Mourning Religion

by Parsons, William B.; Jonte-pace, Diane; Henking, Susan E.

• ISBN13: 9780813927459
• ISBN10: 0813927455
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-31
• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr

Summary

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists such as Freud, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx built their intellectual edifices on what they thought would be the remains or ruins of religion in the wake of modernization. But today the decline and disappearance of religion can no longer be simply assumed. In the face of contemporary entanglements of religion and violence, the establishment of meaning and morality remains troubling; the experience of loss and change remains, paradoxically, constant; and new theoretical perspectives--feminism, race studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, postmodernism--have emerged, challenging the works that mourned religion and created meaning in earlier periods. The effects of this ongoing experience of mourning and symbolic loss on culture, on subjectivity, and on the academic disciplines of religious studies, though immense, are poorly understood and underinterpreted. In order to correct this lacuna in scholarly thought, this volume brings together a notable group of scholars who examine the ways in which recent cultural transformations inform the place of religion in the modern world. Methodologically, they represent the intersection of religious studies and the social scientific study of religion, bringing the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology into this dialogue.

Table of Contents

Mourning Religion: An Introduction	p. 1
Loss and Theory Formation in Religious Studies
Symbolic Loss and the Re-creation of Meaning: Freud and Eliade as Culture Makers	p. 13
The Persistence of the Past: Framing Symbolic Loss and Religious Studies in the Context of Race	p. 44
Mourning and Method in Psychoanalytic Studies of Indian Religions	p. 63
Melancholia and Religion in French Feminist Theory	p. 81
Mourning the (Dis)Contents of Religion
Psychologia Perennis and the Academic Study of Mysticism	p. 97
Mourning Modern Ethics on the Couch	p. 124
Mourning and Immortality: Ritual and Psychoanalysis Compared	p. 141
Mourning Religion in Culture
Theology and Mourning in Film: Loss and Redemption in the Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski	p. 161
If SILENCE = DEATH, Then What Is Life? Renewing the Politics of Mourning	p. 177
Nostalgia and the Disenchantment with Modernity: Memory Books as Adaptive Response to Shoah	p. 201
Afterword: Conversations on Freud, Memory, and Loss	p. 221
Bibliography	p. 239
Index	p. 261
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