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Dr. Bryan S. Rennie
Vira I. Heinz Professor of Religion  |
Spring 2012: I am on sabbatical leave this semester. Telephone: 724 946 7151. My only e-mail address is brennie@westminster.edu Chair of the Department of Religion, History, Philosophy, and Classics
Co-organizer of:
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“Fact and Interpretation: Sui Generis Religion, Experience, Ascription, and Art” Archaeus, Volume XV, Numbers 1-4, 2011: 51-74. Guest Edited by Norman Girardot & Bryan Rennie. |
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"I am proud to be involved in a profession, religious studies, which
has taken seriously the phenomenological method, banning the
ideological or theological determination of descriptive or historical
truth." (Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred, p. 177).
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| I teach both philosophy and religious studies, having majored in philosophy as a method for the study of religion. My doctoral work concentrated on theory and method in the study of religion and convinced me that philosophy cannot be adequate as a method for the study of religion without a thorough grasp of the history of religion, just as the history of religion is incomplete without critical philosophical understanding. The History of Religion, like Art History, requires both criticism and content. My publications on the historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, have attracted an international audience and my book from the State University of New York Press, Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion, was reviewed, generally favourably, in many of the leading journals in the field. (See reviews.) |
