Bringing the sacred down to earth: adventures in comparative religion

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. 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 tomaterial 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 ofHindu and Christian religious dynamics, many of which exist on opposite sidesof 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 inestimableadvantages of the comparative method described by religion scholars and performed in this book are disciplinary as well as ethical. As demonstrated in thisstimulating book, the process of comparison can shed light on angles and contours otherwise obscured and perform the important work of bridging humancontingencies and perception across religious, cultural, and disciplinary divides. Icelandic and Indian Language NotesIntroduction: Adventures and Misadventures in ComparisonChapter 1: The Suffering Indian Nun and the Wandering (Drunken) Irish Priest:Orientalism and Celticism UnpluggedChapter 2: Arguing Equal Access to an Earthly Sacred: Christian and Hindu Theologies of LiberationChapter 3: Making and Staking Sacred Terrain: Rajneeshee and Diaspora Hindu Settlers and UnsettlersChapter 4: Embodying the Extraordinary in Iceland and India and the Difference Spirits MakePostscript: Unanticipated Adventures in Ritualized EthnographyNotesBiblographyIndex

• ISBN: 978-0-19-986032-6
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 240
• Fecha Publicación: 05/01/2012
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés