Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought
Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought

Author: Ziad Elmarsafy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1780936540

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Why would a devout Catholic, a committed Protestant, and a Maoist atheist devote their lives and work to the study of esoteric aspects of Islam? How are these aspects 'good to think with'? What are the theoretical and intellectual problems to which they provide solutions? These are the questions at the heart of Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought. The three French specialists of Islam described above form an intellectual and personal genealogy that structures the core of the text: Massignon taught Corbin, who taught Jambet in his turn. Each of them found in the esoteric a solution to otherwise insurmountable problems: desire for Massignon, certainty for Corbin, and resurrection/immortality for Jambet. Over the course of three long chapters focused on the life and work of each writer, the book maps the central place of esoteric Islam in the intellectual life of twentieth and twenty-first century France.

Scholarship between Europe and the Levant
Scholarship between Europe and the Levant

Author: Jan Loop

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-05-06

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9004429328

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Scholarship between Europe and the Levant is a collection of essays in honour of Professor Alastair Hamilton. His pioneering research into the history of European Oriental studies has deeply enhanced our understanding of the dynamics and processes of cultural and religious exchange between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. Written by students, friends and colleagues, the contributions in this volume pay tribute to Alastair Hamilton’s work and legacy. They discuss and celebrate intellectual, artistic and religious encounters between Europe and the cultural area stretching from Northern Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, and spanning the period from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Contributors: Asaph Ben-Tov, Alexander Bevilacqua, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Charles Burnett, Ziad Elmarsafy, Mordechai Feingold, Aurélien Girard, Bernard Heyberger, Robert Irwin, Tarif Khalidi, J.M.I. Klaver, Noel Malcolm, Martin Mulsow, Francis Richard, G. J. Toomer, Arnoud Vrolijk, Nicholas Warner, Joanna Weinberg, and Jan Just Witkam.

Louis Massignon et la mystique musulmane
Louis Massignon et la mystique musulmane

Author: Florence Ollivry

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-08-21

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 9004548173

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À la faveur d’éléments historiques et biographiques inédits, cet ouvrage offre une analyse approfondie de l’œuvre consacrée par Louis Massignon (1883-1962) à la mystique musulmane. Il souligne l’importance de certaines découvertes de l’islamologue pour les études islamiques concernant la période formative du soufisme. Plus encore, ce livre sonde le regard porté par Massignon sur les vocations mystiques en islam et examine à la lumière des travaux récents sa vision de la « sainteté » et de la figure d’al-Ḥallāj (mort en 309/922). Par suite, ce travail fait émerger la question de la posture du chercheur en sciences des religions ainsi que celle des précautions à adopter afin que sa subjectivité ne reconstruise pas le réel, mais l’éclaire et le révèle. This book provides an extensive analysis of the work of Louis Massignon (1883-1962) on Muslim mysticism, based on previously unpublished historical and biographical elements. It highlights the importance for Islamic Studies of certain discoveries made by the Islamicist concerning the formative period of Sufism. More than that, this book probes Massignon’s view of mystical vocations in Islam and examines, in the light of recent work, his vision of "holiness" and the figure of al-Ḥallāj (d. 309/922). This work opens, more broadly, the question of the posture of the researcher in the study of religion and the precautions to be adopted so that their subjectivity does not reconstruct reality, but illuminates and reveals it.

Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel
Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel

Author: Ryan S. Kemp

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1350106976

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In her five novels and many essays, Marilynne Robinson develops a distinctive Christian vision animated by a powerfully affirmative and sacramental attitude toward the physical world and everyday human life. An in-depth philosophical exploration of her work – from Gilead to her extensive non-fiction writing – Marilynne Robinson's Worldly Gospel reads the author's theology as articulating a compelling response to the claim that Christianity is an otherworldly religion whose adherents seek through it to escape the misfortunes of this life. Ryan Kemp and Jordan Rodgers argue that Robinson's work challenges the modern atheistic tradition dating back to Friedrich Nietzsche to present a unique form of contemporary faith that seeks to affirm the world rather than deny its claims.

Biblical Sterne
Biblical Sterne

Author: Ryan J. Stark

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 135017999X

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Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the parson's roguish reputation. The book's aim, however, is not to dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives behind Sterne's comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes, and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary, we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas. Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour's role in the service of religion.

