Refiguring theological hermeneutics : Hermes, trickster, fool / Marion Grau.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Grau, Marion, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hermeneutics.

Hermes (Greek deity).

Hermes.

Hermeneutics--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Physical Description:

xiii, 201 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Summary:

Hermeneutics can be said to be operative when something is not immediately intelligible. The divine, experiences of God and the sacred, are of course a notorious hermeneutical problem. How to render, translate, interpret the unintelligible, the infinitely untranslatable without indeed admitting to its impossibility? This book argues that interpretive agency has aspects that are represented by the figures of Hermes, trickster, and fool. These figures reveal, perform, and challenge the status quo of a society and its structures of power, knowledge and belief. As hermeneutical acts are notoriously multivalent, engagement with these figures can help reframe hermeneutical work as a vibrant reminder of the play between humility and courage in reinterpreting the divine through mythos and logos anew each day. These figures can help to reconstruct theology as mytho-logy in teaching us greater respect for the dynamics of mythological narrativity and its logical exfoliation. Book jacket.

Contents:

On the poetics of Christian theological hermeneutics

Unsealing hermeneutics

Theological hermeneutics as pattern recognition

Logos, mythos, and mysticism

Putting Hermes back into hermeneutics

The trickster as hermeneut

Fool's errand: holy fools and divine folly as hermeneutical figures

Theology as mytho-logy

Reframing hermeneutics.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781137326850

1137326859

OCLC:

886489870