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Faith and Fiction is a collection of essays which partly stems from the 25th LAUD-Symposium on 'Metaphor and Religion' (University of Duisburg, April 1-5, 1997). It investigates the relationship between religious experience and the use of metaphors and thus explores the tensions between faith and fiction. Herein, special attention is paid to the type of situation in which the confrontation of a community or an individual with religion is not self-evident or even discordant. In order to address the diversity of the problem area, the volume opts for an interdisciplinary approach. Section I analyses 'religious metaphors' from the viewpoint of contemporary linguistics. In section II, the significance of metaphors in a 'meta-religious' discourse is considered. The philosophical dialogue with religion and metaphor is discussed in section III, and the final section submits religious poems to a formal and interpretative examination.
List of contents
Contents: Benjamin Biebuyck: Faith or Fiction? Introduction - Anna Wierzbicka: The Meaning of Jesus' Parables. A Semantic Approach to the Gospels - Willem J. Botha: The Love Frame in the Bible. A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis - Tamás Szende: Upside-down Metaphors of 'Father'. The Case of Hungarian Oaths and Invective Formulas - Mualla Selçuk: The Use of Metaphors in Islamic Education - Lieve Orye: Two Faces of Religious Metaphor. Investigating the Problematic Dialogue between Religious Studies and Theology - Kristoffel Demoen: Metaphor and the Ancient Trinitarian Debate. Analogical Language in the Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen - John Ries: Faith Seeking Words. Metaphor and Kierkegaard's Silentio - Benjamin Biebuyck: Nietzsche's Curse on Christianity. Explorations of the Power of Creative Metaphor - Purificación Ribes: The Pregnancy of Metaphor. Multi-layered Figuration in John Donne's Batter my Heart - Peter Grundy: And the Analogy was to God. Propositional Meaning and Linguistic Form in Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Windhover.
About the author
The Editors: Benjamin Biebuyck is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the 'Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders' (Belgium) at the University of Gent.
René Dirven is Professor emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg.
John Ries is an Associate Researcher at the Catholic University of Leuven.
