Bringing the sacred down to earth : adventures in comparative religion / Corinne G. Dempsey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dempsey, Corinne G.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religion.

Religions--Relations.

Religions.

Relations.

Physical Description:

xi, 199 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, [2012]

Summary:

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 of this view, 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 performed in this book are disciplinary as well as ethical. As she demonstrates 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Icelandic and Indian language notes

Introduction: adventures and misadventures in comparison

The suffering Indian nun and the wandering (drunken) Irish priest: orientalism and Celticism unplugged

Arguing equal access to an earthly sacred: Christian and Hindu theologies of liberation

Making and staking sacred terrain: Rajneeshee and diaspora Hindu settlers and unsettlers

Embodying the extraordinary in Iceland and India and the difference spirits make

Postscript: unanticipated adventures in ritualized ethnography.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780199860326

0199860327

9780199860333

0199860335

OCLC:

719673413