ABSTRACT
The teaching of the studies of religion is complicated by the fact that religious statements involve a broad range of logical types including cosmological, ontological, theological, moral, historical, and sociological propositions. Accordingly, studies of religion syllabuses tend to focus on those types of statements thought to be most meaningful for students. This leads to the widespread use of methodologies such as the phenomenological, historical, and sociological. This chapter will aigue that independently of the particular logical types into which religious statements fall, there are ethical principles deriving from membership of epistemic and democratic communities which dictate that an axiological approach should be part of the study of the subject. An epistemic community is one committed to the principles of rational inquiry (or critical rationality, as is the term used in Chapter 1). An axiological approach is one concerned with the teaching of values which, within the context of this chapter, are those values concerned with an ethics of belief.
