Translation of “Présentation” from La Religion Implicite

une Introduction

Abstract

Edward Bailey’s book, Implicit Religion: An Introduction, was published in 1998 by Middlesex University Press (London). This translation is part of a broader project to introduce an area of study which has been developing in Great Britain and in other English-speaking countries for about thirty years, to the French-speaking world. In 1996, Religiologiques, the journal of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal, devoted an issue to this field of study by publishing a “selection” of ten articles by British authors illustrating the fertile diversity of this approach to the phenomenon of religion. Unfortunately, despite some incursion into French speaking territory, this approach remains largely unknown here. Yet even today, more than ten years later, the prospects opened up by this line of research are by their nature capable of contributing to the renewal of our understanding of the phenomenon of religion and its current evolution. So it seemed important to me to translate this short treatise which introduces the origins and the broader themes of the concept of implicit religion, together with some of the principal results of the research it has inspired.