Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in our Strange World , written by Gavin Flood

The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in our Strange World , written by Gavin Flood The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in our Strange World . Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 249 pp. isbn 9781405189729 (pbk.) Gavin Flood is an Oxford Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion who has written several well-received books on subjects such as Tantric traditions, asceticism, and the theory of religion. The present book is attractively bound, with a large question mark on the cover, no doubt meant to illustrate the central thesis of the book, that the search for meaning and the encounter with the unknown lie at the core of religious experience. It must be admitted in advance that in the course of reading the book, the margins of my own copy were also filled with question marks. The book consists of nine chapters that are well organized into three parts of approximately the same size. These three parts correspond to the three constituents of religion, according to Flood, namely, 1) action, that is, embodied ritual practices and moral action; 2) speech, referring to speech acts and the dimension of semantic meaning; and 3) world, which is the visible and invisible realities that are shown forth in the religious encounter. Flood thus argues that the invisible world http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Numen Brill

The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in our Strange World , written by Gavin Flood

Numen , Volume 62 (4): 465 – Jun 8, 2015

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/the-importance-of-religion-meaning-and-action-in-our-strange-world-DfLUdtxa0i

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Subject
Book Reviews
ISSN
0029-5973
eISSN
1568-5276
DOI
10.1163/15685276-12341382
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The Importance of Religion: Meaning and Action in our Strange World . Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 249 pp. isbn 9781405189729 (pbk.) Gavin Flood is an Oxford Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion who has written several well-received books on subjects such as Tantric traditions, asceticism, and the theory of religion. The present book is attractively bound, with a large question mark on the cover, no doubt meant to illustrate the central thesis of the book, that the search for meaning and the encounter with the unknown lie at the core of religious experience. It must be admitted in advance that in the course of reading the book, the margins of my own copy were also filled with question marks. The book consists of nine chapters that are well organized into three parts of approximately the same size. These three parts correspond to the three constituents of religion, according to Flood, namely, 1) action, that is, embodied ritual practices and moral action; 2) speech, referring to speech acts and the dimension of semantic meaning; and 3) world, which is the visible and invisible realities that are shown forth in the religious encounter. Flood thus argues that the invisible world

Journal

NumenBrill

Published: Jun 8, 2015

There are no references for this article.