From meditation and fasting to celibacy and anchoritism, the ascetic impulse has been an enduring and complex phenomenon throughout history. Offering a sweeping view of this elusive and controversial aspect of religious life and culture, Asceticism looks at the ascetic impulse from a unique vantage point. Cross-cultural, cross-religious, and multidisciplinary in nature, these essays provide a broad historical and comparative perspective on asceticism--a subject rarely studied outside the context of individual religious traditions. The work represents the input of more than forty...
From meditation and fasting to celibacy and anchoritism, the ascetic impulse has been an enduring and complex phenomenon throughout history. Offering ...
Refractions of the Scriptural is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that seeks to construct a new field of scholarly inquiry with scriptures as a fraught category, analytical wedge, and site for excavation and problematization. The book focuses on the ways in which individual and social bodies manipulate and are manipulated by the politics and power encoded in language and formalized canonical knowledge. Scriptures, in this sense, function as complex phenomena that are instrumental to social conservatism as well as social critique and social change. The essays in this volume, written...
Refractions of the Scriptural is a transdisciplinary collection of essays that seeks to construct a new field of scholarly inquiry with scriptures ...
