The language, themes and imagery of the Bible have been rewritten into texts across time. In the Revelation of John, the Hebrew Bible echoes and is reinvented, just as in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) many explicit and implicit readings and interpretations of the Bible are offered. In Texts Reading Texts, these readings of the Bible, and the ways in which Revelation and Hogg's Confessions have themselves been read, are considered from the two postmodern perspectives of marginalization and deconstruction. By reading the two seemingly unrelated texts side by side from these perspectives, traditional readings of them both are disturbed and challenged.

Boyle examines influential readings on the Bible as literature--notably Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel and Levinas--and then applies them to literary writings.

“In these soaring, open-hearted essays, Vanessa Zoltan writes with fierce brilliance about suffering, survival, and the kind of meaning in life that can withstand real scrutiny.”—John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and The Anthropocene Reviewed A deeply felt exploration of the ways our favorite books can shape and heal us, from the host of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Our favorite reads keep us company, give us hope, and help us find meaning in a chaotic world. In this fresh and relatable work, atheist chaplain Vanessa Zoltan blends memoir and personal growth as she grapples with the notions of family legacy and identity through the lens of her favorite novel, Jane Eyre. Informed by her training at the Harvard Divinity School and filtered through the pages of Jane Eyre as well as Little Women, Harry Potter, and The Great Gatsby, Zoltan explores topics ranging from the trauma she has inherited as the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors to finding hope, meaning, and even magic in our deeply fractured times. Brimming with a love of classic literature and the tenderness of self-reflection, the book also reveals simple techniques for reading any work as a sacred text--from Virginia Woolf to Anne of Green Gables to baseball scorecards. Whether you're an avowed "Eyrehead" or a voracious reader and pop culture fan, this deeply felt and inspiring book will light the way to a more intimate appreciation for whatever books you love to read.

All the human senses become engaged in ritualizing sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination. Ritualized display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalizing the contents of texts by reading and memorization. The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas. Books thus physically incarnate cultural and religious values, doctrines, beliefs, and ideas. These essays bring theories of comparative scriptures and affect theory to bear on the topic as well as rich ethnographic descriptions of scriptural practices with Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and modern art and historical accounts of changing practices with sacred texts in ancient and medieval China and Korea, and in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures.

This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.

Newman highlights the ways in which the premodern reader understood sacred and secular not as opposing points but as a state of double judgment.

During the Middle Ages the act of reading was experienced intensively in the monastic exercise of lectio divina 'the prayerful scrutiny of passages of Scripture, savored in meditation, memorized, recited, and rediscovered in the reader's own religious life. The rich literary tradition that arose from this culture includes theoretical writings from the Conferences of John Cassian (fifth century) through the twelfth-century treatises of Hugh of St. Victor and the Carthusian Guigo II; it also includes compilations, literary meditations, and scriptural commentary, notably on the Song of Songs. This study brings medievalist research together with modern theoretical reflections on the act of reading in a consolidation of historical scholarship, spirituality, and literary criticism. Duncan Robertson has taught French and Latin, language and literature, at Augusta State University since 1990. Previous publications include The Medieval Saints' Lives: Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1995), and The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, with Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Nancy Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2002). His articles have appeared in Romance Philology, French Forum, Cahiers de Civilisation Madiavale, and other journals in the United States and abroad.

This volume challenges and redefines the traditional distinction made between the sacred and the secular in medieval healing, medical practice, and theory as evidenced in the historic, text record, and by material culture (sites and objects). The studies here are interdisciplinary and are grouped into two parts. The first focuses on secular and religious texts, demonstrating how the language of sacred and secular healing blurs and merges in both Latin and vernacular textual traditions. Chapters critically examine how medieval English literature draws directly from medical discourse when representing the physical and moral consequences of wrath; the reasons why empirical experience in medical education is central to the writings of Valesco de Tarenta; the narrative significance of Bede s representation of plague in his eighth-century prose Life of Cuthbert; and the implications of distinctions between late medieval religious sermons and secular discourse on plague. Authors also discuss how secular medicine and religious faith intersect in two, recorded, late medieval English miracles and present the largely unexplored impact of access to food on people s everyday health. The second part investigates how the concepts of the sacred and the secular are seen in material culture. Chapters explore how the practice of lapidary medicine by early practitioners and midwives used the protective and healing properties ascribed to gemstone amulets, eagle-stones, and lodestones. At pilgrimage sites, the dynamic nature of cure and spiritual interaction is evidenced in art and artifact. One type of object, pilgrim badges from English sites, is used to explore statistically the wider social context of faith and healing."

In this volume an international team of scholars address the theme of books as sacred beings from an impressively diverse range of primary material and perspectives. Yet, as a group, they meld to engage and advance previous research to solidify the conclusion that human cultures, especially religious groups, often ritualize bodies as sacred books and books as divine beings. The studies collected here not only increase the range of examples of this phenomenon. They also show the wide variety of ways in which the identity of books, bodies and beings gets both ritualized and theorized. The articles are bracketed by an introduction to the collection, and then by a concluding essay that extrapolates the theme of books as sacred beings on a more general level.

This volume is the first comprehensive survey of iconic books and texts. It traces their development and influence from ancient to modern times and compares their roles in multiple cultures and religious traditions.