William Paden's classic exploration in religious studies, with a new introduction In the current climate, Interpreting the Sacred provides a fresh, thorough way to consider and compare various religious belief systems. Paden puts forth the idea that our understanding of religion influences our understanding of ourselves and our world. Updated with a new introduction, this book is for anyone who wants to consider and discuss religious beliefs.

Sacred Disobedience: A Jungian Analysis of the Saga of Pan and the Devil traces the ancient Greek God Pan, who became distorted into the image of the Devil in early Christianity. When Pan was demonized, the powerful qualities he represented became repressed, as Pan’s visage twisted into the model of the Devil. This book follows a Jungian analysis of this development. In ancient Greek religion, Pan was worshipped as an honored deity, corresponding to an inner psycho-spiritual condition in which the primitive qualities he represented were fully integrated into consciousness, and these qualities were valued and affirmed as holy. But in the era of early Christianity Pan “dies,” and the Devil is born, a twisted inflation, possibly due to an underlying repression. In the Jungian system, repressed psychic contents do not disappear, as proponents of the new order tacitly assume, but distort and grow more powerful, or “inflate,” to cripple the psyche that refuses to incorporate these split-off elements. Repressed contents will expand to explosive force as the repressed elements eventually return regressively from below. It becomes important then, to understand what qualities the primitive Goat God carried, to appreciate what was repressed in the Western psycho-spiritual system, and what subsequently needs reintegration.

Interpreting Sacred Ground is a rhetorical analysis of Civil War battlefields and parks, and the ways various commemorative traditions—and their ideologies of race, reconciliation, emancipation, and masculinity—compete for dominance. The National Park Service (NPS) is known for its role in the preservation of public sites deemed to have historic, cultural, and natural significance. In Interpreting Sacred Ground, J. Christian Spielvogel studies the NPS’s secondary role as an interpreter or creator of meaning at such sites, specifically Gettysburg National Military Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and Cold Harbor Visitor Center. Spielvogel studies in detail the museums, films, publications, tours, signage, and other media at these sites, and he studies and analyzes how they shape the meanings that visitors are invited to construct. Though the NPS began developing interpretive exhibits in the 1990s that highlighted slavery and emancipation as central facets to understanding the war, Spielvogel argues that the NPS in some instances preserves outmoded narratives of white reconciliation and heroic masculinity, obscuring the race-related causes and consequences of the war as well as the war’s savagery. The challenges the NPS faces in addressing these issues are many, from avoiding unbalanced criticism of either the Union or the Confederacy, to foregrounding race and violence as central issues, preserving clear and accurate renderingsof battlefield movements and strategies, and contending with the various public constituencies with their own interpretive stakes in the battle for public memory. Spielvogel concludes by arguing for the National Park Service’s crucial role as a critical voice in shaping twentieth-first-century Civil War public memory and highlights the issues the agency faces as it strives to maintain historical integrity while contending with antiquated renderings of the past.

“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.

This document's purpose is to spell out the Church's understanding of the nature of revelation--the process whereby God communicates with human beings. It touches upon questions about Scripture, tradition, and the teaching authority of the Church. The major concern of the document is to proclaim a Catholic understanding of the Bible as the "word of God." Key elements include: Trinitarian structure, roles of apostles and bishops, and biblical reading in a historical context.

Irreverence and the Sacred brings together some of the most cutting edge, interdisciplinary, and international scholars working today in order to debate key issues in the critical and comparative study of religion. The project is inspired in large part by the work of Bruce Lincoln, whose influential and wide-ranging scholarship has consistently posed challenging, provocative, and often-irreverent questions that have really pushed the boundaries of the field of religious studies in important, sometimes controversial ways. Retracing the history of the discipline of religious studies, Lincoln argues that the field has tended to champion a "validating, feel-good" approach to religion, rather than posing more critical questions about religious claims to authority and their role in history, politics, and social change. A critical approach to the history of religions, he suggests, would focus on the human, temporal, and material aspects of phenomena that are claimed to have a superhuman, eternal, or transcendent status. This volume takes up Lincoln's challenge to "do better," by engaging in critical analyses of four key themes in the study of religion: myth, ritual, gender, and politics. The book also interrogates the "politics of scholarship" itself, critically examining the relations of power and material interests at work in the study as well as the practice of religion. The scholars involved in this project include not only some of the most important figures in the American study of religion--such as Wendy Doniger, Russell McCutcheon, Ivan Strenski, and Lincoln himself--but also European scholars whose work is hugely influential overseas but not as well known in the U.S.--such as Stefan Arvidsson, Claude Calame, Nicolas Meylan, and others.

Formally approved by Pope Francis, this present work is the contribution of the Pontifi cal Biblical Commission toward a more adequate understanding of the concepts of inspiration and truth that respects both the nature of the Bible and its signifi cance for the life of the Church. Drawing on a close reading of the Scriptures themselves, the document focuses on three main aspects: 1. The inspiration of Sacred Scripture and the exploration of its divine provenance 2. The truth of the Word of God, emphasizing the message about God and his project of salvation 3. Challenges that arise from the Bible itself, on account of certain aspects that seem inconsistent with its quality of being the Word of God