Author: Alex Scott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780595424092
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
What is the relation between language and religious faith? To what extent do we depend on the use of language in order to express our religious feelings and beliefs? Semiotics is a field of study that seeks to answer these questions by investigating the meaning of religious symbols and by examining their uses, purposes, and functions. Christian Semiotics and the Language of Faith discusses the work of a number of important thinkers in semiotics, including Saussure, Peirce, Morris, Barthes, Hjelmslev, and Eco. The work of these writers provides insight into many aspects of religious symbolism, including the relation between signs and their referents, the iconicity of signs and symbols, the nature of "meaning" and signification, and the function of signs as signifiers of the sacred. Author Alex Scott discusses the writings of Todorov, Greimas, Foucault, Bakhtin, and others, describing the applications of discourse analysis to theological and literary study. He also examines the usefulness of discourse analysis as a method of studying biblical and liturgical language. Christian Semiotics and the Language of Faith embraces a variety of disciplines, including semiotics, the philosophy of language, ethics, religion and literature, and theology. This multidisciplinary approach can provide us with a means of understanding the symbolic importance of many aspects of religious faith.
Author: Crystal L. Downing
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 083086685X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Crystal Downing brings the postmodern theory of semiotics within reach for today's evangelists. Following the idea of the sign through Scripture, church history and the academy, Downing shows you how signs work and how sensitivity to their dynamics can make or break an attempt to communicate truth.
Author: Domenico Pietropaolo
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350064130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The semiotics of the Christian imagination describes the repository of signs and the logic of signification through which a community of faith envisions spiritual truths. This book analyses various examples in text, images, music, art and scientific treatise of the imaginative semiotisation of the fall of Man and the Church's semiotic perception of the Divine plan for Redemption. The book includes a chapter detailing the theory of signs, based on a close reading of primary sources, and has nine further chapters on the meaning-making inherent in ideas of the Fall and Redemption of mankind. These are filtered through and given material representation by the semiotic paradigms of various cultural fields, including philology, verbal arts and science. Central to this practice - and to the book's message - are two themes of theological semiotics fundamental to man's understanding of himself in the larger scheme of things. Two of these include the theology of the Fall and a sacramental theory of signs. The theory is grounded in the doctrine of analogy, and this is the only reliable cognitive link between the immanence of the thinking subject and the transcendence that is the object of thought.
Author: Robert A. Yelle
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441172378
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Following the heyday of Lévi-Straussian structuralism in the 1970s-80s, little attention has been paid by scholars of religion to semiotics. Semiotics of Religion reassesses key semiotic theories in the light of religious data. Yelle examines the semiotics of religion from structural and historical perspectives, drawing on Peircean linguistic anthropology, Jakobsonian poetics, comparative religion and several theological traditions. This book pays particular attention to the transformation of religious symbolism under modernization and the rise of a culture of the printed book. Among the topics addressed are: - ritual repetition and the poetics of ritual performance - magic and the belief in a natural (iconic) language - Protestant literalism and iconoclasm - disenchantment and secularization - Holiness, arbitrariness, and agency Building from the legacy of structuralism while interrogating several key doctrines of that movement, Semiotics of Religion both introduces the field to a new generation and charts a course for future research.
Author: Stanley E. Porter
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1850757836
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
The papers in this volume were presented at a conference held at the Roehampton Institute, London, in February 1995, and are concerned with either theological or literary issues related to the nature of religious language. The papers suggest further issues that are still unresolved about the nature of religious language, from its early usage in the biblical texts to its recent use in contemporary writing and religious discourse.
Author: Alex Scott
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450205860
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
What are the elements of expression? What are the origins, aims, and functions of expression? An adequate theory of expression can help us to address these questions and to recognize the diversity of the many modes of expression (scientific, ethical, aesthetic, religious, and sociocultural). Alex Scott describes the interdependence of the modes of expression, showing that a theory of expression can promote social understanding by illuminating the nature of our interdependence as individuals in society. Expression theory, as described by Scott, is not merely a theory of art. It is a theory of the ethics, aesthetics, psychology, logic, language, and politics of expression. It is a theory that enables us to examine in a more comprehensive way the question of whether there are any logical limits to the expressive capacity of language. Expression theory is also a theory that enables us transcend the dialectics of the said and the unsaid, the sayable and the unsayable. It enables us to address the question of whether the communicability of a person's thoughts or feelings is determined solely by that person's communicative competence or whether there are some kinds of thoughts and feelings that are truly ineffable and incommunicable.
Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520940040
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
The Friday Masowe apostolics of Zimbabwe refer to themselves as "the Christians who don’t read the Bible." They claim they do not need the Bible because they receive the Word of God "live and direct" from the Holy Spirit. In this insightful and sensitive historical ethnography, Matthew Engelke documents how this rejection of scripture speaks to longstanding concerns within Christianity over mediation and authority. The Bible, of course, has been a key medium through which Christians have recognized God’s presence. But the apostolics perceive scripture as an unnecessary, even dangerous, mediator. For them, the materiality of the Bible marks a distance from the divine and prohibits the realization of a live and direct faith. Situating the Masowe case within a broad comparative framework, Engelke shows how their rejection of textual authority poses a problem of presence—which is to say, how the religious subject defines, and claims to construct, a relationship with the spiritual world through the semiotic potentials of language, actions, and objects. Written in a lively and accessible style, A Problem of Presence makes important contributions to the anthropology of Christianity, the history of religions in Africa, semiotics, and material culture studies.
Author: Samuel K. Sarpiya
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725270285
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 130
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Book Description
This book is for people who believe that the gospel is a message of peace and this gospel of peace is relevant for our time. Peacemaking is a core part of our Christian discipleship just as we learn how to pray, just as we learn how to love our neighbors, just as we learn how to feed the hungry. We can also learn how to be peacemakers. Sarpiya believes that peacemaking is central to the Christian faith and practice. This book will serve as a guide that will offer a scriptural guide with practical stories and applications. Readers will be challenged by Scripture to take the call to peacemaking into their communities. The fact that numerous peace treaties have collapsed serves to show how difficult it is to transcend cycles of violence and foster a sustained, durable peace. The one place that one could look to for answers about how to move toward peace is within faith communities, and sometimes not just one faith acting alone but working alongside other faiths, in concert with other faiths, taking an interreligious approach. The Highest of All Mountains shows how Sarpiya's Christian peacemaking backed by the interreligious approach brings the monotheistic faiths together, as they all agreed on one denominator to their faith's origin, Abraham.
Author: Massimo Leone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134402465
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.
Author: Andrew Hollingsworth
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 153267984X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
In God in the Labyrinth, Andrew Hollingsworth uses Umberto Eco’s semiotic concept of the model encyclopedia as the basis for a new model and approach to systematic theology. Following an in-depth analysis of the model encyclopedia in Eco’s semiotics, he demonstrates the implications this model has for epistemology, hermeneutics, and doctrinal development. This work aims to bridge the unfortunate gap in research that exists between the fields of systematic theology and semiotics by demonstrating semiotic insights for theological method.
