scholarly journals Shankh-er Shongshar, Afterlife Everyday: Religious Experience of the Evening Conch and Goddesses in Bengali Hindu Homes

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sukanya Sarbadhikary
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Female Snake

This essay brings together critical archetypes of Bengali Hindu home-experience: the sound of the evening shankh (conch), the goddess Lakshmi, and the female snake-deity, Manasa. It analyzes the everyday phenomenology of the home, not simply through the European category of the ‘domestic’, but conceptually more elastic vernacular religious discourse of shongshar, which means both home and world. The conch is studied as a direct material embodiment of the sacred domestic. Its materiality and sound-ontology evoke a religious experience fused with this-worldly wellbeing (mongol) and afterlife stillness. Further, (contrary) worship ontologies of Lakshmi, the life-goddess of mongol, and Manasa, the death-and-resuscitation goddess, are discussed, and the twists of these ambivalent imaginings are shown to be engraved in the conch’s body and audition. Bringing goddesses and conch-aesthetics together, shongshar is thus presented as a religious everyday dwelling, where the ‘home’ and ‘world’ are connected through spiraling experiences of life, death, and resuscitation. Problematizing the monolithic idea of the secular home as a protecting domain from the outside world, I argue that everyday religious experience of the Bengali domestic, as especially encountered and narrated by female householders, essentially includes both Lakshmi/life/fertility and Manasa/death/renunciation. Exploring the analogy of the spirals of shankh and shongshar, spatial and temporal experiences of the sacred domestic are also complicated. Based on ritual texts, fieldwork among Lakshmi and Manasa worshippers, conch-collectors, craftsmen and specialists, and immersion in the everyday religious world, I foreground a new aesthetic phenomenology at the interface of the metaphysics of sound, moralities of goddess-devotions, and the Bengali home’s experience of afterlife everyday.

scholarly journals TAREKAT SYEIKH MUHAMMAD ARSYAD AL-BANJARI: TELAAH ATAS KITAB KANZ AL-MA'RIFAH

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Hadi
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Colour Patterns

Development of Sufism in the archipelago is one icon in view of the problems connected with the Sufi. Sufism is the diversity of colour patterns of thought of religious life, while religious practice to be a representation of the diversity of religious thought to be highly variable and often decorated with the interview "controversial" a very sharp. In the context of religious institutions belonging to the tarekat also have a variety of variants, so that a diverse group of tarekat scattered every where and have the characteristics of each in accordance with religious discourse and the "religious experience" developer congregation. In fact there are some "differences" between the executive tarekat in an area with other regions, although with the same tarekat. Sheikh Muhammad Arsyad Al-Banjary as a prolific writer in various fields of Islamic sciences, such as Tawheed, Fiqh and Sufism. Among his works is the Kanz al-patterned ma'rifah Sufism, but in some discussion related to religious practices and traditions of the congregation are very close, but the Sammaniyah tarekat who had been brought closer to the Al-Banjary Arsyad not so visible in Kanz al-Ma 'rifah but Syaziliyah tarekat who are more visible.

New Perspectives on Ethiopian and African Christianity: Communalities and Contrasts in Twentieth Century Religious Experience

Exchange ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 306-336
Author(s):  
Joachim Persoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Life World ◽  
Local Factors ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Global And Local ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractRecent political developments and factors within Ethiopian studies have led to more emphasis on the African rather than Semitic elements in Ethiopian Culture. In the religious sphere likewise there are striking communalities in the 20th century experience of Ethiopian and wider African Christendom. Some of these can be ascribed to sharing similar sociological conditions i.e. religious resurgence as a response to the marginalisation and poverty associated with globalisation. However, resemblance between Ethiopian traditions and recently developed African Christian 'traditions' indicate more profound communalities in religious perception. The paradigm of the 'knowledge buffet' and the relationship between food and religion is developed into a scheme of three stages or courses in the evolution of African and Ethiopian Christendom. These are characterised by institutionalisation, indigenisation, and internationalisation. This exemplifies the interaction between global and local factors, as individuals seek empowerment and the transformation of a negative life world through the development of religious discourse.

Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Gerhard van den Heever
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Force Fields ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Introductory Essay ◽  
The Way

In this introductory essay to the theme issue “Intersections of Discourses – Pliable Body, the Making of Religion, and Social Definition,” we sketch the main contours of thinking about human bodiliness in religion. This relates both to the way in which bodies and ways of bodiliness feature in religious discourse and practice but also to the way in which scholarly theorising deal with human bodies in religion. Our argument is based on two main points of departure, namely that bodies are constructed products of discourse and that “religion” is a set of somaticising practices. After a long neglect, the body was rediscovered as a core topic for religious studies in the wake of four intersecting force fields, namely the interest in human bodies in anthropology and sociology, the intellectual legacy of Michel Foucault, the emergence of spirituality as lived religion, and interest in religious experience as study field. In sum, it is argued that the essays presented here constitute a reminder that religious discourses are not languages “out of this world”, but are very much human languages effecting human intentional (and unintentional) outcomes in interactional social and cultural settings.

VIII. Reading Pagan Texts

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 76-85
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Simplifying Assumptions ◽  
Double Impact

As the argument of the last chapter suggested, one level at which religious change had its most profound and lasting effects was in the character of the language used in religious discourse. This has a double impact on our understanding: first, it is one of the key areas in which we can see religious change taking place; but, secondly, understanding the different uses of language is a precondition of interpreting the different religions themselves. The Christians spoke a far more direct language about the character of the deity, the character of priesthood, about the beliefs that an individual ought to hold or not hold and about the character of the interaction between divine and earthly beings. To some extent, the pagans were forced into making explicit statements by way of competition; but, far more clearly, we should regard them as disadvantaged in the competition with Christianity by the nature of their own traditions of religious discourse. It is easy but dangerous to jump from this observation about pagan habits of speech to making simplifying assumptions about their religious experience. Just because they are inexplicit and guarded in what they say, we have no right to assume that they were either hypocritical or uninterested in regard to the gods and goddesses they worshipped or that the rituals they carefully maintained and practised carried no meanings for them.

scholarly journals Being and Time-less Faith: Juxtaposing Heideggerian Anxiety and Religious Experience

Open Theology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Jonathan Lyonhart
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Phenomenological Method ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Specific Object ◽  
Do So

AbstractIn Heidegger, fear reveals the thing to be feared in a fuller way than theory can. However, anxiety is distinct from fear, for while fear is directed towards a specific thing within the world, anxiety is anxious about existence itself, disclosing the totality of Being. A similar method could be applied to faith. Arguably, faith is a mood; a feeling of trust in the divine that can be phenomenologically consistent and overwhelming. However, faith is not necessarily directed towards a specific object within the world. One cannot point and say: “God is right there!” Indeed, attempts to do so through miracles, teleology or dialectics have been roundly critiqued by the Western tradition. But then what is this mood of faith disclosing if not something within the world? Perhaps, like anxiety, faith is not revealing an object within the world, but the world as a totality. Since God—at least the God central to much of the Judeo-Christian tradition—is not a being but Being itself (or in some formulations is actually ‘beyond being’), God therefore cannot be disclosed in the world as an object but has to be disclosed as that which is transcendently beyond it. Such a conclusion does not simply flee the realm of the everyday, but derives from, and legitimates, basic descriptions of religious experience. Specifically, Judeo-Christian descriptions of (1) divine providence, (2) happiness/ joy, (3) the eschatological ‘not yet’, and (4) Divine Hiddenness. This paper will argue that appropriating Heidegger’s phenomenological method in his discussions of fear/anxiety and applying them to Judeo-Christian descriptions of faith thus leads to a radically different ontology from that of Heidegger himself, offering a renewed basis for religion that contrasts the nothingness revealed by anxiety with the divinity revealed by faith, challenging us to weigh for ourselves which mood is more swaying.

