Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Invitation to Religious Studies / Edition 3

by J. Bowyer Bell

Overview

The essence of Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove remains intact: its vision of religious studies as sustained refl ection on our lifelong voyage to discover who we are. The story we choose for ourselves, the story we live, can sacralize or secularize our lives and our world by the way in which we choose to relate to it. With this awareness of the story dimension of life, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove opens us to awe, reverence, and wonder at the risks and possibilities of human freedom.

This book is even more important than it was thirty years ago. We need religion to strike deeply into the self, away from public glare. Unless Americans become more sophisticated about the language of the self, inner life will shrivel. In addition, our people will continue to be vulnerable to fundamentalist movements. Such movements take over too many innocents. Th ey promise, and sometimes deliver, a touching happiness. But they do so by closing the spirit in a powerful and dangerous way.

Families and schools do not provide a large and critical vocabulary by which to express the inner longings of the spirit. The souls of many are parched and they gladly accept water, any water, from those who off er it. The liberation of the religious spirit from trivial, closed, and simplistic systems of thought can only be achieved through the development of a critical language, exercises, and disciplines that open rather than close the mind, that lead to higher viewpoints, breakthroughs, and new syntheses, in a constant enlargement of spirit. Novak's book leads us to that place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412808842
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	05/15/2009
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Michael Novak is George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He has twice been the US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission and is a member of the National Endowment for Democracy board. He is the author of over two dozen books and numerous scholarly articles which have appeared in First Things, The Weekly Standard, and National Review Online. He is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Michael Novak is George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He has twice been the US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission and is a member of the National Endowment for Democracy board. He is the author of over two dozen books and numerous scholarly articles which have appeared in First Things, The Weekly Standard, and National Review Online. He is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition
Preface to the Revised Edition (1978)
Introduction: An Invitation to Religious Studies
ONE—The Voyage
1. The Religious Drive
2. What Religion is Not
3. Way of Life
4. Earthy Ecstasy
5. Conversion to the Sacred
TWO—Autobiography and Story
1. Religion as Autobiography
2. Cultural Stories and Personal Stories
3. Standpoint to Standpoint
4. "Story," Elaborated
5. What Cannot Be Said
6. The Aesthetic, The Moral, The Religious
7. Among the Many Rises and Declines of Reason
THREE—Cultures
1. Paradoxes of the Finite
2. Sense of Reality
3. From Culture to Cult
FOUR—Societies and Institutions
1. Institutions are Man's Natural Habitat
2. Freedom and Coercion
3. Are Institutions Obsolete?
4. The New Heteronomy
5. Secular Religion
6. The Communal Imagination
7. The Realities of Economics
8. Political Revolution
9. Civil Religion
FIVE—Organizations
1. Organized Anything
2. Liturgy
3. Church, Denomination, Sect
4. Holy Texts
5. Theologies
6. A Map of Christian Theologies in the United States
7. Theology as Suitor
SIX—Nature and History
SEVEN—How Then Shall We Act?
1. Elaborations on "Story"
2. A Story of My Own
Epilogue: New Horizons
Notes
Index of Names