Sacrifice In Religious Experience

This book presents revised papers delivered at the 1998 and 1999 Taubes Minerva Center for Religious Anthropology conferences. The papers from the 1998 conference discuss the role of sacrifice in religious experience from a comparative perspective. Those from the second conference examine alternatives to sacrifice. The first theme has been much elaborated in recent scholarship, and the essays here participate in that on-going inquiry. The second theme has been less explored, and the goal of this volume is to stimulate examination of the topic by offering a set of test cases. In both sections of the volume a wide variety of religious traditions are considered. The essays show that in spite of the inclination we may sometimes have to consider sacrifice part of the idolatrous past, long overcome, it remains a persistent and meaningful part of religious experience.

For some time interest has been growing in a dialogue between modern scientific research into human cognition and research in the humanities. This ground-breaking volume focuses this dialogue on the religious experience of men and women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Each chapter examines a particular historical problem arising from an ancient religious activity and the contributions range across a wide variety of both ancient contexts and sources, exploring and integrating literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. In order to avoid a simple polarity between physical aspects (ritual) and mental aspects (belief) of religion, the contributors draw on theories of cognition as embodied, emergent, enactive and extended, accepting the complexity, multimodality and multicausality of human life. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters open up new questions around and develop new insights into the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of ancient religions.

An examination of the practice and philosophy of sacrifice in three religious traditions In the book of Genesis, God tests the faith of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice the life of his beloved son, Isaac. Bound by common admiration for Abraham, the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also promote the practice of giving up human and natural goods to attain religious ideals. Each tradition negotiates the moral dilemmas posed by Abraham’s story in different ways, while retaining the willingness to perform sacrifice as an identifying mark of religious commitment. This book considers the way in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to “sacrifice”—not only as ritual offerings, but also as the donation of goods, discipline, suffering, and martyrdom. Weddle highlights objections to sacrifice within these traditions as well, presenting voices of dissent and protest in the name of ethical duty. Sacrifice forfeits concrete goods for abstract benefits, a utopian vision of human community, thereby sparking conflict with those who do not share the same ideals. Weddle places sacrifice in the larger context of the worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, using this nearly universal religious act as a means of examining similarities of practice and differences of meaning among these important world religions. This book takes the concept of sacrifice across these three religions, and offers a cross-cultural approach to understanding its place in history and deep-rooted traditions.

'Holy Spirit and Religious Experience' seeks to find out how far the centrality of the Holy Spirit in Christian experience during the earliest period of the church was maintained or diminished in the third to the fifth generations (ca. AD 90-200). Three themes are explored. First, the sense of encounter with the divine presence, the numinous, a sense of being caught up into the divine being or being overwhelmed by the One who is beyond us. Secondly, a sense of being illuminated in respect to the truth, given deeper understanding of God's purpose, whether for the individual or the congregation, or guided in decision-making. Thirdly, a sense of ethical empowerment, an awareness of being helped by divine power, assisted in a course of action or development of character, in grappling with temptation, or in the ultimate test of loyalty, martyrdom. This book is arranged geographically, from Syria and Asia Minor in the East to Rome and Gaul in the West, including North Africa and Egypt. Christian authors within these areas are examined chronologically, from the later New Testament writers through the second century to Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage, for the evidence they supply. The variegated picture which emerges, it is contended, reflects second-century Christianity.

Sacrifice is at the heart of Christian wisdom about love. Jesus' teaching that one must "lose one's life to save it" reveals a paradoxical relationship between self-sacrifice and self-realization. The invitation to imitate Jesus Christ, and to give of oneself to other, inspires great acts of love. Yet the veneration of sacrifice for its own sake can validate painful losses that are no longer life-giving. Faced with such ambiguities, and struggling to discern the boundaries of giving, Christians need a new interpretation of the symbol of sacrifice. The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice explores a revised understanding of authentic sacrifice in terms of dedication to others for the reign of God. Sacrificial self-giving becomes a means to Christian identity-a paradoxical way to find life in the fullest. Ultimately, sacrificial love is not only an imitation of the cross, but an image of the creativity of God. Book jacket.