Download or read book Mysticism and Language written by Steven T. Katz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taken collectively, the original essays in this new collection make up the most important exploration of mysticism and language to appear in many years. Written from diverse perspectives on a wide variety of religious and mystical traditions, ranging from Judaism and Christianity to Zen Buddhism and Hinduism, all the essays exhibit great erudition, a mastery of the original mystical sources, and philosophical and hermeneutical sophistication. Further, all recognize the inadequacy of treating the questions surrounding this subject a-contextually - outside of their historic, intellectual, and sociological circumstances. As such, these studies deepen the on-going revisionist, contextualist study of mysticism so powerfully and influentially inaugurated by two previous collections also edited by Steven Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis and Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Like its predecessors, the present collection includes work by some of the world's leading authorities on mysticism, including Moshe Idel, William Alston, Bernard McGinn, Ewert Cousins, Bimal Matilal, Carl Ernst, and Steven Katz. It is sure to become essential reading for everyone interested in mysticism, as well as those who study religion, comparative religion, philosophy, and history.
Download or read book Mystical Languages of Unsaying written by Michael A. Sells and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994-05-02 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of Mystical Languages of Unsaying is an important but neglected mode of mystical discourse, apophasis. which literally means "speaking away." Sometimes translated as "negative theology," apophatic discourse embraces the impossibility of naming something that is ineffable by continually turning back upon its own propositions and names. In this close study of apophasis in Greek, Christian, and Islamic texts, Michael Sells offers a sustained, critical account of how apophatic language works, the conventions, logic, and paradoxes it employs, and the dilemmas encountered in any attempt to analyze it. This book includes readings of the most rigorously apophatic texts of Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, with comparative reference to important apophatic writers in the Jewish tradition, such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de Leon. Sells reveals essential common features in the writings of these authors, despite their wide-ranging differences in era, tradition, and theology. By showing how apophasis works as a mode of discourse rather than as a negative theology, this work opens a rich heritage to reevaluation. Sells demonstrates that the more radical claims of apophatic writers—claims that critics have often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic—are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying. This work also has important implications for the relationship of classical apophasis to contemporary languages of the unsayable. Sells challenges many widely circulated characterizations of apophasis among deconstructionists as well as a number of common notions about medieval thought and gender relations in medieval mysticism.
Download or read book Language Mysticism written by Shira Wolosky and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language Mysticism explores the place granted to language within metaphysical and theological hierarchies traditional to Western culture. Within these hierarchies, language represents embodiment, division, and historical differentiation; whereas silence points to an eternal unity beyond linguistic form and limitation. But this reflects a deeply embedded ambivalence in the Western tradition toward material and temporal conditions in general. The author uses the writings of T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan to show how far-reaching and immediate this history of ambivalence remains in its influence and consequences. In each of these writers, theological traditions inform and situate linguistic imagery and practices, albeit in quite different ways. The author argues that the stances toward language of these three writers register values not only fundamental to their work but general to our culture. Language is the sign of body, of history, of difference; and a negative attitude toward language therefore implies a displacement of value away from concrete, historical condition. The approach to language of Eliot, Beckett, and Celan therefore inscribes their struggle to define and locate the values that endow our lives with meaning, and the possibility of translating these values into historical reality.
Download or read book Between Mysticism and Philosophy written by Diana Lobel and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judah Ha-Levi (1075–1141), a medieval Jewish poet, mystic, and sophisticated critic of the rationalistic tradition in Judaism, is the focus of this ground-breaking study. Diana Lobel examines his influential philosophical dialogue, Sefer ha-Kuzari, written in Arabic and later translated into Hebrew, which broke religious and philosophical convention by infusing Sufi terms for religious experience with a new Jewish theological vision. Intellectually engaging, clear, and accessible, Between Mysticism and Philosophy is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the intertwined worlds of Jewish and Islamic philosophy, religion, and culture.
Download or read book Mysticism and Religious Traditions written by Steven T. Katz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1983 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages written by Gordon Rudy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. This book is about the way medieval authors wrote about union with God and how they used language that refers to the senses to articulate their ideas about how a person can be one with God. Rudy argues that such explicit concepts of the spiritual senses are not sharply distinct from the ideas implicit in broader usage of sensory language in theological writings. These ideas are significant in the history of Christian mysticism, because language that refers to the senses bears directly on several ideas that are central to ideas about union with God.
Download or read book Wittgenstein From Mysticism to Ordinary Language written by Russell Nieli and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language presents the Tractatus as a work of mystic theology intended to direct the reader to a transcendental plane from which human existence can be viewed from the divine perspective. More than any other work on Wittgenstein, this study integrates text material with personal biographical information, especially information dealing with his spiritual and psychological states. The result is a fresh, coherent, and extremely illuminating picture of Wittgenstein, successfully avoiding the pitfalls of either psychological reductionism or unfaithfulness to the text. It is bold without being reckless, passionately argued without being doctrinaire, and makes a very powerful and persuasive case for its main thesis.
