Mediation and Immediacy: A Key Issue for the Semiotics of Religion

Description

Religion, like any other domain of culture, is mediated through symbolic forms and communicative behaviors, which allow the coordination of group conduct in ritual and the representation of the divine or of tradition as an intersubjective reality. While many traditions hold out the promise of immediate access to the divine, or to some transcendent dimension of experience, such promises depend for their realization as well on the possibility of mediation, which is necessarily conducted through channels of communication and exchange, such as prayers or sacrifices. An understanding of such modes of semiosis is therefore necessary even and especially when mediation is denied by a tradition in the name of the 'ineffability" of the deity or of mystical experience. This volume models and promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-cultural perspective on these issues by asking prominent semioticians, historians of religion and of art, linguists, sociologists of religion, and philosophers of law to reflect from a semiotic perspective on the topic of mediation and immediacy in religious traditions. Acknowledgments Table of Contents Figures Introduction: Mediation and immediacy, a key issue for the semiotics of religion Part I: Classical traditions Immediacy and mediation in Philo’s interpretation of divine names “Anì velo mal’akh”: Are angels in the Torah a sort of medium? The angel as an intercultural medium Medieval theology and the theory of signs Transcending the body: The semiotics of an out-of-body experience reported by Mechthild of Magdeburg The supremacy of the Qur’anic sign and its impacts on the Arabic Muslim culture Arguments for immediacy and mediation in classical Advaita-Vedānta Part II: Contemporary movements Religious-artistic epiphanies in 20th-century literature: Joyce, Claudel, Weil, C.S. Lewis, Rebora, and Papini On vain repetitions: The enactment of collective subjectivities through speaking in unison The other Buddha: Leaving monasteries, fighting the enemy Part III: Religious legal systems Mediation and immediacy in the Jewish legal tradition The doodling of Jesus: A semiotic inquiry into the rhetoric of immediacy Legal theology and communication: The meaning of Christian eschatology between immanence and transcendence in contemporary social sciences Post-secular jurisprudence: A visual semiotics of the sacred source of law’s authority Contributors Index