Studies in Religion and Culture – serie

Ordinarily Sacred aims to illuminate the sacred quality of experience that on the surface appears mundane or secular. Through stories, metaphors, and images, the author claims, we discover the religious or the sacred in the activities of ordinary life - dreams, play, and memory. In these activites, the author suggests, we create texts, make meaning and imagine reality in such a way as to lend symbolic significance to life. She also suggests that through these activities, we define our relation to the divine, and to one another.

This book is a study of the much debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's ""indirect communication."" It approaches the problem, however, in quite a new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy. A deconstructive approach to the written work is followed by a phenomenological description of the development of the lived sign. The book is an attempt to investigate a theme concerning individual rights and embodiment that descends from Kant through Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

This text examines the work of a broad selection of authors in order to discover the reasons for their loss of faith and to analyse the ways they have interpreted that loss. For some the experience of deconversion led to another religious faith while others turned to atheism or agnosticism.

Assessing the state of the study of myth, this text explores the possibilities for charting a methodological middle course that takes into account both the comparative and the contextual issues raised since 1985.

Assessing of the state of the study of myth, this text explores the possibilities for charting a methodological middle course that takes into account both the comparative and the contextual issues raised since 1985.

Savage Systems examines the emergence of the concepts of ""religion""and ""religions"" on colonial frontiers. The book offers a detailed analysis of the ways in which European travelers, missionaries, settlers, and government agents, as well as indigenous Africans, engaged in the comparison of alternative religious ways of life as one dimension of intercultural contact. Focusing primarily on ninteenth-century frontier relations, David Chidester demonstrates that the terms and conditions for comparison-including a discrouse about ""otherness"" that were established during this period still remains.A volume in the series Studies in Religion and Culture

Examining the concept of the otherness of God, this text traces its theme from Plato to dialectical theology. Although a variety of approaches are considered, the contributors agree that despite the ontological argument, one must continue to think theologically when questioning the nature of God.

Langdon Gilkey's account of his experiences as a witness for the ACLU at the 1981 creationist trial in Little Rock, Arkansas. The book brings to life principal characters and anecdotes from the trial and translates the abstract religious concepts of the case into digestable language.

The ten essays assembled in this volume represent, in an interdisciplinary way, the work of scholars attempting to understand the decline of mourning practices and their associated rituals. The text is arranged in sections on cultural studies, architecture, history and psychology.

The ten essays assembled in this volume represent, in an interdisciplinary way, the work of scholars attempting to understand the decline of mourning practices and their associated rituals. The text is arranged in sections on cultural studies, architecture, history and psychology.

Responsibility is the queen of modern virtues, Winston Davis argues, even if there is no consensus as to what responsibility means. These essays, by scholars of philosophy, anthropology, history, religious studies, classics and law, encompass conceptions of responsibility around the globe.

World's fairs contributed mightily to defining a relationship between religion and the wider world of human culture. Even at the base level of popular culture found on the midways of the earliest international expositions - where Victorian ladies gawked at displays of non-Western, ""primitive"" life - the concept of religion as an independent field of study began to take hold in public consciousness. The World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago exposition of 1893 did as much as any other single event to introduce the idea that religion could be viewed as simply one concern amoung many within the rapidly diversifying modern lifestyle. A chronicle of the emergence and development of religion as a field of intellectual inquiry, this volume is an extensive survey of world's fairs from the inaugural Great Exhibition in London to the Chicago Columbian Exposition and World's Parliament of Religions. As the first broad gatherings of people from across the world, these events were pivotal as forums in which the central elements of a field of religion came into contact with one another.

The relationship between meditation and martial arts is a multifaceted one: meditation is one of the practices in which martial artists engage in order to prepare for combat, while the physical exercises constituting much of the discipline might be considered meditative practices. This book suggests there is a sense in which meditation might also be considered a form of combat, citing a variety of spiritual disciplines that employ the heavy use of martial arts images and categories as part of their self-description. It provides an approach to understanding the connection between martial arts and spirituality in such diverse disciplines as Japanese alkido, Chinese tsi chi chuan, Hindu yoga, Christian ascetism, Zen Buddhism and Islamic Jihad.

