Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred

by Sawyer,Deborah F.

• ISBN13: 9780754663294
• ISBN10: 0754663299
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The phenomenon of 'sacred text' has undergone radical deconstruction in recent times, reflecting how religion has broken out of its traditional definitions and practices, and how current literary theories have influenced texts inside the religious domain and beyond. Reading Spiritualities presents both commentary and vivid examples of this evolution, engaging with a variety of reading practices that work with traditional texts and those that extend the notion of 'text' itself. The contributors draw on a range of textual sites such as an interview, Caribbean literature, drama and jazz, women's writings, emerging church blogs, Neo-pagan websites, the reading practices of Buddhist nuns, empirical studies on the reading experiences of Gujarati, Christian and post-Christian women, Chicana short stories, the mosque, cinema, modern art and literature. These examples open up understandings of where and how 'sacred texts' are emerging and being reassessed within contemporary religious and spiritual contexts; and make room for readings where the spiritual resides not only in the textual, but in other unexpected places.Reading Spiritualities includes contributions from Graham Holderness, Ursula King, Michael N. Jagessar, David Jasper, Anthony G. Reddie, Michèle Roberts, and Heather Walton to reflect and encourage the interdisciplinary study of sacred text in the broad arena of the arts and social sciences. It offers a unique and well-focused 'snapshot' of the textual constructions and representations of the sacred within the contemporary religious climate - accessible to the general reader, as well as more specialist interests of students and researchers working in the crossover fields of religious, theological, cultural and literary studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Spiritual Journeys

Spiritual journeys

'Getting a/cross God': an interview with Michèle Roberts

The sacred in Caribbean literature: a theological conversation

Dramatic improvisation: a jazz inspired approach to undertaking theology with the marginalized

Authority

Authority

'Gendering the spirit': reading women's spiritualities with a comparative mirror

Our sacred texts: literature, theology and feminism

The desire for interactivity and the emerging texts of the blogosphere

Readers and Texts

Readers and texts

Spiritual themes and identities in chicana texts: the Virgin of Guadeloupe as a role model for womanhood

Bihishti Zewar: a text for respectable women?

Forming community in the 3rd wave: literary texts and women's spiritualities

Accessing the Spiritual

Accessing the spiritual

Solomon's narrative: architecture, text and the sacred

Reading texts, watching texts: mythopoesis on neopagan websites

Word and image: Burgess, Zeferelli and Jesus the Man of Nazareth

Do not hide your face from me: the sacred and profane body in art and modern literature

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.