffable concepts. Yet, the concept of
religion has existed far longer than the latter, and as such, so have debates about its meaning. In fact,
arguments over the definition of religion consumed sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religious
studies throughout much of the 20th century. Attempting to define religion may still be a useful
epistemological exercise, but the fact that this debate persist today may demonstrate that it is largely
unresolvable. Indeed, hardly a definition arrived at can satisfy the would-be critic, for such a definition
would almost inevitably be riddled with some kind of value judgment that might leave it biased in favor of
one putative religion at the expense or exclusion of another. Nevertheless, by borrowing from the core
ontological and epistemological tenets of reflexivity and subjectivism respectively, one can bypass this
problem (albeit in a limited fashion as this approach may make it too difficult to operationalize the concept
of religion). First, in the Giddensian approach to reflexivity, one must recognize that the constitution of
social life empowers researchers to “influence what they study” through knowledge production. Second,
the subjectivist epistemology common to social constructivist thought recognizes that since an individual’s
understanding of the world is built in his or her own mind, knowledge of the world cannot be completely
objective. Consequently, individuals must rely on their own instincts to inform their conceptions of what
“religion” is, for, as religious studies scholar W. Richard Comstock avers, “Augustine’s famous
observation about time applies with equal force to religion; if not asked, we know what it is; if asked, we
do not know”

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