The Curve of the Sacred

An Exploration of Human Spirituality
Erscheinungsjahr 2006
ISBN: 978-90-420-2031-3
Verlag: Editions Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 178, 217 Seiten, Format (B × H): 15 mm x 22 mm

Reihe: Value Inquiry Book Series / Philosophy and Religion

This interdisciplinary book examines the nature of spirituality and the role it plays in the search for meaning. Spirituality is a loving tendency towards the sacred. In a secular environment, the sacred is taken to be a power greater than self. In a religious environment, the Sacred refers to God, or Higher Power. The book examines the developments of the s/Sacred in great works of art and literature, as well as in medicine, theology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Spirituality also functions as an unloving tendency towards disunity, or a force for evil.
The first part of the book examines the ways of the spiritual as a force for good and evil. We have just witnessed one of the bloodiest centuries in human history. The experience of two World Wars leaves a legacy of brokenness: “Where Nossack’s reminiscences bore poetic, compassionate, and personal witness to the disaster, Eliot’s poetry reads more like a sacred and religious poem taking contemporary Western European civilization to task—much like the biblical prophets of old—for its spiritual bankruptcy.” Albert Einstein, Edvard Munch’s Madonna, and Carl Jung’s ‘unconscious’ touch the curve of the Sacred in more promising places.
The second part examines how the search for meaning works. The distinction between being human and being a person plays a central role in the life of the spiritual; “…the spiritual is manifest in the activities taking place in the central self. The central self is the locus of all thoughts, feelings, acts of reason and judgment, conscious and unconscious processes alike. The central self is the place where social relationships and environmental relationships are processed. The essential feature of the central self is that it does not exist outside these processes.” The same spiritual energies that light up great works of art also light up our destructive side, only the associations’ change.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ponomareff, Constantin V.

Bryson, Kenneth A.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Praktische Theologie Christliche Spiritualität, Christliche Mystik
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologische Disziplinen Religionspsychologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Editorial Foreword by Kenneth A. BRYSON
Foreword by Rose Tekel
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Kenneth A. BRYSON
Part One
Constantin V. PONOMAREFF: Spirituality from the Perspective of the Humanities Tradition
One: The Sacred and Evil
Two: Healers and Would-Be Healers
Three: The Koran’s Compassionate Spirit
Four: Transformations of the Sacred in Russian Society
Five: Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain
Six: T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”
Seven: Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum: The Sacred in Destructive Guise
Eight: A Meditation on Albert Camus
Nine: The Sacred as Subatomic Particle, Image, Subliminal Intelligence or Metaphor
Ten: Albert Einstein
Eleven: Edvard Munch’s Madonna
Twelve: Jung’s Unconscious
Thirteen: The Sacred and Time
Part Two
Kenneth A. BRYSON: Becoming Personal from the Spiritual
Fourteen: The Nature of Spirituality
Fifteen: Acting towards the Divine Image
Sixteen: The Spiritual Nature of Dependency
Seventeen: Recovery as Process
Eighteen: Spirituality and Human Death
Nineteen: Spirituality and Religion
Notes
Bibliography
About the Authors
Index