Zoroastrian Studies Seminar Series: Ted Good
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A Theory of Religion in Dēnkard III
The Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies in collaboration with the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America, the Ontario Zoroastrian Community Foundation, the Zoroastrian Society of Ontario, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation jointly present "A Theory of Religion in Dēnkard III" on Friday, February 6, 2026, 1 p.m. (Eastern Time: Canada & US).
Abstract:
Zoroastrians have called their religion "the Good Religion" since the earliest times, and so contemporary scholars have tried to articulate the semantic and cultural nuances of this term in order to better understand Zoroastrian self-conceptualization. In this paper, I will contribute to this discussion by sketching a theory of Religion from the 9th century philosophers that wrote Dēnkard III.
Dēnkard III is a multigenerational text, whose compositional history begins in the late Sasanian period and ends in the early Islamic period. Besides these general chronological parameters, its internal chronology is opaque. Within the text, the authors divide the religious landscape into two religions: there is the Good Religion (Zoroastrianism), on the one hand, and there is the Bad Religion, on the other. They give this division eschatological significance, since a mark of the final triumph of good over evil will be when all people profess the Good Religion. However, since one of the manifestations of evil in the world is the Lie, and the Lie obstructs honest communication, they needed to develop a theory for determining the truth of religious expression. They developed a theory based on the ancient framework of "thoughts, words, and deeds" in order to access the internal religious commitments of others. After sketching the basics of this theory, I will argue that it can help us embed some of the text in its Islamic context.
Bio:
Ted Good is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, his research focuses on Zoroastrian philosophy in the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. For his doctoral work, he focused on Zoroastrian metaphysics and philosophy of religion as it appears in Dēnkard III and the Škand-Gumānīg Wizār, which were both completed during the 9th century. He is currently working on Zoroastrian philosophical anthropology, or the Zoroastrian compositional and historical theories of humanities as well as preparing for publication a book on the 9th century Zoroastrian philosopher Mardānfarrox.
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