Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove

An Invitation to Religious Studies
3rd Auflage
ISBN: 978-1-138-51896-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 236 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 485 g

The essence of Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove remains intact: its vision of religious studies as sustained refl ection on our lifelong voyage to discover who we are. The story we choose for ourselves, the story we live, can sacralize or secularize our lives and our world by the way in which we choose to relate to it. With this awareness of the story dimension of life, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove opens us to awe, reverence, and wonder at the risks and possibilities of human freedom.

This book is even more important than it was thirty years ago. We need religion to strike deeply into the self, away from public glare. Unless Americans become more sophisticated about the language of the self, inner life will shrivel. In addition, our people will continue to be vulnerable to fundamentalist movements. Such movements take over too many innocents. Th ey promise, and sometimes deliver, a touching happiness. But they do so by closing the spirit in a powerful and dangerous way.

Families and schools do not provide a large and critical vocabulary by which to express the inner longings of the spirit. The souls of many are parched and they gladly accept water, any water, from those who off er it. Th e liberation of the religious spirit from trivial, closed, and simplistic systems of thought can only be achieved through the development of a critical language, exercises, and disciplines that open rather than close the mind, that lead to higher viewpoints, breakthroughs, and new syntheses, in a constant enlargement of spirit. Novak's book leads us to that place.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bell, J Bowyer

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Philosophie: Allgemeines, Methoden
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Theologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction to the Transaction Edition
Preface to the Revised Edition (1978)
Introduction: An Invitation to Religious Studies
ONE The Voyage
1. The Religious Drive
2. What Religion is Not
3. Way of Life
4. Earthy Ecstasy
5. Conversion to the Sacred
TWO Autobiography and Story
1. Religion as Autobiography
2. Cultural Stories and Personal Stories
3. Standpoint to Standpoint
4. "Story," Elaborated
5. What Cannot Be Said
6. The Aesthetic, The Moral, The Religious
7. Among the Many Rises and Declines of Reason
THREE Cultures
1. Paradoxes of the Finite
2. Sense of Reality
3. From Culture to Cult
FOUR Societies and Institutions
1. Institutions are Man's Natural Habitat
2. Freedom and Coercion
3. Are Institutions Obsolete?
4. The New Heteronomy
5. Secular Religion
6. The Communal Imagination
7. The Realities of Economics
8. Political Revolution
9. Civil Religion
FIVE Organizations
1. Organized Anything
2. Liturgy
3. Church, Denomination, Sect
4. Holy Texts
5. Theologies
6. A Map of Christian Theologies in the United States
7. Theology as Suitor
SIX Nature and History
SEVEN How Then Shall We Act?
1. Elaborations on "Story"
2. A Story of My Own
Epilogue: New Horizons
Notes
Index of Names

Über Autor(innen)

J. Bowyer Bell