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Saints of Sacred Madness

Author: Joyce Kessel

Publisher:

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 9781637528358

"We were in training to be little Soldiers for Christ - no questions, no doubts. Avoid temptations, kneel and pray, follow the lessons in the Catechism. March forward in blind faith." Built on a lifetime of reflection studying philosophy, theology, history and literature, Joyce Kessel's poems are direct responses to the lessons, assignments and questions from the Baltimore Catechism of childhood. Haunted by the image of milk bottles that portrayed the stain of "actual sins," the poet began to explore other lessons in this primary Catholic school textbook required before Vatican II. In this verse reflection, sometimes sober, but often humorous, Kessel explores the everchanging lines between doubt and faith as the poems address the mysteries and challenges of daring to question what was presented as gospel, both as a child and later as an adult. Here is the existential wrestling match between wanting to believe and knowing what can be believed in the narrow teaching of her childhood.

The Madness of the Saints

Author: June McDaniel

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1989-07-15

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0226557235

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Although ecstasy has been explored in several Indian contexts, surprisingly little scholarship has been devoted to its central role in Bengali devotion. In The Madness of the Saints, June McDaniel undertakes the first comprehensive study of religious ecstasy in Bengal, examining the texts that describe it, the people who experience it, and the traditions that support it.

Holy Madness

Author: Georg Feuerstein

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2013-10-09

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1935387596

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This book traces the shadowy tradition of “holy madness/crazy wisdom” from the Holy Fools of early Christianity, through the great adepts of India and Tibet, up to the controversial gurus of today. In our day, when even the Dalai Lama has warned Western seekers to choose their teachers carefully, Feuerstein provides an intelligent and cautionary guidebook to the guru-disciple relationship, plus a comprehensive analysis of the principles of authentic spirituality.

Holy Horrors

Author: James A. Haught

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Published: 2010-03-05

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1615922539

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In 1583 in Vienna, a 16-year-old girl suffered stomach cramps. A team of Jesuits exorcized her for eight weeks. The priests announced that they had expelled 12,652 demons from her, demons that her grandmother had kept as flies in glass jars. The grandmother was tortured into confessing that she was a witch who had engaged in sex with Satan. She was then burned at the stake. This was one of perhaps one million such executions during three centuries of witch-hunts. In 1989 in Moradabad, India, a pig caused hundreds of people to kill one another when the animal walked through a Muslim holy ground. Muslims, who think pigs are an embodiment of Satan, accused Hindus of driving the pig into the sacred spot. Members of both faiths went on a rampage, stabbing and clubbing. The pig riot spread to a dozen cities and left two hundred dead. A squad of armed Islamic zealots raided a Christian church at Behawalpur, Pakistan, on October 28, 2001, killing the minister, fourteen worshipers, and the church's police guard. It is said that there is never enough religion in the world to make people love one another--just enough to make them hate one another. Incendiary blends of fundamentalist religion, politics, nationalism, and ethnic zealotry engender countless examples of atrocity in the name of faith and orthodoxy. If anything, religious persecution is more savage now than everbefore in the history of mankind. HOLY HORRORS chronicles the grim spectrum of religious persecution from ancient times to the present. Fully illustrated with drawings, woodcuts, and photographs, the book recounts such historic religious persecution as the Crusades, the Islamic jihads, the Catholic wars against heretics, the Inquisition, witch-hunts, and the Reformation. It also chronicles modern-day atrocities, including the Holocaust, the seemingly insoluble Catholic-Protestant schism in Northern Ireland, religious tribalism in in Lebanon, and the barbaric cruelty of the theocracy in Iran.

Saints

Author: Françoise Meltzer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-12

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0226519929

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While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

Divine Madness

Author: Karol Jackowski

Publisher: St Pauls BYB

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 9788171093731

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Permanent Liminality and Modernity

Author: Arpad Szakolczai

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1317082176

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This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening the world to theatre, but because they effectively capture and present the reality of a world that has been thoroughly ’theatricalised’ - and they do so more effectively than the main instruments usually employed to analyse reality: philosophy and sociology. With analyses of some of the most important novelists and novels of modern culture, including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Mann, Blixen, Broch and Bulgakov, and focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a crucial ’threshold’ chronotope of modernity, Permanent Liminality and Modernity demonstrates that all seek to investigate and unmask the theatricalisation of modern life, with its progressive loss of meaning and our deteriorating capacity to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is artificial. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Girard to examine the ways in which novels explore the reduction of human existence to a state of permanent liminality, in the form of a sacrificial carnival, this book will appeal to scholars of social, anthropological and literary theory.

The Holy Madmen of Tibet

Author: David M. DiValerio

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0199391203

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Machine generated contents note:Introduction -- Chapter 1: The Lives and Lives of the Madmen of U and Tsang -- Hagiography and History -- The Life of the Madman of U (1458-1532) -- The Life of the Madman of Tsang (1452-1507) -- Chapter 2: Of Scripture and Bone: The Tantric Discipline of the Madmen of U and Tsang -- The Practice of the Observance -- The Secret Practice, the Insane Observance -- "You, the Hero, Glorious Heruka Himself ..."--Tantric Literalism -- Conclusion -- Chapter 3: Sainthood in the Making: The Madmen of U and Tsang in Public -- The Drum Sound of Their Fame -- The Repertoire of Siddha Behavior -- Performing Enlightenment -- "To Spread and Increase the Teachings of the Kagyu" -- Tantric Literalism in Context: Competing Models of Buddhist Holiness -- Conclusion -- Intermezzo: The Relationship between the Madmen of U and Tsang -- Chapter 4: Civil War, Strategic Alliances: The Madmen of U and Tsang in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Tibet -- The Pakmodru-Geluk Partnership -- The Rinpungpa Revolt -- Priestly Alliances and Sectarian Aggression under the Rinpungpas -- Sakya, Kagyu and Rinpungpa Affairs -- "A Mutual Understanding": The Patrons of the Madmen of U and Tsang -- Conclusion -- Chapter 5: Making History: The Later Projects of the Madmen of U and Tsang -- The Projects of the Madman of U and His Disciples -- The Literary School of the Madman of Tsang -- Writing and Printing the Life of Milarepa -- Milarepa the Madman, the Madman as Milarepa -- Putting the Aural Transmission to Paper -- Renovating the Swayambhunath Stupa -- Conclusion -- Chapter 6: Who Was Drukpa Kunle? -- Popular Depictions of Drukpa Kunle -- Drukpa Kunle's Miscellaneous Writings -- The Trajectory of Drukpa Kunle's Life -- Drukpa Kunle's Position in Politics -- Drukpa Kunle the Critic -- Drukpa Kunle and the Holy Madmen -- The Transformation of Drukpa Kunle -- Chapter 7: The Enduring Trope of Holy Madness -- Other Madmen and Ma.

Sufis and Saints' Bodies

Author: Scott Kugle

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0807872776

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Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power. Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.