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This volume contains a selection of the papers originally delivered at the 25th LAUD-symposium on 'Metaphor and Religion'. The essays in this volume analyse the metaphorical nature of religious language from a variety of perspectives. The concept of metaphor has been developed by the sustained attention of theologians, philosophers, linguists and literary theorists for more than two millennia. The last twenty years have witnessed a renewed and intensified interest in this powerful dynamism of thought. The present contributions offer a survey of the most adhered-to theories of metaphor. They elaborate on their significance for religious language: next to analogy as a philosophical and theological tool, interactionist, pragmatist and cognitivist theories are used to shed light on the peculiarity of human efforts to talk and think about the transcendent.
List of contents
Contents: Robert Cummings Neville: A pragmatic semiotic theory of religious symbolism - Wim A. de Pater: Analogy and disclosures: On religious language - Gustavo Zonana: On the names of God: Notes on the construction of interpretive frames for religious language - Richard G. Swinburne: Analogy, metaphor, and religious language - Hubert Knoblauch: Metaphors, transcendence and indirect communication: Alfred Schutz' phenomenology of the life-world and the metaphors of religion - Jean-Pierre Van Noppen: Christian theographic metaphors: Ordinary words with extraordinary meanings - Robert Maier: Religious communication and pragmatic metaphors - Zdravko Radman: In the name of God: Towards a concept of virtual meaning - Roberta Pires de Oliveira: 'Mother in heaven': A desirable metaphor? - Lieven Boeve and Kurt Feyaerts: Religious metaphors in a postmodern culture: Transverse links between apophatical theology and cognitive semantics - Antonio Barcelona: The metaphorical and metonymic understanding of the trinitarian dogma - Troels Nørager: 'Heart' as metaphor in religious discourse - William H. Huseman: The sacred centre of orthodoxy: Metaphorical links between sexual impurity and heresy - Victor Balaban: Religious metaphor and cognitive linguistics: Perceptual metaphors for knowledge at a Marian apparition site - Wesley J. Wildman: Strategic mechanisms within religious symbol systems.