Most people feel ambivalent about solitude, both loving and fearing it depending on how they experience being alone at certain points in their lives. In The Value of Solitude, John Barbour explores some of the ways in which experiences of solitude, both positive and negative, have been interpreted as religiously significant. He also shows how solitude can raise ethical questions as writers evaluate the virtues and dangers of aloneness and consider how social interaction and withdrawal can most meaningfully be combined in a life. Barbour's work differs from previous books about solitude in two ways: it links solitude with ethics and spirituality, and it approaches solitude by way of autobiography. Barbour ranges from the early Christian and medieval periods to the twentieth century in examining the varieties of solitary experience of writers such as Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Gibbon, Rousseau, Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Paul Auster. For many authors, the process of writing an autobiography is itself conceived of as a form of solitude, a detachment from others in order to discover or create a new sense of personal identity. Solitude helps these authors to reorient their lives according to their moral ideals and spiritual aspirations. The Value of Solitude both traces the persistence and vitality of the theme of solitude in autobiography and shows how the literary form and structure of autobiography are shaped by ethical and religious reflection on aloneness. This work should appeal to scholars in the fields of religious studies and theology, to literary critics and specialists in autobiography, and to readers interested in the experience of solitude and its moral and spiritual significance.

The first book on the Victorian critic and public intellectual John Ruskin by a scholar of religion and ethics, this work recovers both Ruskin's engaged critique of economic life and his public practice of moral imagination. With its reading of Ruskin as an innovative contributor to a tradition of ethics concerned with character, culture, and community, this book recasts established interpretations of Ruskin's place in nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics, challenges nostalgic diagnoses of the supposed historical loss of virtue ethics, and demonstrates the limitations of any politics that eschews common purpose as vital to individual agency and social welfare. Although Ruskin's moralistic efforts did not always allow for democratic individuality, equality, and contestation, his eclecticism, Craig argues, helps to correct these problems. Further, Ruskin's interdisciplinary explorations of beauty, work, nature, religion, politics, and economic value reveal the ways in which his insights into the practical connections between aesthetics and ethics, and culture and character, might be applied to today's debates about liberal modernity today. With the triumph of global capitalism, and the near-silence of any opposing voice, Ruskin's model of an engaged reading of culture and his public practice of moral imagination deserve renewed attention. This book provides students in religion, politics, and social theory with a timely reintroduction to this timeless figure.

It is often assumed that the law and religion address different spheres of human life. Religion and ethics articulate complex systems of moral reasoning that concern norms, deliberation of ends, cultivation of disposition, and transformation of moral agency. Law, in contrast, seeks to govern human conduct through procedural justice, rights, and public good. ""Doing Justice to Mercy"" challenges this assumption by presenting the reader with an urgent conversation between the law and religion that yields a constructive approach, both theoretically and practically, to the complex role of mercy in our legal process. Authored by legal practitioners, activists, and theorists in addition to theologians and ethicists, the essays collected here are informed by timeless principles, and yet they could not be timelier. The trend in sentencing moves toward an increased severity, and the number of incarcerated people in the United States is at an all-time high. In the half-decade since 9/11, moreover, homeland security has established itself as a permanent fixture in our lives. In this atmosphere, the current volume seeks initially to clarify how justice and mercy intertwine in relation to a number of issues, such as rehabilitation, the death penalty, domestic violence, and war crimes. Exploring the legal, philosophical, and theological grounds for mercy in our courts, the discussion then moves to the practical ways in which mercy may be implemented.

