The title of this entry is also the title of a book by Daniel Pals, a professor at the University of Miami.
Strictly speaking, the first edition, in 2006, was called "Seven theories of religion." Pals has included an eighth, and thus the new title, for the just-printed second edition.
The eight theories, identified by their most prominent theorists, and by the brief explanatory phrase for each he uses as his table of contents, are:
1. E.B. Tylor and James Frazer (animism and magic)
2. Sigmund Freud (religion and personality)
3. Emile Durkheim (society as sacred)
4. Karl Marx (religion as alienation)
5. Max Weber (A source of social action)
6. Mircea Eliade (The reality of the sacred)
7. E.E. Evans-Pritchard (Societies 'construct of the heart')
8. Clifford Geertz (Religion as cultural system).
The new chapter in that lot is the fifth, on Weber.
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While I'm here... Doesn't this all miss the mystical understanding of It All? I suppose Mircea Eliade may come close, though I'm only vaguely familiar with the guy, & the wikipedia version sounded pretty wiggy. What about the religious theory of sociologists?--that they are, like fundamentalists, people confused by lack of concrete experience of God?
Does God's theory of religion, as told to Raymond Smullyan in 'Is God a Taoist?' count? Why not? [Simply stated: ~"I am doing what I can to become known to humans, but it's a process that includes them making mistakes & learning better over a period of time."
Oh well. Perhaps thee should relax and read _The Lathe of Heaven_? (That first page is too ornate, but it gets better fast!)
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