The scientific study of religion is one aspect of religious sudies that investigates religious behaviors and experiences within an emprical framework. Ideologocal surround methodologies represent an empirical approach to religious studies that is based upon a ‘post - postmodern” foundation. Such methodologies were developed as a reactoin against the reductionism of modernism and the extreme relativism of postmodern pluralism. Within these methodologies, conceptualizations of religious behavior and experience maintained by the scientific observer and by the religious subject who is observed are brought into ‘dialogue” within an ideological surround. The result is a dialectical empiricism among perspectives on religion. These empirical methodological presumptions of any conceptualizations and research findings about religion, and thus reveal the limitations and unique vision of all perspectives. The Ideological Surround Model promotes a pluralistic, not a single and authoritative rationality; a balanced, though not an unbiased objectivity: an empirica, and not just a conceptual dialectics; and an empirical, and not personal and disorganized hermeneutics. By empirically clarifying the bias of all perspectives on religion, this methodology explores the possibility of peace, democracy, and integration among perspectives. In this article, empirical studies of religion based on this model are reviewed.
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