The Economy of Religion in American Literature
The Economy of Religion in American Literature

Author: Andrew Ball

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-04-07

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1350231681

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Examining how economic change influences religion, and the way literature mediates that influence, this book provides a thorough reassessment of modern American culture. Focusing on the period 1840-1940, the author shows how the development of capitalism reshaped American Protestantism and addresses the necessary role of literature in that process. Arguing that the “spirit of capitalism” was not fostered by traditional Puritanism, Ball explores the ways that Christianity was transformed by the market and industrial revolutions. This book refutes the long-held secularization thesis by showing that modernity was a time when new forms of the sacred proliferated, and that this religious flourishing was essential to the production of American culture. Ball draws from the work of Émile Durkheim and cultural sociology to interpret modern social upheavals like religious awakenings, revivalism, and the labor movement. Examining work from writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Jack London, and Countee Cullen, he shows how concepts of salvation fundamentally intersect with matters of race, gender, and class, and proposes a theory that explains the enchantment of modern American society.

Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination
Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination

Author: Denae Dyck

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-02-08

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 135033538X

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Examining the creative thought that arose in response to 19th-century religious controversies, this book demonstrates that the pressures exerted by historical methods of biblical scholarship prompted an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. During the Victorian period, new approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts called into question traditional ideas about biblical inspiration, motivating literary transformations of inherited symbols, metaphors, and forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Denae Dyck considers how Victorian writers from a variety of belief positions used wisdom literature to reframe their experiences of questioning, doubt, and uncertainty: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George MacDonald, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. This study contributes to the reassessment of historical and contemporary narratives of secularization by calling attention to wisdom literature as a vital, distinctive genre that animated the search for meaning within an increasingly ideologically diverse world.

Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination
Christian Heresy, James Joyce, and the Modernist Literary Imagination

Author: Gregory Erickson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-02-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1350212768

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Organized by heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses the work of James Joyce – particularly Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake – as a prism to explore how the history of Christian heresy remains part of how we read, write, and think about books today. Erickson argues that the study of classical, medieval, and modern debates over heresy and orthodoxy provide new ways of understanding modernist literature and literary theory. Using Joyce's works as a springboard to explore different perspectives and intersections of 20th century literature and the modern literary and religious imagination, this book gives us new insights into how our modern and “secular” reading practices unintentionally reflect how we understand our religious histories.

Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature
Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature

Author: Matthew Smalley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 135040005X

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With seemingly obsessive regularity, American authors, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evoke the sermon at culturally loaded moments in their works, deploying the form to underscore the cultural work they imagine their novels or poetry to perform. Examining this longstanding tradition of “literary preaching,” this book draws on literary applications of design theory to provide a nuanced account of American literature's complex, anxious, and persistent engagement with the Protestant sermon. Analyzing literary preaching as a transhistorical form that simultaneously attracts and repels authors, Smalley demonstrates how major US writers–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison–have subverted the sermon's predominantly religious content in order to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, and aesthetic mode. This study elucidates new lines of literary kinship, offers fresh readings of familiar works, and establishes literary preaching as an undertheorized but significant tradition in American literature.

Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative
Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative

Author: Chad Schrock

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-10-17

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1350417424

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Demonstrating how Chaucer uses the Bible in The Canterbury Tales as an authoritative literary source and model for his own literary production, this book explores the ways in which the Bible was a key tool for Chaucer's self-definition and innovation as an author. Chad Schrock unravels Chaucer's Tales in the light of topics important to biblical reception in 14th-century England: authority, textuality, interpretation, translation, rephrasing and marginalia. When the Canterbury Tales are summed up in this way, they show the great extent to which Chaucer was drawing upon the Bible as a meta-poetical resource for his own poetry – its fictional tale-tellers and characters, its quotations, allusions and images, its plots, its imaginative engagement with an audience of listeners and readers, and its hidden intentions. Schrock demonstrates that the Bible is a uniquely potent literary source for Chaucer because it combines infinite authority and plenitude with unprecedented freedom of interpretive invention. As a world-making text, the Bible's authority includes the literary as subcategory but surpasses and contextualizes it, which gives Chaucer's deferential biblical invention a different kind of freedom and safety. Within Chaucer's tales, a biblical image is often where a given narrative peaks and its plot comes clear, but a biblical world also and without strain contains his biblical fictioneers and whatever they make from the Bible, whether orthodoxy or heresy, whether sin or worship.