It is often assumed that the law and religion address different spheres of human life. Religion and ethics articulate complex systems of moral reasoning that concern norms, deliberation of ends, cultivation of disposition, and transformation of moral agency. Law, in contrast, seeks to govern human conduct through procedural justice, rights, and public good. ""Doing Justice to Mercy"" challenges this assumption by presenting the reader with an urgent conversation between the law and religion that yields a constructive approach, both theoretically and practically, to the complex role of mercy in our legal process. Authored by legal practitioners, activists, and theorists in addition to theologians and ethicists, the essays collected here are informed by timeless principles, and yet they could not be timelier. The trend in sentencing moves toward an increased severity, and the number of incarcerated people in the United States is at an all-time high. In the half-decade since 9/11, moreover, homeland security has established itself as a permanent fixture in our lives. In this atmosphere, the current volume seeks initially to clarify how justice and mercy intertwine in relation to a number of issues, such as rehabilitation, the death penalty, domestic violence, and war crimes. Exploring the legal, philosophical, and theological grounds for mercy in our courts, the discussion then moves to the practical ways in which mercy may be implemented.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 provides a legal framework within which Native Americans can seek the repatriation of human remains and certain categories of cultural objects - including ""sacred objects"" - from federally funded institutions. Although the repatriation movement among Native Americans has heretofore received scholarly attention specifically focused on this act, ""Sacred Claims"" is the first book to analyze the ways in which religious discourse is used to articulate repatriation claims. Greg Johnson takes this act as one instance in a larger context wherein native peoples around the globe must engage legal arenas in order to preserve their heritage. Methodologically, ""Sacred Claims"" is based on a close reading of government documents concerning the law and participant observation in a variety of NAGPRA-related events and provides the background and legislative history of the law, the life history of the act's axial term cultural affiliation (the most delicate and least understood aspect of NAGPRA), and several case studies of highly visible and contentious Hawaiian repatriation disputes. Johnson then moves beyond the strictly legal context to analyze NAGPRA discourse in the public realm. He concludes by way of a theoretical treatment of the foregoing issues, arguing that religious language was the chief means by which native representatives ultimately persuaded non-native audiences of the applicability of widely held human rights principles to their cultural remains. Theorizing modes of cultural vitality in the repatriation context, Johnson argues that living tradition is not found in the objects themselves but is instead located in struggles over them. With the law on the brink of receiving crucial tests, and repatriation issues making daily headlines in Native American and Hawaiian news, ""Sacred Claims"" is a timely and necessary examination of these issues.

Why do we travel? Ostensibly an act of leisure, travel finds us thrusting ourselves into jets flying miles above the earth, only to endure dislocations of time and space, foods and languages foreign to our body and mind, and encounters with strangers on whom we must suddenly depend. Travel is not merely a break from routine; it is its antithesis, a voluntary trading in of the security one feels at home for unpredictability and confusion. In ""Bewildered Travel"", Frederick Ruf argues that this confusion, which we might think of simply as a necessary evil, is in fact the very thing we are seeking when we leave home. Ruf relates this quest for confusion to our religious behavior. Citing William James, who defined the religious as what enables us to ""front life,"" Ruf contends that the search for bewilderment allows us to point our craft into the wind and sail headlong into the storm rather than flee from it. This view challenges the Eliadean tradition that stresses religious ritual as a shield against the world's chaos. Ruf sees our departures from the familiar as a crucial component in a spiritual life, reminding us of the central role of pilgrimage in religion. In addition to his own revealing experiences as a traveler, Ruf presents the reader with the journeys of a large and diverse assortment of notable Americans, including Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Mark Twain, Mary Oliver, and Walt Whitman. These accounts take us from the Middle East to the Philippines, India to Nicaragua, Mexico to Morocco - and, in one threatening instance, simply to the edge of the author's own neighborhood. ""What gives value to travel is fear,"" wrote Camus. This book illustrates the truth of that statement.

Why do we travel? Ostensibly an act of leisure, travel finds us thrusting ourselves into jets flying miles above the earth, only to endure dislocations of time and space, foods and languages foreign to our body and mind, and encounters with strangers on whom we must suddenly depend. Travel is not merely a break from routine; it is its antithesis, a voluntary trading in of the security one feels at home for unpredictability and confusion. In ""Bewildered Travel"", Frederick Ruf argues that this confusion, which we might think of simply as a necessary evil, is in fact the very thing we are seeking when we leave home. Ruf relates this quest for confusion to our religious behavior. Citing William James, who defined the religious as what enables us to ""front life,"" Ruf contends that the search for bewilderment allows us to point our craft into the wind and sail headlong into the storm rather than flee from it. This view challenges the Eliadean tradition that stresses religious ritual as a shield against the world's chaos. Ruf sees our departures from the familiar as a crucial component in a spiritual life, reminding us of the central role of pilgrimage in religion. In addition to his own revealing experiences as a traveler, Ruf presents the reader with the journeys of a large and diverse assortment of notable Americans, including Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Mark Twain, Mary Oliver, and Walt Whitman. These accounts take us from the Middle East to the Philippines, India to Nicaragua, Mexico to Morocco - and, in one threatening instance, simply to the edge of the author's own neighborhood. ""What gives value to travel is fear,"" wrote Camus. This book illustrates the truth of that statement.

