Full Description
This volume is the first attempt to investigate explicitly how the multiplicity of religions and forms of spirituality interconnect with the pluralism of languages, including scientific codes, formal languages, and artistic expressions. In a journey "beyond Babel", the volume explores how religious and linguistic pluralisms enter into polyphonic relations, how they co-evolve and grow together, and why they clash.
This text provides the setting for a dialogue on a rich variety of religious languages and traditions, including Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Jainism, and Christianity. The chapters explore how these traditions can venture into new interreligious paths, how sacred meanings translate into vernacular speeches, how religious identities and scientific notions interacts, what role emotional expressions play in interfaith encounters, and the impact of Artificial Intelligence on beliefs.
The book is authored by esteemed senior scholars, established researchers, and exceptional junior doctorate holders whose expertise spans across religious studies, the history of science, philosophy, fine arts, theology, linguistics, computer science, and legal studies. This volume contributes to interfaith studies and teaching, to sociology and philosophy of religion, and to the history and anthropology of religion and the sacred arts. It is intended to reach students, researchers, instructors, and professionals alike.
Contents
Chapter 1. Beyond Babel: Interconnecting Religions and Languages.- Conceptual Orientations.- Chapter 2. Divine Language, Graham Oppy.- Chapter 3. The Oscillation Paradigm in Interreligious Dialogue.- Chapter 4. Religious Language, Silence, and Scientific Imagination.- Interreligious and Intertextual Gatherings.- Chapter 5. On the Power of Imperfect Words: An Inquiry into the Revelatory Power of One Hindu Verse.- Chapter 6. Interreligious Empathy and Linguistic Plurality.- Chapter 7. Beyond Comparisons to Contemplative Theology.- Chapter 8. Religious Reformation and Arabic Language in Colonian India.- Living Religions, Living Speeches, Living Texts.- Chapter 9. Knowledge from words: text, tradition and authority in Indian Thought-Tradition.- Chapter 10. (Re)Connecting Analytic Philosophy and Empirical Research. The Example of Ritual Speech Acts and Religious Collectivities.- Chapter 11. Jainism and Sanscrit Language.- Chapter 12. "Expression to Our Christmas Feeling": Imagining Familial Religion in Schleiermacher.- Religious and Scientific Codes.- Chapter 13. Islamic Geometries: Spiritual Language against a Secularist Grid.- Chapter 14. Scientific and Religious Discourses in COVID-19 Pandemic.- Chapter 15. Theological Discourse as Scientific Discourse.- Chapter 16. Religion and Science in Victorian Alchemic Practices.- Chapter 17. Mathematics Declaring the Glory of God.- Religions in a Technological World.- Chapter 18. A Simplified Variant of Gödel's Ontological Argument.- Chapter 19. Human Dignity after the Human.- Chapter 20. (Online) Spelling the (Digital) Spell: Talking About Magic in the Digital Revolution.- Chapter 21. Religious Belief and Complex Systems.- Religious Limits of Language.- Chapter 22. Ineffability: Its Origins and Problems.- Chapter 23. Would We Speak if We Hadn't to Die?.- Chapter 24. Paradox and Diagonalization.
