Fantastic Spiritualities
eBook - PDF

Fantastic Spiritualities

Monsters, Heroes and the Contemporary Religious Imagination

  1. 224 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Fantastic Spiritualities

Monsters, Heroes and the Contemporary Religious Imagination

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

In this work Jobling argues that religious sensibility in the Western world is in a process of transformation, but that we see here change, not decline, and that the production and consumption of the fantastic in popular culture offers an illuminating window onto spiritual trends and conditions. She examines four major examples of the fantastic genre: the Harry Potter series (Rowling), His Dark Materials (Pullman), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon) and the Earthsea cycle (Le Guin), demonstrating that the spiritual universes of these four iconic examples of the fantastic are actually marked by profoundly modernistic assumptions, raising the question of just how contemporary spiritualities (often deemed postmodern) navigate philosophically the waters of truth, morality, authority, selfhood and the divine. Jobling tackles what she sees as a misplaced disregard for the significance of the fantasy genre as a worthy object for academic investigation by offering a full-length, thematic, comparative and cross-disciplinary study of the four case-studies proposed, chosen because of their significance to the field and because these books have all been posited as exemplars of a 'postmodern' religious sensibility. This work shows how attentiveness to spiritual themes in cultural icons can offer the student of theology and religions insight into the framing of the moral and religious imagination in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how this can prompt traditional religions to reflect on whether their own narratives are culturally framed in a way resonating with the 'signs of the times'.

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Yes, you can access Fantastic Spiritualities by J'annine Jobling in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Christian Theology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
T&T Clark
Year
2010
ISBN
9781472535290
Edition
1
Topic
Theology & Religion
Subtopic
Christian Theology

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. CHAPTER 1 Introduction. Fantasy and Spirituality
  4. CHAPTER 2 Transforming Selves. Harry Potter: ‘A highly unusual boy’
  5. CHAPTER 3 Transforming Selves. Earthsea: ‘The Eaten One’
  6. CHAPTER 4 Metaphysics and Transcendence. His Dark Materials: ‘The Republic of Heaven’
  7. CHAPTER 5 Metaphysics and Transcendence. Earthsea: ‘Only in silence the word’
  8. CHAPTER 6 Transforming Worlds. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: ‘Bite me’
  9. CHAPTER 7 Transforming Worlds. Harry Potter: ‘Toujours Pur’
  10. CHAPTER 8 The Good and the Monstrous. His Dark Materials: ‘. . . and ye shall be as gods’
  11. CHAPTER 9 The Good and the Monstrous. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: ‘From beneath you, it devours’
  12. CHAPTER 10 Conclusion. Shadows of the Divine
  13. Bibliography
  14. Index