Product Description

Cuts through traditional debates to argue that religious phenomena are cocreated by human cognition and a generative spiritual power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1667108 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 388 pages

From the Back Cover
Can we take seriously religious experience, spirituality, and mysticism, without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or simply asserting their validity as a dogmatic fact? The contributors to this volume argue that we can, and they offer a new way: the "participatory turn," which proposes that individuals and communities have an integral and irreducible role in bringing forth ontologically rich religious worlds. They explore the ways this approach weaves together and gives voice to a number of robust trends in contemporary religious scholarship, including the renewed study of lived spirituality, the postmodern emphasis on embodied and gendered subjectivity, the admission of alternate epistemic perspectives, the irreducibility of religious pluralism, and the pragmatist emphasis on transformation--all trends that raise serious challenges to the currently prevalent linguistic paradigm.

The first part of the book situates the participatory turn in the context of contemporary religious studies; the second part shows how this approach can be applied to various global traditions, ancient and contemporary, from Western esotericism to Jewish mysticism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sufism, and socially engaged Buddhism.

"What a truly hopeful and beautiful book this is. Skillfully negotiating between the Charybdis of a reductive but precious rationalist contextualism and the Scylla of the profound but not always sufficiently critical religious traditions, these authors propose a new, more dialectical path for the future of religious studies--a path of participation that recognizes in a rare fashion the truly creative nature of that fundamentally mysterious process of human consciousness we so mundanely call `interpretation.' Catalyzed by a marvelous opening essay on the history and meaning of this participatory turn, the volume promises to become for a new generation what Katz's and Forman's pioneering volumes were for earlier ones." -- Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion

"In its quiet, careful way, The Participatory Turn is at once a nuanced portrait of a great sea change taking place in religious studies and a clear-eyed manifesto on behalf of that change. In their brilliant introduction, Ferrer and Sherman have managed to condense and summarize a vast and complex field, clarified its multitude of diverse strands, and set forth a richly coherent philosophical synthesis. One senses that with this book and the intellectual shift it describes, the academic study of religion has, quite dramatically, come in from the cold. The book delineates a pathway for the discipline to enter back into direct engagement with the great mystery it seeks to illuminate, employing the many critical advances of the past century's scholarship but in a manner that is no longer constrained by the hidden reductionism of many conventional academic assumptions. The Participatory Turn presents an emerging orientation for religious studies that is not only cogent and empowering but perhaps even inevitable." -- Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View

Contributors include G. William Barnard, Bruno Barnhart, William Chittick, Jorge N. Ferrer, Lee Irwin, Sean Kelly, Brian L. Lancaster, Beverly J. Lanzetta, Robert McDermott, Donald Rothberg, and Jacob H. Sherman.

About the Author
Jorge N. Ferrer is Chair of the Department of East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the author of Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, also published by SUNY Press. Jacob H. Sherman is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of the Divinity at the University of Cambridge.

Customer Reviews

New Pathways in Religious Studies
Although a disturbing lifelessness never fails to haunt what scientist-philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte diagnosed as a total obsession with partial ideas, scholars and philosophers have resorted to monolithic explanations of spirituality with dull regularity: It's direct from God. It's linguistic. It's hierarchical, or neurological; culture-bound, or perennial; something your mom or dad told you to conform to.

By refreshing contrast, The Participatory Turn asks: Can we recognize and value many paths to many co-created mansions of the sacred? Can we learn to see the frameworks we apply as furnishing examples of spiritual enactment, of a "participatory turn" toward a true plurality invigorating spiritual life, rather than standing aloof being descriptive or merely explanatory?

For the scholars of this anthology---all of whom engage in a spiritual practice---a participatory turn in religious studies means welcoming in the many facets of exuberant religiosity, including the gendered, the erotic, the sensual, the local, the nonverbal, and, yes, the linguistic too. Emphasizing the interactive nature of embodied spirituality, the participatory set of approaches avoids overarching summations, empirical reductions, and 19th-Century grand conceptual systems to center instead on spirituality as both constructed and revealed, embedded in culture rather than built by it, and resistant to reckless transplantation into artificially imposed grids of competitive elucidation.

Religions and spiritual paths do share commonalities, one of which is that most seek a gradual transformation from narrow self-centeredness toward a fuller participation in the mystery of existence" (p. 138). I would add that "self-centeredness" includes what Erich Fromm identified as group narcissism (our way or the highway) as well as idealization of the lone genius, scientist, or guru who purports to explain existence to us, as though one leaf could inform the rest of the true extent of the forest, let alone of a single tree.

At the same time, paths bent to serve an overriding goal of mapping or explaining the world tend to lose their original curvatures, byways, and departures to a Roman Empire-style system of straight lines and cleared landscapes. When witnessed in their natural context, however, the many windings among the realms and worlds of spirit are allowed their full transformational vitality, a vitality that frees the participant to innovate and experiment with a path's original insights, stories, and wisdom teachings. Here a body-based imagination enters in to season critical appreciation with a capacity for dissolving the blockage of reified religious and philosophical constructs which have forgotten they are working fictions and sketches rather than absolute truths.

The book's full Introduction lays out the book's rationale and organization and includes a valuable overview of scholarly thought in religious studies. The varied points of view are themselves a mark of the irrepressible plurality at work in spiritual exploration through which transcendent dimensions shine like rays of light through stained-glass windows.

As a depth psychologist I appreciate the participatory deliteralizing of what the Introduction describes as static essences, spiritual hierarchies, and universal metaphysical paradigms. I am deeply suspicious of conceptual systems that seek philosophical or spiritual primacy over other perspectives, especially when those systems place themselves beyond investigation as possible examples of unconscious theologizing. The brutal empire-era logic of triumphalism is an old and weary one; whether different approaches are "lovingly" criticized for being unorthodox, mistaken, or unevolved makes no real psychological difference. Very often the most totalistic views are actually the most confining, the most covertly authoritarian, and the least friendly to genuine dialogue. They also favor goals and levels and a rhetoric of Progress to the detriment of enjoying the journey itself.

In terms of the book's organization, its first section is more philosophical and theoretical in tone, and the second more geared toward actual application of participatory modes of spirituality. Approaches range from scientific to Buddhist to Hindu to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism, with Bergson and Aivanhov included for good measure.

As the author of Terrapsychology: Reengaging The Soul Of Place, I look forward eagerly to how the participatory turn will also foster a wider appreciation for the animated presence of the landscapes around us, disenchanted and under industrial siege but unceasing in their potent subvocal claims upon the psyches of their inhabitants.