Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth

Adventures in Comparative Religion

Corinne G. Dempsey (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

216 Seiten

2012
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-986033-3 (ISBN)

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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.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Nazareth College

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

Erscheint lt. Verlag	23.2.2012
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	236 x 160 mm
Gewicht	431 g
Themenwelt	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Hinduismus
ISBN-10	0-19-986033-5 / 0199860335
ISBN-13	978-0-19-986033-3 / 9780199860333
Zustand	Neuware