Religious Experience: Experience of Transparency and Resonance

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 679-699
Author(s):  
Gerd Theissen
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Spiritual Experience ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Final Point ◽  
Normative Power ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Concept Of Truth ◽  
Point Of Reference

AbstractAt a time in which religion is breaking away from the normative power of its traditions and new forms of spiritual experience are emerging, religious philosophy must find criteria for what a religious experience is and how to judge its truth. In their empirical critique of religion L. Wittgenstein and R. Carnap accepted two forms of religious experience, which they described with an optical and acoustic metaphor. They denied their cognitive truth value, but not their value for life. However, an extended concept of truth, which encompasses every correspondence between experience and reality, can also find truth in religious experiences of “transparency” and “resonance”. They differ from aesthetic experience not only by the depth of transparency and resonance, but also by their cognitive interpretation. What is experienced is cognitively referred to a final reality: either to a “summum ens” in this world, or to the whole of this world or something unknown beyond of this world. This final point of reference is a unity of “being” and “value”. Religion makes experiences of the everyday transparent for both aspects of an ultimate reality und motivates to a life full of resonance with this reality.

Status of symbolic in religious experience

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Author(s):  
Miroslav Ivanovic
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Epistemological Status

In this paper we consider the place of symbol in the religious expierience both in the religious discourse and practice. Symbol is the link between two worlds, and so becomes the central construct with respect to the epistemological status of the religious experience. We analyze the epistemological status of one particular form of the religious discourse the discourse of energetism.

scholarly journals SEKULIARI KASDIENYBĖ IR RELIGINĖ PRASMĖ: ETIŠKUMO IR RELIGIŠKUMO SANTYKIS

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Danutė Bacevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Traditional Sense

Straipsnyje svarstoma religinės prasmės galimybė sekuliarios kasdienybės sąlygomis. Remiantis Charles’o Tayloro sekuliarizacijos proceso tyrimais, siekiama ne likti prie sociologijoje įsitvirtinusios tezės apie religijos vaidmens menkėjimą šiuolaikinės visuomenės gyvenime, bet mėginti iš naujo apmąstyti, kas yra religiškumas šiandien. Pastebima, kad kasdienėje sekuliarioje sąmonėje įsitvirtinęs „Apšvietos mitas“ apsunkina prieigą prie religijos tradicine prasme, tačiau suteikia galimybę įsižiūrėti į pačią kasdienybę. Remiantis Jacques’o Derrida „religijos be religijos“ apibrėžtimi aptariamas tiek šiuolaikinio religinio diskurso pobūdis, tiek Derrida bandymas kasdieniuose atsakomybės, pasirinkimo, sprendimo aktuose įžvelgti etiškumo ir religiškumo įtampą, leidžiančią kalbėti apie religinio santykio struktūrą mūsų kasdienėse patirtyse.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: sekuliarumo samprata, kasdienybė, religija be religijos, etiškumo ir religiškumo įtampa, Charles’as Tayloras, Derrida. SECULAR EVERYDAY LIFE AND RELIGIOUS SENSE: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS SPHERESDanutė Bacevičiūtė SummaryThe article deals with the problem of religious sense in the secular everyday life. With reference to Charles Taylor’s analysis of secularization, the author tries to distance herself from the prevailing sociological thesis about the decline of religion in the life of contemporary society and rethink what religion means today? One can notice that “the myth of the Enlightenment” is deeply entrenched in our secular everyday consciousness, so the approach to the religious in the traditional sense is quite aggravated. Nevertheless, such a situation provides a possibility to contemplate the everyday life itself. Derrida’s notion of “religion without religion” allows us to reflect the character of a contemporary religious discourse as well as to envisage the tension between ethical and religious spheres in the daily acts of decision-making, choice, and responsibility. Not traditional religious forms but the structure of religious relationship enables us to talk about religious sense in the secular everyday life.Keywords: notion of secularity, everyday life, religion without religion, tension between ethical and religious spheres, Charles Taylor, Derrida.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document