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About this book
The idea of a connection between poetry and religion is as old as civilization. Homer consulted the Olympian gods on the fate of the fighters on the plain before Troy, and the poet made the heavenly ones speak. It was through poetry that the gods were brought within reach of human hearing. In the centuries after Homer, the Athenian stage became the setting where gods made their poetic interventions, resolving human impasses and contributing to the emotional synchronization of the public life of the city.
Sloterdijk argues that, as with the culture of the Ancient Greeks, all religions inscribe a kind of "theopoetry" at the heart of their cultural life and thought, even as they strenuously obscure these poetic origins through the cultivation and enforcement of orthodox norms. Sloterdijk also shows how, in conditions of religious pluralism, religions poetically reshape themselves to accommodate the demands of the religious marketplace.
This highly original study of the poetic devices that inform accounts of the otherworldly offers a new interpretation of religious practice and its theological elaboration through history, as well as a fresh perspective on our contemporary age in which collective life, interwoven with imaginative fabrications, is fraying under critical stress.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- I Deus ex machina, Deus ex cathedra
- 1 The gods in the theatre
- 2 Plato’s contestation
- 3 Of the true religion
- 4 Representing God, being God: an Egyptian solution
- 5 On the best of all possible heaven dwellers
- 6 Poetries of power
- 7 Dwelling in plausibilities
- 8 The theopoetical difference
- 9 Revelation whence?
- 10 The death of the gods
- 11 “Religion is unbelief”: Karl Barth’s intervention
- 12 In the garden of infallibility: Denzinger’s world
- II Under the high heavens
- 13 Fictive belonging together
- 14 Twilight of the gods and sociophany
- 15 Glory: poems of praise
- 16 Poetry of patient endurance
- 17 Poetry of exaggeration: religious virtuosos and their excesses
- 18 Kerygma, propaganda, supply-side offense, or, when fiction is not to be trifled with
- 19 On the prose and poetry of the search
- 20 Freedom of Religion
- In lieu of an afterword
- End User License Agreement