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Dr. Bryan S. Rennie Professor of Philosophy and Religion  |
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Spring 2021: Patterson Hall Room 336 Telephone: 724 946 7151. My only e-mail address is brennie@westminster.edu Department of Philosophy and Religion
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Former Vice-President and Program Chair North American Association for the Study of Religion Organizer of the North American Undergraduate Conference on Religion and Philosophy, 2008, 2010, 2015. |
An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.
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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 "World Religion" through 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 religion, 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 favorably, in many of the leading journals in the field. (See reviews.) My most recent monograph proposes a reconceptualization of religion based on the integration of the ethology of art (that is, the study of art behavior as an evolved human trait) and the cognitive science of religion (that is, the study of religion as a natural product of human cognition). |
