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The way in which people change and represent their spiritual
evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures.
Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words
and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through
explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the
discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and
social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution
of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.
The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.
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.
Focusing on the anthropological consequences of the disappearing of
materiality and sensory embodiment, On Insignificance highlights
some of the most perturbing patterns of insignificance that have
seeped into our everyday lives. Seeking to explain the semiotic
causes of feelings of meaninglessness, Leone posits that caring for
the singularities of the world is the most viable way to resist the
alienating effects of the digital bureaucratization of meaning. The
book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, cultural
studies, semiotics, aesthetics, communication studies, and social
theory.
Saints and Signs analyzes a corpus of hagiographies, paintings, and
other materials related to four of the most prominent saints of
early modern Catholicism: Ignatius of Loyola, Philip Neri, Francis
Xavier, and Therese of Avila. Verbal and visual documents -
produced between the end of the Council of Trent (1563) and the
beginning of the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623) - are placed in
their historical context and analyzed through semiotics - the
discipline that studies signification and communication - in order
to answer the following questions: How did these four saints become
signs of the renewal of Catholic spirituality after the
Reformation? How did their verbal and visual representations
promote new Catholic models of religious conversion? How did this
huge effort of spiritual propaganda change the modern idea of
communication? The book is divided into four sections, focusing on
the four saints and on the particular topics related to their
hagiologic identity: early modern theological debates on grace
(Ignatius of Loyola); cultural contaminations between Catholic
internal and external missions (Philip Neri); the Christian
identity in relation to non-Christian territories (Francis Xavier);
the status of women in early modern Catholicism (Therese of Avila).
Focusing on the anthropological consequences of the disappearing of
materiality and sensory embodiment, On Insignificance highlights
some of the most perturbing patterns of insignificance that have
seeped into our everyday lives. Seeking to explain the semiotic
causes of feelings of meaninglessness, Leone posits that caring for
the singularities of the world is the most viable way to resist the
alienating effects of the digital bureaucratization of meaning. The
book will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, cultural
studies, semiotics, aesthetics, communication studies, and social
theory.
This unique volume focuses on religion and spirituality, along with
rituals, practices and symbols, discussed and analysed from a
semiotic perspective. It covers both cognitive and social
dimensions of religious practices and beliefs, various aspects of
spirituality, multiple forms of representation, as well as spheres
of religious beliefs and practices. The volume is an outcome of the
Signum-Idea-Verbum-Opus project initiated by Umberto Eco’s
keynote address during his visit at the University of Łódź in
2015. More theoretical insights and further explorations into
contemporary semiosphere can be found in Current Perspectives in
Semiotics: Signs, Signification and Communication and Current
Perspectives in Semiotics: Texts, Genres and Representations,
published by Peter Lang.
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