(DOWNLOAD) "Seeing "That of God" in Texts: Christian Practices for Training in Perception (Critical Essay)" by Christianity and Literature " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Seeing "That of God" in Texts: Christian Practices for Training in Perception (Critical Essay)
- Author : Christianity and Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Religion & Spirituality,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 70 KB
Description
The diversity of submissions for the seminar on the turn to religion in literary studies makes it clear that there are in fact many contemporary turns to religion. My article is concerned with the study of religious practice as part of that turn, a concern shared by the essays of Liam Corley and Karen Dieleman, which follow this one. Where their essays are chiefly concerned with the values of particular practices--devotional reading and liturgy, respectively--mine focuses more on the general value for Christian literary scholars of conscious reflection on the role of religious practice in their exercise of literary, professional interpretation and judgment, though I will turn to practices for cultivating sensibility--training one's faculties of perception to be more or less responsive to certain feelings or kinds of details--for examples to illustrate some of my general claims. That the study of religious practice has been a major element of the religious turn, especially as a starting point for secular scholarship on religion I take to be an obvious point. If, as Karen Dieleman points out, religion has re-entered the discourse of literary criticism largely through recognition of its status as "a component of individual and social formations" (this issue, 278), then practice will be the element of religion that this discourse will first explore. (1)