Reddit reviews The Invention of Religion in Japan

Just saw this. Thanks for the shout out! In The Invention of Religion in Japan, I do argue agains the idea that religion is a natural category or a cultural universal. I could say a lot about this and the debates in Religious studies/anthropology if you are curious. The video series never finished because I got saddled with a bunch of administrative work chairing a department.... Sorry. I'm about to go to a meeting but if you are curious about the evidence/argument about "religion" as a category I'd be happy to share my thoughts or summarize the state of the field. I'll check back periodically over the span of the day to see if there are any comments.

(Not an anthropologist, just an interested layperson.)

I regard religion as a problematic category that's used in a bunch of different ways and and increasingly difficult to apply the further you get away from Protestant Christianity. (A close friend of mine has done extensive work on how Meiji Japan imported and adapted the western concept of religion.)

Theologically, I don't believe in an independently existing deity with literal psychological properties like will, desire, knowledge, etc. I'm rather ambivalent about God-language; I have no problem with people using "God" to mean "the ground of being" or "our ultimate concern" or whatnot. I generally prefer the term "religious naturalist" to atheist, agnostic, or pantheist, but I'll accept any of them.

I'm also a Unitarian Universalist. I need to wrap this up now so I'm not late to church.

Just to add a little to /u/tryptaminex's answer, you might be interested in looking at some of the difficulty we've had in applying religion as a term cross-culturally. Jason Josephson's The Invention of Religion in Japan is a nice one for this. There's a pretty good review of it here