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Analogies of Transcendence
Stephen M. Fields
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
The problem of nature and grace lies at the heart of Christian theology. No dimension of divine revelation can be addressed without implicitly drawing reference to this issue.Analogies of Transcendence focuses on the central role that the analogies of being and faith play in developing a solution to the problem. These link God, as self-manifesting transcendence, to the human person as both fallen and justified, and to the material cosmos. Although the proposed solution draws on the work of Maréchal, de Lubac, Balthasar, and Rahner, it criticizes their approach for its underdeveloped analogies that diminish nature in grace's engagement with it. In redressing this weakness, Fr. Fields adapts its solution to the intellectual struggle of our time. This volume examines the origins and structure of modernity, which, it asserts, has not been superseded and is therefore critical of'‘postmodernism,' as well as of some ambiguous legacies of Thomism.
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The End of the World
Cultural Apocalypse and Transcendence
Ernesto de Martino
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The first English translation of a classic work of twentieth-century anthropology and philosophy.
 
A philosopher, historian of religions, and anthropologist, Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965) produced a body of work that prefigured many ideas and concerns that would later come to animate anthropology. In his writing, we can see the roots of ethnopsychiatry and medical anthropology, discussions of reflexivity and the role of the ethnographer, considerations of social inequality and hegemony from a Gramscian perspective, and an anticipation of the discipline’s “existential turn.” We also find an attentiveness to hope and possibility, despite the gloomy title of his posthumously published book La fine del mondo, or The End of the World. Examining apocalypse as an individual as well as a cultural phenomenon, treating subjects both classic and contemporary and both European and non-Western, ranging across ethnography, history, literature, psychiatry, and philosophy, de Martino probes how we relate to our world and how we might be better subjects and thinkers within it. This new translation offers English-language readers their first chance to engage with de Martino’s masterwork, which continues to appear prescient in the face of the frictions of globalization and environmental devastation.
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From Dickinson to Dylan
Visions of Transcendence in Modernist Literature
Glenn Hughes
University of Missouri Press, 2020
Glenn Hughes examines the ways in which six literary modernists—Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, and Bob Dylan—have explored the human relationship to a transcendent mystery of meaning. Hughes argues that visions of transcendence are, perhaps surprisingly, a significant feature in modernist literature, and that these authors’ works account for many of the options for interpreting what transcendent reality might be.

This work is unique in its extended focus, in a comparative study spanning a century, on the persistence and centrality in modernist literature of the struggle to understand and articulate the dependence of human meaning on the mystery of transcendent meaning. Hughes shows us that each of these authors is a mystic in his or her way, and that none are tempted by the modern inclination to suppose that meaning originates with human beings. Together, they address one of the most difficult and important challenges of modern literature: how to be a mystic in modernity.
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Get Shown the Light
Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead
Michael Kaler
Duke University Press, 2023
Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music’s structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead. In Get Shown the Light Michael Kaler examines how the Dead’s dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence. Drawing on band testimonials and analyses of early recordings, Kaler traces how the Dead developed an approach to playing music that they believed would facilitate their spiritual goals. He focuses on the band’s early years, the significance of their playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and their evolving exploration of the myriad musical and spiritual possibilities that extended improvisation afforded. Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleash the spiritual and transformative potential of their music.
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Immortal Wishes
Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain
Ellen Schattschneider
Duke University Press, 2003
Immortal Wishes is a powerful ethnographic rendering of religious experiences of landscape, healing, and self-fashioning on a northern Japanese sacred mountain. Working at the intersection of anthropology, religion, and Japan studies, Ellen Schattschneider focuses on Akakura Mountain Shrine, a popular Shinto institution founded by a rural woman in the 1920s. For decades, local spirit mediums and worshipers, predominantly women, have undertaken extended periods of shugyo (ascetic discipline) within the shrine and on the mountain's slopes. Schattschneider argues that their elaborate, transforming repertoire of ritual practice and ascetic discipline has been generated by complex social and historical tensions largely emerging out of the uneasy status of the surrounding area within the modern nation's industrial and postindustrial economies.

Schattschneider shows how, through dedicated work at the shrine including demanding ascents up the sacred mountain, the worshipers come to associate the rugged mountain landscape with their personal biographies, the life histories of certain exemplary predecessors and ancestors, and the collective biography of the extended congregation. She contends that this body of ritual practice presents worshipers with fields of imaginative possibilities through which they may dramatize or reflect upon the nature of their relations with loved ones, ancestors, and divinities. In some cases, worshipers significantly redress traumas in their own lives or in those of their families. In other instances, these ritualized processes lead to deepening crises of the self, the accelerated fragmentation of local households, and apprehension of possession by demons or ancestral forces. Immortal Wishes reveals how these varied practices and outcomes have over time been incorporated into the changing organization of ritual, space, and time on the mountainscape.

For more information about this book and to read an excerpt, please click here.

