Comparison in religion: a methodological contribution

Abstract

How do we build theory on religion in cross-religious research? This article deals with four methodological issues in answering this question. What are the goals of cross-religious comparison? What is the object of cross-religious research? What kind of definition of religion is used in cross-religious comparison? And finally, how can we asses similar phenomena across different religious traditions? The last question is specified by the distinction of levels of equivalence in quantitative cross-religious survey research.