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  1. Home
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  3. Religious Inventions
  • Cited by 10
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2010
Print publication year:
1997
Online ISBN:
9780511621529
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621529
Subjects:
Social and Cultural Anthropology, Religion, Anthropology, Religion: General Interest
Information

Book description

Many scholars assume that all genuine religions are basically similar and that it is possible to define the sphere of religion in terms of the 'sacred' or the 'holy'. In this book, Max Charlesworth argues that we must take the diversity of religions as a primary fact. Any religion is an active response to a revelation of the divine, and human beings receive these revelations, interpret them and develop them in a variety of ways. To illustrate his thesis, he considers a number of examples of the 'invention' of religion, ranging from Australian Aboriginal religions to the Rhineland mystical movement associated with Meister Eckhart in the early fourteenth century, from the seventeenth-century sects like the Muggletonians, to Roman Catholic attempts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to construct a theological account of doctrinal development and also to formulate a Christian ethic.

Reviews

‘This elegantly slim volume approaches fat and unwieldy issues of religious creativity … This is an intelligent, wide-ranging and interesting book.’

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

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