Religious Imagination and the Body

Religious Imagination and the Body PDF Author: Paula M. Cooey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195087356
Category : Body, Human
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Offering a feminist perspective on the significance of the body in the context of religious life and practice, this treatise examines the evidence, ranging from the novels of Toni Morrison to the paintings of Frida Kahlo.

Religious Imagination and the Body

Religious Imagination and the Body PDF Author: Paula M. Cooey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195087356
Category : Body, Human
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book

Book Description
Offering a feminist perspective on the significance of the body in the context of religious life and practice, this treatise examines the evidence, ranging from the novels of Toni Morrison to the paintings of Frida Kahlo.

Religious Imagination and the Body

Religious Imagination and the Body PDF Author: Paula M. Cooey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195358619
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In recent years feminist scholarship has increasingly focused on the importance of the body and its representations in virtually every social, cultural, and intellectual context. Many have argued that because women are more closely identified with their bodies, they have access to privileged and different kinds of knowledge than men. In this landmark new book, Paula Cooey offers a different perspective on the significance of the body in the context of religious life and practice. Building on the pathbreaking work of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, Cooey looks at a wide range of evidence, from the Argentine prison narrative of Alicia Partnoy, to the novels of Toni Morrison and the paintings of Frida Kahlo. Drawing on current social theory and critique, cognitive psychology, contemporary fiction and art, and women's accounts of religious experience, Cooey relates the reality of sentience to the social construction of reality. Beginning with an examination of the female body as a metaphor for alternative knowledge, she considers the significance of physical pain and pleasure to the religious imagination, and the relations between sentience, sensuality, and female subjectivity. Cooey succeeds in bringing forward a sophisticated new understanding of the religious importance of the body, at the same time laying the foundations of a feminist theory of religion.

Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Reindert Leonard Falkenburg
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
One of the central and defining beliefs in late-medieval and early-modern spirituality was the notion of the formability of the religious self. Identified with the soul, the self was conceived, indeed experienced, not as an abstraction, but rather as an essential spiritual persona, as well as the intellectual and sensory center of a human being. This volume investigates the role played by images construed as formal and semantic variables - mental images, visual tropes and figures, pictorial and textual representations - in generating and sustaining processes of meditation that led the viewer or reader from outward perception to various forms of inward perception and spiritual discernment. The fifteen articles address the history of the soul as a cultural construct, an internal locus of self-formation where the divine is seen to dwell and the person may experience her/himself as a place inhabited by the spirit of God. Three central questions are approached from various disciplines: first, how was the self-contained soul created in God's likeness, yet stained by sin and as such susceptible both to destructive and redemptive forces, refashioned as a porous and malleable entity susceptible to metaphysical effects and human practices, such as self-investigation, meditative prayer, and other techniques of inwardness? Second, how did such practices constitutive of an inner liturgy prepare the soul - the anima, bride - for an encounter with God that trains, purifies, moulds, shapes, and transforms the religious self? Finally, in this process of self-reformation, how were images of place and space mobilized, how were loci found, and how did the soul come to see itself situated within these places mapped upon itself?

The Religious Imagination of American Women

The Religious Imagination of American Women PDF Author: Mary Farrell Bednarowski
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025321338X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"Explores five ideas that animate the theological imagination of women in religious communities throughout America: ambivalence toward tradition; the immanence, or indwelling, of the divine; the sacredness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of the sacred; the vision of the universe as a web of relationships; and healing as a central function of religion"--back cover.

The Forbidden Body

The Forbidden Body PDF Author: Douglas E. Cowan
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479803103
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
"Throughout history, the religious imagination has attempted to control nothing so much as our bodies: what they are and what they mean; what we do with them, with whom, and under what circumstances; how they may be displayed-or, more commonly, how they must be hidden. Religious belief and mandate affect how our bodies are used in ritual practice, as well as how we use them to identify and marginalize threatening religious Others. This book examines how horror culture treats religious bodies that have stepped (or been pushed) out of their 'proper' place. Unlike most books on religion and horror, This book explores the dark spaces where sex, sexual representation, and the sexual body come together with religious belief and scary stories. Because these intersections of sex, horror, and the religious imagination force us to question the nature of consensus reality, supernatural horror, especially as it concerns the body, often shows us the religious imagination at work in real time. It is important to note that the discussion in this book is not limited either to horror cinema or to popular fiction, but considers a wide range of material, including literary horror, weird fiction, graphic storytelling, visual arts, participative culture, and aspects of real-world religious fear. It is less concerned with horror as a genre (which is mainly a function of marketing) and more with the horror mode, a way of storytelling that finds expression across a number of genres, a variety of media, and even blurs the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. This expanded focus not only deepens the pool of potential examples, but invites a much broader readership in for a swim"--

