At an international symposium in Norway, the 100 years' anniversary of the academic study of religion was celebrated. This volume contains the papers that were presented at this conference.
A major part of the papers deals with the situation of this discipline around the turn of the last century, focussing especially on the work of the Dutch-Norwegian scholar W. Brede Kristensen (1867-1953) and on other founding fathers in the Scandinavian countries. Other contributors discuss methodological questions relating to the idea of a phenomenology of religion.

Furthermore, an attempt is made to compare the study of religion at the end of the twentieth century with the situation a hundred years earlier, and to trace some of the lines of development. The book includes a bibliography of publications by W. Brede Kristensen.