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Full Description
The Importance of Religion reveals the significance of religion in modern times, showing how it provides people with meaning to their lives and helps guide them in their everyday moral choices
Provides readers with a new understanding of religion, demonstrating how in its actions, texts and world views religion is enduring and vividly engages with the mystery of the world
Offers striking arguments about the relationship of religion to science, art and politics
Engagingly written by a highly respected scholar of religion with an international reputation
Contents
Preface xi Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Religion and the Human Condition 1
Mediating Our Strange World 6
Theories of Religion 8
Religion and Religions 12
Defining Religion 14
The Argument 17
Alienation and the Human Condition 17
The Primacy of Perception and the System of Signs 23
The Invisible and the Transcendent 24
The Truths of Religion 26
Conclusion 27
Part One ACTION
1 Clearing the Ground 37
Reification: The Marxist Legacy 40
Rationalization: The Weberian Legacy 44
Knowledge and Action 46
Methodology 49
Conclusion 50
2 The Meaning of Religious Action 53
The Sociology of Religious Meaning 55
Meaning and Action 58
Moral Acts 60
Ritual and the Body 63
A Rite of Affliction 66
The Meaning of Sacrifice 69
A Phenomenology of Sacrifice 71
The Meanings of Death 73
Conclusion 74
3 The Inner Journey 80
Languages of Spirituality 83
The Spiritual Habitus 91
Conclusion 95
Part Two SPEECH
4 The Reception of the Text 101
Routes to the World of Life 102
Theories of the Text 106
The Reception of Sacred Texts 109
Sacred Text and Act 111
Conclusion 113
5 Tradition, Language, and the Self 115
Linguistic Universals 117
Linguistic Relativity 118
Language and Religious Experience 122
Language as a Model of Religion 125
Conclusion 127
6 Religion and Rationality 130
What is Rationality? 131
Rational Religious Communities 139
Rationality and Cosmology 141
Conclusion 146
Part Three WORLD
7 The Mystery of Complexity and Emergence 153
A History of Antagonism 155
Complexity and Constraint 159
The Ontology of Process 164
Conclusion 166
8 The Union of Nature and Imagination 171
Art and the Real 172
Cosmological Art 175
Pavel Florensky 177
Abhinavagupta 178
Secular Art 180
Re-Spiritualizing Art 182
Conclusion 185
9 Religion and Politics 189
Religion in the Public Sphere 190
The Secular Public Sphere 195
The Traditionalist View 197
Fundamentalism 200
The Religious Citizen 201
Conclusion 205
Summary 210
Epilogue 217
References 221
Index 237
