Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

"In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that ""religion"" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the id...