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The Religion of Reality
Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence
Didier Maleuvre
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
The book first argues that religious feeling persists in the secular western mind; that it has taken refuge in the unlikeliest of camps, indeed with the supposed debunker of religious creed: the rationalist existential ego.
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Romanticism and Transcendence
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination
J. Robert Barth, S.J.
University of Missouri Press, 2003
Grounded in the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romanticism and Transcendence explores the religious dimensions of imagination in the Romantic tradition, both theoretically and in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. J. Robert Barth suggests that we may look to Coleridge for the theoretical grounding of the view of religious imagination proposed in this book, but that it is in Wordsworth above all that we see this imagination at work.
Barth first argues that the Romantic imagination—with its profound symbolic import—of its very nature has religious implications, and notes parallels between Coleridge’s view of the imagination and that of Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises. He then turns to the role of religious experience in Wordsworth, using The Prelude as a privileged source. Next, after comparing the conception of humanity and God in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Barth considers the role of religious experience and imagery in two of Coleridge’s central poetic texts, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Finally, Barth examines the continuing role of the Romantic idea of the religious imagination today, in literature and all the arts, linking it with the thought of theologian Karl Rahner and literary critic George Steiner.
Romanticism and Transcendence brings together literary theory, poetry, and religious experience, areas that are interrelated but are often not seen in relationship. By exploring levels of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry that are often ignored, Barth provides insight into how and why the imagination was so important to their work. He also demonstrates how rich with religious value and meaning poetry and the arts can be.
The interdisciplinary nature of this important new study will make it useful not only to Wordsworth and Coleridge scholars and other Romantic specialists, but also to anyone concerned with the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and to theologians in general.
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Transcendence and History
The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity
Glenn Hughes
University of Missouri Press, 2020
Transcendence and History is an analysis of what philosopher Eric Voegelin described as “the decisive problem of philosophy”: the dilemma of the discovery of transcendent meaning and the impact of this discovery on human self-understanding. The world’s major religious and wisdom traditions are built upon the recognition of transcendent meaning, and our own cultural and linguistic heritage has long since absorbed the postcosmological division of reality into the two dimensions of “transcendence” and “immanence.” But the last three centuries in the West have seen a growing resistance to the idea of transcendent meaning; contemporary and “postmodern” interpretations of the human situation—both popular and intellectual—indicate a widespread eclipse of confidence in the truth of transcendence.
In Transcendence and History, Glenn Hughes contributes to the understanding of transcendent meaning and the problems associated with it, assisting in the philosophical recovery of the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence. Depending primarily on the treatments of transcendence found in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, Hughes explores the historical discovery of transcendent meaning and then examines what it indicates about the structure of history. Hughes’s main focus, however, is on clarifying the problem of transcendence in relation to historical existence. Addressing both layreaders and scholars, Hughes applies the insights and analyses of Voegelin and Lonergan to considerable advantage.
Transcendence and History will be of particular value to those who have grappled with the notion of transcendence in the study of philosophy, comparative religion, political theory, history, philosophical anthropology, and art or poetry. By examining transcendent meaning as the key factor in the search for ultimate meaning from ancient societies to the present, the book demonstrates how “the decisive problem of philosophy” both illuminates and presents a vital challenge to contemporary intellectual discourse.
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Transcendence and Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Michael P. Hodges
Temple University Press, 1990

Although Wittgenstein claimed that his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was essentially an ethical work, it has been viewed insistently as a purely logical one. His later work, Philosophical Investigations, is generally seen as presenting totally different ideas from his earlier writings. In this book, Michael Hodges shows how Wittgenstein’s later work emerged from his earlier Tractatus, and he unifies the early philosophy, both its well-known logical aspects and the lesser known ethical dimensions, in terms of the notion of transcendence.

Hodges studies the Tractatus in light of Wittgenstein’s own claim that the Philosophical Investigations can only be understood when read against the background of the Tractatus. At the heart of an understanding of the earlier work is the idea of transcendence which structures both Wittgenstein’s logical and ethical insights. Seen in terms of this notion, the rigorous unity of Wittgenstein’s early thinking becomes apparent and the gestalt shift to the later philosophy comes clearly into focus.

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Transhumanism and Transcendence
Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement
Ronald Cole-Turner, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2013

The timeless human desire to be more beautiful, intelligent, healthy, athletic, or young has given rise in our time to technologies of human enhancement. Athletes use drugs to increase their strength or stamina; cosmetic surgery is widely used to improve physical appearance; millions of men take drugs like Viagra to enhance sexual performance. And today researchers are exploring technologies such as cell regeneration and implantable devices that interact directly with the brain. Some condemn these developments as a new kind of cheating—not just in sports but in life itself—promising rewards without effort and depriving us most of all of what it means to be authentic human beings. “Transhumanists,” on the other hand, reject what they see as a rationalizing of human limits, as if being human means being content forever with underachieving bodies and brains. To be human, they insist, is to be restless with possibilities, always eager to transcend biological limits.

As the debate grows in urgency, how should theology respond? Christian theologians recognize truth on both sides of the argument, pointing out how the yearnings of the transhumanists—if not their technological methods—find deep affinities in Christian belief. In this volume, Ronald Cole-Turner has joined seasoned scholars and younger, emerging voices together to bring fresh insight into the technologies that are already reshaping the future of Christian life and hope.

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Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature
Wilt L. Idema
Harvard University Press, 2006

The collapse of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China were traumatic experiences for Chinese intellectuals, not only because of the many decades of destructive warfare but also because of the adjustments necessary to life under a foreign regime. History became a defining subject in their writings, and it went on shaping literary production in succeeding generations as the Ming continued to be remembered, re-imagined, and refigured on new terms.

The twelve chapters in this volume and the introductory essays on early Qing poetry, prose, and drama understand the writings of this era wholly or in part as attempts to recover from or transcend the trauma of the transition years. By the end of the seventeenth century, the sense of trauma had diminished, and a mood of accommodation had taken hold. Varying shades of lament or reconciliation, critical or nostalgic retrospection on the Ming, and rejection or acceptance of the new order distinguish the many voices in these writings.

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The Turn to Transcendence
The Role of Religion in the Twenty-First Century
Glenn Olsen
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, Glenn W. Olsen sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period.
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