PARADIGM SHIFT
The expression “paradigm shift” - which came to prominence after the publication of American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) -
far from fostering a relativist view of belief systems, can be fruitfully applied to scholarship regarding religion to flesh out and highlight when and how the multiple disciplines
of the broader field of religious studies found ways (or were inevitably led) to change their own perspectives and the manner of defining, reading and analysing the objects of their
analyses through the positive or conflictual engagement (or lack thereof) with major historical events, the use of innovative theoretical lenses to further understand the significance
of what Jean Delumeau called the fait religieux, the adoption of brand new or established technologies bringing to disruptive discoveries, and the ways in which one or more katastrophé
of the Anthropocene were read, or continue to be read, as apocalypses or vice versa in the historiography on religious history.