Holy Tears

Holy Tears PDF Author: Kimberley Christine Patton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691190224
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What religion does not serve as a theater of tears? Holy Tears addresses this all but universal phenomenon with passion and precision, ranging from Mycenaean Greece up through the tragedy of 9/11. Sixteen authors, including many leading voices in the study of religion, offer essays on specific topics in religious weeping while also considering broader issues such as gender, memory, physiology, and spontaneity. A comprehensive, elegantly written introduction offers a key to these topics. Given the pervasiveness of its theme, it is remarkable that this book is the first of its kind--and it is long overdue. The essays ask such questions as: Is religious weeping primal or culturally constructed? Is it universal? Is it spontaneous? Does God ever cry? Is religious weeping altered by sexual or social roles? Is it, perhaps, at once scripted and spontaneous, private and communal? Is it, indeed, divine? The grief occasioned by 9/11 and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere offers a poignant context for this fascinating and richly detailed book. Holy Tears concludes with a compelling meditation on the theology of weeping that emerged from pastoral responses to 9/11, as described in the editors' interview with Reverend Betsee Parker, who became head chaplain for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and leader of the multifaith chaplaincy team at Ground Zero. The contributors are Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Amy Bard, Herbert Basser, Santha Bhattacharji, William Chittick, Gary Ebersole, M. David Eckel, John Hawley, Gay Lynch, Jacob Olúpqnà (with Solá Ajíbádé), Betsee Parker, Kimberley Patton, Nehemia Polen, Kay Read, and Kallistos Ware.

Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination

Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination PDF Author: Linda Freedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139501399
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Dickinson knew the Bible well. She was profoundly aware of Christian theology and she was writing at a time when comparative religion was extremely popular. This book is the first to consider Dickinson's religious imagery outside the dynamic of her personal faith and doubt. It argues that religious myths and symbols, from the sun-god to the open tomb, are essential to understanding the similetic movement of Dickinson's poetry - the reach for a comparable, though not identical, experience in the struggles and wrongs of Abraham, Jacob and Moses, and the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Linda Freedman situates the poet within the context of American typology, interprets her alongside contemporary and modern theology and makes important connections to Shakespeare and the British Romantics. Dickinson emerges as a deeply troubled thinker who needs to be understood within both religious and Romantic traditions.

Meaning in Our Bodies

Meaning in Our Bodies PDF Author: Heike Peckruhn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190280921
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world. And yet the appeal to experience as resource for theology, though a significant shift in contemporary scholarship, has seldom received nuanced investigation. How do embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality highlight theological analysis and connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination? In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience may order normalcy, social status, or communal belonging. Ultimately, she argues that scholars who appeal to the importance of bodily experiences need to acquire a robust and nuanced understanding of how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts of making meaning.

The Wounded Angel

The Wounded Angel PDF Author: Paul Lakeland
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814646476
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In this unique book, readers are taken on a journey to explore the role of the imagination in the face of mystery, whether it be the mystery of God, whose full reality lies beyond our earthly horizons, or the deepest mysteries of life hinted at in the work of fiction. By attending to a series of novels, Paul Lakeland proposes serious fiction as an antidote to the failure of the religious imagination today and shows how literature might lead the secular mind at least to the threshold of mystery.

Theology and Horror

Theology and Horror PDF Author: Brandon R. Grafius
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1978707991
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Scholars of religion have begun to explore horror and the monstrous, not only within the confines of the biblical text or the traditions of religion, but also as they proliferate into popular culture. This exploration emerges from what has long been present in horror: an engagement with the same questions that animate religious thought – questions about the nature of the divine, humanity's place in the universe, the distribution of justice, and what it means to live a good life, among many others. Such exploration often involves a theological conversation. Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination pursues questions regarding non-physical realities, spaces where both divinity and horror dwell. Through an exploration of theology and horror, the contributors explore how questions of spirituality, divinity, and religious structures are raised, complicated, and even sometimes answered (at least partially) by works of horror.