Phenomenology of religion

The phenomenology of religion concerns the experiential aspect of religion, describing religious phenomena in terms consistent with the orientation of worshippers. It views religion as made up of different components, and studies these components across religious traditions in order to gain some understanding of them.

A different approach is that of typological or classifying phenomenology, which seeks to describe and explain religion in general by analyzing the many diverse 'phenomena' of religions, such as rituals, holy places, narratives, religious roles, and the many other modes of religious expression. In this respect, the phenomenology of religion takes the generalizing role that linguistics has over philologies or that anthropology has in relation the specific ethnographies: where the history of religions produces insights into specific religious traditions, the phenomenology of religion becomes the general scholarly (or scientific) enterprise that explains and interprets religious phenomena in general.^[1]

Although it has adopted some of the philosophical terminology of the phenomenological movement founded by Edmund Husserl, the tradition of the phenomenology of religion discussed in this article is only loosely related to the philosophical movement known as phenomenology.^[2]