Download or read book Mysticism and Meaning Multidisciplinary Perspectives written by Alex S. Kohav and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume investigates the question of meaning of mystical phenomena and, conversely, queries the concept of "meaning" itself, via insights afforded by mystical experiences. The collection brings together researchers from such disparate fields as philosophy, psychology, history of religion, cognitive poetics, and semiotics, in an effort to ascertain the question of mysticism's meaning through pertinent, up-to-date multidisciplinarity. The discussion commences with Editor's Introduction that probes persistent questions of complexity as well as perplexity of mysticism and the reasons why problematizing mysticism leads to even greater enigmas. One thread within the volume provides the contextual framework for continuing fascination of mysticism that includes a consideration of several historical traditions as well as personal accounts of mystical experiences: Two contributions showcase ancient Egyptian and ancient Israelite involvements with mystical alterations of consciousness and Christianity's origins being steeped in mystical praxis; and four essays highlight mysticism's formative presence in Chinese traditions and Tibetan Buddhism as well as medieval Judaism and Kabbalah mysticism. A second, more overarching strand within the volume is concerned with multidisciplinary investigations of the phenomenon of mysticism, including philosophical, psychological, cognitive, and semiotic analyses. To this effect, the volume explores the question of philosophy's relation to mysticism and vice versa, together with a Wittgensteinian nexus between mysticism, facticity, and truth; language mysticism and "supernormal meaning" engendered by certain mystical states; cognitive-poetic analysis of mystical poetry; and a semiotic scrutiny of some mystical experiences and their ineffability. Finally, the volume includes an assessment of the so-called New Age authors' contention of the convergence of scientific and mystical claims about reality. The above two tracks are appended with personal, contemporary accounts of mystical experiences, in the Prologue; and a futuristic envisioning, as a fictitious chronicle from the time-to-come, of life without things mystical, in the Postscript. The volume contains fourteen chapters; its international contributors are based in Canada, Israel, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Study of Mysticism written by Richard H. Jones and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in contemporary mystical studies: an overview of the basic ways to approach mystical experiences and mysticism. It discusses the problem of definitions of “mystical experiences” and “mysticism” and advances characterizations of “mystical experiences” in terms of certain altered states of consciousness and “mysticism” in terms of encompassing ways of life centered on such experiences and states. Types of mystical experiences, enlightened states, paths, and doctrines are discussed, as is the relation of mystical experiences and mysticism to religions and cultures. The approaches of constructivism, contextualism, essentialism, and perennialism are presented. Themes in the history of the world’s major mystical traditions are set forth. Approaches to mystical phenomena in sociology, psychology, gender studies, and neuroscience are introduced. Basic philosophical issues related to whether mystical experiences are veridical and mystical claims valid, mystics’ problems of language, art, and morality are laid out. Older and newer comparative approaches in religious studies and in Christian theology are discussed, along with postmodernist objections. The intended audience is undergraduates and the general public interested in the general issues related to mysticism.
Download or read book Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis written by Steven T. Katz and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 1994-07-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical and religious experience are subjects which are constantly under investigation by both the religiously sensitive and, in a more general way, by those interested in the phenomenon. This comprehensive study by a group of distinguished American and British scholars sympathetically and objectively deals with mystical experience in Christianity, Judaism, and Eastern religions.
Download or read book Philosophy of Mysticism written by Richard H. Jones and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones's inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism.
Download or read book Mysticism a study in the nature and development of man s spiritual consciousness written by Evelyn Underhill and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 1930-01-01 with total page 1046 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Mystical Language of Icons written by Solrunn Nes and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2009-04-10 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solrunn Nes, one of Europe's most admired iconographers, illuminates the world of Christian icons, explaining the motifs, gestures, and colors common to these profound symbols of faith. Nes explores in depth a number of famous icons, including those of the Greater Feasts, the Mother of God, and a number of the better-known saints, enriching her discussion with references to Scripture, early Christian writings, and liturgy. She also leads readers through the process and techniques of icon painting, showing each step with photographs, and includes more than fifty of her own original works of art.
Download or read book Growing into God written by John Mabry and published by Quest Books. This book was released on 2012-08-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a straightforward look at the Christian mystical tradition, using examples of the classical mystical journey from the lives of Christian mystics.
Download or read book Into the Region of Awe written by David C. Downing and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2005-04-21 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David C. Downing explores mysticism as a part of C. S. Lewis's faith and writing. He addresses both the influence on Lewis by mystical writers of his own day and the threads of mysticism evident in Lewis's works.
Download or read book The Language of Mysticism written by Elise R. Parker and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mysticism and Social Transformation written by Janet K. Ruffing and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do Mysticism and and political action meet? How does faith empower its adherents to resist oppression? What are the origins of authentic contemporary mysticism? From the thirteenth-century Franciscan movement to African American mystics, this wide-ranging volume of essays considers exemplars of Christian mysticism (including Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, the Quakers, and the Society of Friends) whose practices and influence brought about social change. Linking major conceptual issues and social theory, the essays examine the historical impact of mysticism in contemporary life and argue for a hermeneutical approach to mysticism in its historical context. The contributors look at how mystical empowerment can serve as a catalyst for expressing compassion in acts of justice and long-term social change. We learn how Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, driven by mystical experiences to take up lives of preaching, faced the same misogynistic religious environments as did women mystics throughout history, which has submerged this key area of women’s experience. The final two essays describe the development of socially engaged Buddhism in Asia and America and the mystical roots of deep ecology.
