medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Dear all,
I am pleased to announce a new publication in (Medieval) Religion studies
which might be your interest.
* The Curve of the Sacred
An Exploration of Human Spirituality
Constantin V. Ponomareff and Kenneth A. Bryson
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2006. XVII, 217 pp.
(Value Inquiry Book Series 178)
ISBN-10: 90-420-2031-8
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2031-3
Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=Vibs+178
More info:
This interdisciplinary book examines the nature of spirituality and the
role it plays in the search for meaning. Spirituality is a loving tendency
towards the sacred. In a secular environment, the sacred is taken to be a
power greater than self. In a religious environment, the Sacred refers to
God, or Higher Power. The book examines the developments of the s/Sacred
in great works of art and literature, as well as in medicine, theology,
psychology, philosophy, and religion. Spirituality also functions as an
unloving tendency towards disunity, or a force for evil. The first part of
the book examines the ways of the spiritual as a force for good and evil.
We have just witnessed one of the bloodiest centuries in human history.
The experience of two World Wars leaves a legacy of brokenness: “Where
Nossack’s reminiscences bore poetic, compassionate, and personal witness
to the disaster, Eliot’s poetry reads more like a sacred and religious
poem taking contemporary Western European civilization to task—much like
the biblical prophets of old—for its spiritual bankruptcy.” Albert
Einstein, Edvard Munch’s Madonna, and Carl Jung’s ‘unconscious’ touch the
curve of the Sacred in more promising places.The second part examines how
the search for meaning works. The distinction between being human and
being a person plays a central role in the life of the spiritual; “…the
spiritual is manifest in the activities taking place in the central self.
The central self is the locus of all thoughts, feelings, acts of reason
and judgment, conscious and unconscious processes alike. The central self
is the place where social relationships and environmental relationships
are processed. The essential feature of the central self is that it does
not exist outside these processes.” The same spiritual energies that
light up great works of art also light up our destructive side, only the
associations’ change.
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