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This chapter examines literature discovered at Qumran and related literature, including the Temple Scroll, with an eye toward describing more fully the anti-temple polemics articulated. It identifies sources making the following claims about the Jerusalem temple: that it is ritually defiled, morally defiled, ritually inadequate, and structurally insufficient. It also reconsiders the sources that ostensibly “spiritualize” the temple, arguing instead that these sources are rooted in beliefs concerning the temple’s importance and efficacy. Sectarian Jews emulated the temple’s rituals and priests in part because they looked forward to the temple being under their own control.

This chapter reexamines New Testament traditions concerning the Last Supper and Jesus’ overturning the tables in the Jerusalem temple. It argues that the last supper can be understood as a symbolic act seeking to emulate the temple, affirming its efficacy and meaning. The temple incident is understood as a development of earlier prophetic notions concerning the rejection of stolen sacrifices. In his concern for the poor — and in line with his communitarian social message — Jesus overturned the tables in the temple because he rejected the idea that the poor should be charged at all for their sacrifices. The differing rabbinic perspective on this question is also explored. The chapter concludes with brief survey of anti-temple polemics found in Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation.

The introduction raises the question of corporeality and the body in Maximus’ theology within the context of the wider patristic and subsequent catholic tradition. It asks whether the affinity of patristic thought with Neoplatonism tends towards the marginalization creation and the body, as often charged. The case is argued that an intelligent reading of Maximus’ philosophical and ascetic writings requires due regard for the living, material praxis – especially liturgical and sacramental – within which the Confessor lived, thought, and wrote.

The role of secrecy is looked at as a practical and ritual strategy. It is argued that the esoteric practices and ecstatic techniques of the Kartābhajās involve a key strategy of deconstructing and reconstructing the human body; their aim is to dismantle or dissolve the ordinary socialized body of the initiate, along with the conventional social hierarchy itself, and to create in its place a new, divinized (spiritualized) body, which is in turn reinscribed into an alternative social hierarchy, with its own relations of authority and power. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the relationship between the body and the social body in mainstream Bengali culture, as well as the ritual sacraments used to inscribe the physical body into the greater Bengali social hierarchy. Next, the role of initiation and bodily practice within the Kartābhajā tradition is discussed as it serves to deconstruct the conventional socialized body, and to create in its place an alternative, liberated body. Finally, an examination is made of the attempt of the Kartābhajās to construct not simply an alternative body, but an entire alternative identity or secret self – the “supreme” or ultimate identity, which is at once freed from the bonds of labor and servitude in the exoteric social hierarchy, while at the same time it is inscribed into a new hierarchy of power within the Kartābhajā sect itself.

This chapter analyses the repudiation of male‐female sexuality in The Phoenix and its presentation of asexual, solitary, and spiritual reproduction. It questions how far the spiritualization of sex and gender problematizes the poem's allegorical construction of the monastic environment, and sets up a rich and paradoxical dynamic that reflects a contradictory attitude to same‐sex intimacy and productive anxieties.

This chapter examines the works of Paracelsus on alchemy and German Naturphilosophie and its relation to the history of Western esotericism. It suggests that alchemy played a large part in Renaissance esotericism and its rapid diffusion during the period 1550–1650 is directly related to its combination with Neo-Platonic and Hermetic approaches to nature, and especially to the controversy surrounding Paracelsus. It discusses Paracelsus' esoteric ideas concerning the cosmic all-life, the spiritualization of matter and the divine nature of virtue and energy, which are now integral elements in the new philosophies of science of vitalism and holism and in the archetypes of Jungian psychoanalysis.

The chapter examines the role of religion in contributing to the growth of Southern distinctiveness and eventually in the coming of the Civil War. Religion played a crucial role in the development of antebellum Southern separatism. Religious and political discourse together with sectional controversy over slavery intensified the process of disrupting of the Union. Constitutional crisis is viewed as the cause behind the coming of the Civil War. The chapter explains the concept of honor in the secession crisis. It discusses how Jefferson Davis helped in accelerating the drive towards Southern nationalism. Religion created a moral consensus around slavery through spiritualization. The sanctification of slavery served as a unifying force. The role of ideology in the coming of the Civil War is also discussed. Finally, the chapter provides a conclusion emphasizing the contribution of religion toward secession and revisiting its crucial role in the coming of the Civil War.

This chapter offers an account of the emerging centrality of celebrities in public culture. Studying celebrity and religion in concert requires parsing the multiple ways these terms have become increasingly interactive, overlapping, and co-constitutive in modern America. This chapter explores how this has transpired by looking at both the forms of news reporting that have succeeded in recent years and the changed way that religion is publicly discussed. Its focus is the national daily newspaper USA Today, which provides an excellent archive for the relationship between religion and celebrity in the news via its own oft-touted (and oft-satirized) synthetic style, including short articles, cheery cartoon graphics, and intentionally “easy to read” copy. This chapter analyzes the way that entertainment news deploys religious idiom to express something inexpressibly potent in its subject and to translate democratic moral agency in an increasingly privatized corporate media structure. First, it offers a short history of the emergence of infotainment reportage and its corollary, celebrification. It then discusses news coverage of religion and celebrity in three separate periods: 1989–1996, 1997–2003, and 2004–2010.

Following an introductory survey of its contemporary popularity, this chapter discusses those elements of alchemy that are necessary for the understanding of the literary examples in the following chapters: the exoteric or operative theory of the generation of stones and minerals, which justified the transformation of baser metals to gold; the esoteric or speculative theory of the correspondence of macro- and microcosm, which underlay the spiritualization of physical alchemy as an image for transformation of the self; the basic operations and tools of the magnum opus and the literary analogies adduced to illustrate them; and the historical origins of alchemy when the Greeks provided a theory (Hermes’ Art) to explain Egyptian chemical practices.

This conclusion summarizes the findings of the study: a clear line of development from satirization through stages of spiritualization to trivialization by excessive popularization. During periods of satire the works tended to be broadly international, embracing writers from many languages and cultures. Spiritualization, in contrast, is colored by local and historical factors. It began in Protestant cultures as writers sought images that were not indebted to Catholicism. The figure of the alchemist was then taken up by Romantic writers as a symbol for the self-destructively obsessive search for the absolute. Later the spiritualized figure was taken up by poets as an image of the poet. Following World War I, a widespread turn to occultism involved alchemists. The appeal of alchemy lies in the fact that it offers to change present reality by bringing wealth, producing elixirs for the body, or transforming the spirit.

This chapter focuses on Gandhi’s principle of satyagraha, what it meant to Gandhi, and how it operated in the field of politics. The chapter also discusses satyagraha and how it is related to psychoanalysis. Satyagraha is central to Gandhi’s thought and practices. It essentially involves truth-centric, non-violent action. Gandhi characterized satyagraha variously as generating ‘truth-force’, ‘love-force’, and ‘soul-force’. Satyagraha, which aims at spiritual transformation of the opponent with love and self-suffering, is Gandhi’s creative contribution to conflict resolution. In a significant sense, Gandhi’s satyagraha is a kind of yoga. Like Sankara’s jnana yoga and Patanjali’s dhyana yoga, Gandhi’s is ahimsa yoga.

This introduction charts out the rising rates of religious nones in the United States and Canada, including in several subregions within each nation. Attention is given to the reasons religious nones have grown, as well as to the demographic composition among current religious nones. This chapter then frames the entire project against the backdrop of three theoretical frameworks used in the sociology of religion and religious studies: stages of decline, individualization and spiritualization, and polarization. The chapter concludes with an overview of the remaining sections in the book.