BRINGING THE SACRED DOWN TO EA

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-986033-3
Verlag: OXFORD UNIV PR

Buch, Englisch, 216 Seiten, Format (B × H): 163 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 434 g

In Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth, Corinne Dempsey offers a comparative study of Hindu and Christian, Indian and Euro/American earthbound religious expressions. She argues that official religious, political, and epistemological systems tend to deny sacred access and expression to the general populace, and are abstracted and disembodied in ways that make them irrelevant to if not neglectful of earthly realities. Working at cross purposes with these
systems, attending to material needs, conferring sacred access to a wider public, and imbuing land and bodies with sacred meaning and power, are religious frameworks featuring folklore figures, democratizing theologies, newly sanctified land, and extraordinary human abilities. Some scholars will see Dempsey's
juxtapositions of Hindu and Christian religious dynamics, many of which exist on opposite sides of the globe, as a leap into a disciplinary minefield. Many have argued for decades that comparison is an outmoded, politically troubled approach to the human sciences. More recently opponents, represented by a growing number of religion scholars, are ''writing back'' in comparison's defense, asserting the merits of a readjusted, carefully contextualized, new comparativism. But, says Dempsey, the
inestimable advantages of the comparative method described by religion scholars and performed in this book are disciplinary as well as ethical. As demonstrated in this stimulating book, the process of comparison can shed light on angles and contours otherwise obscured and perform the important work of
bridging human contingencies and perception across religious, cultural, and disciplinary divides.

Zielgruppe

Students and scholars of religion, anthropology, theology, and ethics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dempsey, Corinne G.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Hinduismus Hinduismus: Leben & Praxis, Soziale Aspekte
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Systematische Theologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Icelandic and Indian Language Notes
Introduction: Adventures and Misadventures in Comparison
Chapter 1: The Suffering Indian Nun and the Wandering (Drunken) Irish Priest: Orientalism and Celticism Unplugged
Chapter 2: Arguing Equal Access to an Earthly Sacred: Christian and Hindu Theologies of Liberation
Chapter 3: Making and Staking Sacred Terrain: Rajneeshee and Diaspora Hindu Settlers and Unsettlers
Chapter 4: Embodying the Extraordinary in Iceland and India and the Difference Spirits Make
Postscript: Unanticipated Adventures in Ritualized Ethnography
Notes
Biblography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Nazareth College