Conservative religious figures routinely warn against the dangers of secularization, just as proponents of the modern secular state decry the theocratic tendencies of religion. Both sides assume that the sacred and the secular are diametrically opposed. Gabriel Vahanian rightly calls such misbegotten assumptions into question. The problem lies elsewhere. In the light of the biblical dialectic of holiness and the secular, ""Praise of the Secular"" deftly ""vindicates"" the secular, weaving together philosophy, history, and theology in fine Derridean, yet reinforced, deconstructionist fashion.Vahanian argues that religion, far from being opposed to the secular, finds its fulfillment in the secular world. Armed with a compelling interpretation of Christ's incarnation, he claims that ""we have not grasped John's notion of the word become flesh, even of God as wording, until or unless we realize it must so expand as to demand the worlding of that very word, extending it into secular relevance."" In other words, the holy, if not the sacred, demands its own secularization.In this poetically written and profoundly life-affirming work, Vahanian reinvigorates the secular against the claims of fundamentalism, which makes the relative absolute, and against the ideology of a kind of atheism (""secularism"" in his term), which makes the absolute relative.

In this critical examination of the role of the imagination in the modern and postmodern periods, Victor E. Taylor looks at the fable as a narrative form that addresses the ultimate questions of how to live and why. He assesses various literary theories and styles in the wake of postmodernism to reveal the ways in which fable-style narrative can be a meaningful genre for addressing traditional and post-traditional religious, ethical, and epistemological concerns. In the process, Taylor draws on key figures across the humanities - from Mircea Eliade and Claude Levi-Strauss, Paul Ricoeur and Slavoj Zizek, to Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka.Placing an emphasis on rethinking the importance of critical theory in religious studies, the author argues that a new, more demanding formulation of the concept of possibility allows for a realignment of the philosophical, mythological, and literary imaginations. By returning to the history of philosophy, myth studies, and modern literature, Taylor makes a renewed case for the significance of a distinctive formulation of religious theory as a desire for thinking. ""Religion after Postmodernism"" calls for a reconsideration of 'theory as thinking' for the future of philosophy, religious studies, and literature.

In this critical examination of the role of the imagination in the modern and postmodern periods, Victor E. Taylor looks at the fable as a narrative form that addresses the ultimate questions of how to live and why. He assesses various literary theories and styles in the wake of postmodernism to reveal the ways in which fable-style narrative can be a meaningful genre for addressing traditional and post-traditional religious, ethical, and epistemological concerns. In the process, Taylor draws on key figures across the humanities - from Mircea Eliade and Claude Levi-Strauss, Paul Ricoeur and Slavoj Zizek, to Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka.Placing an emphasis on rethinking the importance of critical theory in religious studies, the author argues that a new, more demanding formulation of the concept of possibility allows for a realignment of the philosophical, mythological, and literary imaginations. By returning to the history of philosophy, myth studies, and modern literature, Taylor makes a renewed case for the significance of a distinctive formulation of religious theory as a desire for thinking. ""Religion after Postmodernism"" calls for a reconsideration of 'theory as thinking' for the future of philosophy, religious studies, and literature.

This book is a study of the much debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's ""indirect communication."" It approaches the problem, however, in quite a new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy. A deconstructive approach to the written work is followed by a phenomenological description of the development of the lived sign. The book is an attempt to investigate a theme concerning individual rights and embodiment that descends from Kant through Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Between May and October of 1917, three young shepherds were reportedly visited six times by an apparition of the Virgin Mary near the town of Fátima in Portugal. At the final apparition event, approximately 70,000 visitors gathered to witness a prophesied miracle intended to convince the public that the children's visions were of divine origin. The miracle took the form of a solar anomaly; witnesses claimed that the sun began to ""dance."" Exploring the early development of the cult of the Virgin of Fátima and the overthrow of the liberal, secular government by pro-Catholic elements, Jeffrey Bennett offers the first book-length scholarly study of the cult's relationship to the rise of authoritarian politics in Portugal. When the Sun Danced offers a fascinating look at the cultural dynamics that informed one of the most turbulent periods in the nation's history.

