Homo Religiosus?: Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience

January 18, 2018
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Labels: featured books, Homo Religiosus (book), jack friedman, philosophical anthropology, religious freedom, theological anthropology, timothy shah
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In 2018, Cambridge University Press will release Homo Religiosus?: Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience, edited by Timothy Samuel Shah and Jack Friedman.  Shah is Research Professor of Government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. He is also Director for International Research at the Religious Freedom Research Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and Senior Director of the South and Southeast Asia Action Team with the Religious Freedom Institute. Jack Friedman is pursuing his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Maryland. He is a former project manager at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and a former research assistant for the Religious Freedom Research Project at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He is also co-editor of Religious Freedom and Gay Rights: Emerging Conflicts in the United States and Europe (2016).

From the publisher’s description of Homo Religiosus?: 

Are humans naturally predisposed to religion and supernatural beliefs? If so, does this naturalness provide a moral foundation for religious freedom? This volume offers a cross-disciplinary approach to these questions, engaging in a range of contemporary debates at the intersection of religion, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, political science, epistemology, and moral philosophy. The contributors to this original and important volume present individual, sometimes opposing points of view on the naturalness of religion thesis and its implications for religious freedom. Topics include the epistemological foundations of religion, the relationship between religion and health, and a discussion of the philosophical foundations of religious freedom as a natural, universal right, drawing implications for the normative role of religion in public life. By challenging dominant intellectual paradigms, such as the secularization thesis and the Enlightenment view of religion, the volume opens the door to a powerful and provocative reconceptualization of religious freedom.

  • Features chapters by authors presenting opposing viewpoints on the ‘naturalness’ of religion, the rationality of materialism, the relationship between religion and health, and the implications of scientific views of religion for religious freedom rights. 
  • Examines the centrality of religion to human experience through multiple disciplinary perspectives, including cognitive and evolutionary science, anthropology, sociology, political theory, and epistemology.
  • Discusses the political implications of the centrality and naturalness of religion to human experience, with particular reference both to early Enlightenment critics of religion and to modern ‘anti-essentialist’ critics of the conceptual frameworks of religion and religious freedom.