The Inside Story: A Narrative Approach to Religious Understanding and Truth / Edition 1

by Paul Brockelman

Overview

This book explores what is meant by claims of religious understanding and truth. It argues that at the end of the twentieth century we are undergoing a revolution in our thinking about ourselves and our place in nature, and that the worldview pervading modern culture is dissolving because it has marginalized and hindered authentic religious understanding and practice. It has spiritually degraded and destroyed the natural environment upon which it depends.

The book describes how this situation developed, and proposes an alternative postmodern, narrative concept of religious understanding that may help us to transcend these spiritual and ecological problems. This model of religious truth explores a new cosmological story that has emerged over the past twenty-five years. It is a story that will enrich and deepen our spiritual experience while helping us cope with possibly the most disastrous and dangerous consequence of modernity—the present worldwide ecological crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791410202
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	08/17/1992
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Paul Brockelman is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I. The Historical Story

1. From Myth to Modernity

2. A Postmodern Story about Human Understanding

Part II. The Heart of the Matter

3. The Narrative Self

4. Mythology and the Narrative Interpretation of Life

5. Faith: Living the Story

6. Narrative Knowledge and Religious Truth

Part III. Denouement

7. Surveying the Promised Land

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

The only apparent religious choice today, says Brokelman, is between meaningless scepticism and bigoted fundamentalism, and that barrenness can be traced to dichotomies of the Enlightenment, between truth and falsity, objective knowledge and subjective emotion. What was lost was the validity of personal religious experience, but the new philosophies centering on deconstructionism provide an approach to reclaiming rational faith. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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