Between May and October of 1917, three young shepherds were reportedly visited six times by an apparition of the Virgin Mary near the town of Fátima in Portugal. At the final apparition event, approximately 70,000 visitors gathered to witness a prophesied miracle intended to convince the public that the children's visions were of divine origin. The miracle took the form of a solar anomaly; witnesses claimed that the sun began to ""dance."" Exploring the early development of the cult of the Virgin of Fátima and the overthrow of the liberal, secular government by pro-Catholic elements, Jeffrey Bennett offers the first book-length scholarly study of the cult's relationship to the rise of authoritarian politics in Portugal. When the Sun Danced offers a fascinating look at the cultural dynamics that informed one of the most turbulent periods in the nation's history.

Given its affinity with questions of identity, autobiography offers a way into the interior space between author and reader, especially when writers define themselves in terms of religion. In his exploration of this ""textual intimacy,"" Wesley Kort begins with a theorisation of what it means to say who one is and how one's self-account as a religious person stands in relation to other forms of self-identification. He then provides a critical analysis of autobiographical texts by nine contemporary American writers -- including Maya Angelou, Philip Roth, and Anne Lamott -- who give religion a positive place in their accounts of who they are. Finally, in disclosing his own religious identity, Kort concludes with a meditation on several meanings of the word assumption.

In Vigilant Faith: Passionate Agnosticism in a Secular World, Daniel Boscaljon takes up the contemporary challenges to faith by scepticism and secularism. He proposes a model of faith for believers and unbelievers alike—a passionate agnosticism—that is rooted in a sceptical consciousness. Scepticism and faith are structurally similar, he writes, in that they share an ""unknowing"" quality. The author argues that vigilance—the act of keeping watch, a spiritual practice in its own right—is as necessary a precondition for the structure of faith as it is for the structure of scepticism. A suspension in uncertainty and an openness to possibility require vigilance, he attests, if faith and scepticism are to avoid the often dogmatic tendencies of both theism and atheism to cling to their own brands of certainty and knowledge.Boscaljon has three aims: to expand the current, post-theistic definitions of God for greater relevance to human beings on an individual and existential level; to integrate scepticism into faith so that it will restore the importance of faith to current theology and recover it from anti-intellectual bias; and to conceptualise the vigilance of faith in such a way that can provide a vocabulary for distinguishing ""good faith"" from ""bad faith."" He offers a variety of cultural examples ranging from film to poetry to represent a life of faith and to show how its components come together in practice. As an alternative to the prevailing fundamentalisms in today's world, his book proposes a paradigmatic understanding of faith in which theism, atheism, and agnosticism refuse to differ.

It is arguably the case,"" writes William Parsons, ""that no two figures have had more influence on the course of Western introspective thought than Freud and Augustine."" Yet it is commonly assumed that Freud and Augustine would have nothing to say to each other with regard to spirituality or mysticism, given the former's alleged antipathy to religion and the latter's not usually being considered a mystic.Adopting an interdisciplinary, dialogical, and transformational framework for interpreting Augustine's spiritual journey in his Confessions, Parsons places a ""mystical theology"" at the heart of Augustine's narrative and argues that his mysticism has been misunderstood partly because of the limited nature of the psychological models applied to it. At the same time, he expands Freud's therapeutic legacy to incorporate the contemporary findings of physiology and neuroscience that have been influenced in part by modern spirituality.Parsons develops a new psychological hermeneutic to account for Augustine's mysticism that will capture the imagination of contemporary readers who are both psychologically informed and interested in spirituality. The author intends this interpretive model not only to engage modern introspective concerns about developmental conflict and the power of the unconscious but also to reach a more nuanced level of insight into the origins and the nature of the self.