Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination

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Kimberley Christine Patton, John Stratton Hawley
Princeton University Press, 26/06/2018 - 368 páginas

What religion does not serve as a theater of tears? Holy Tears addresses this all but universal phenomenon with passion and precision, ranging from Mycenaean Greece up through the tragedy of 9/11. Sixteen authors, including many leading voices in the study of religion, offer essays on specific topics in religious weeping while also considering broader issues such as gender, memory, physiology, and spontaneity. A comprehensive, elegantly written introduction offers a key to these topics. Given the pervasiveness of its theme, it is remarkable that this book is the first of its kind--and it is long overdue.


The essays ask such questions as: Is religious weeping primal or culturally constructed? Is it universal? Is it spontaneous? Does God ever cry? Is religious weeping altered by sexual or social roles? Is it, perhaps, at once scripted and spontaneous, private and communal? Is it, indeed, divine?


The grief occasioned by 9/11 and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere offers a poignant context for this fascinating and richly detailed book. Holy Tears concludes with a compelling meditation on the theology of weeping that emerged from pastoral responses to 9/11, as described in the editors' interview with Reverend Betsee Parker, who became head chaplain for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and leader of the multifaith chaplaincy team at Ground Zero.


The contributors are Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Amy Bard, Herbert Basser, Santha Bhattacharji, William Chittick, Gary Ebersole, M. David Eckel, John Hawley, Gay Lynch, Jacob Olúpqnà (with Solá Ajíbádé), Betsee Parker, Kimberley Patton, Nehemia Polen, Kay Read, and Kallistos Ware.

 

Índice

Introduction
1
The Poetics and Politics of Ritualized Weeping in Early and Medieval Japan
25
Weeping Speech Water and the Underworld in Mexica Tradition
52
Why Do Your Eyes Not Run Like a River? Ritual Tears in Ancient and Modern Greek Funerary Traditions
67
Divine Weeping on Mount Nebo and in the Warsaw Ghetto
83
The Gopis Tears
94
A Cloud of Philosophy in a Drop of Tears
112
Weeping in Classical Sufism
132
Weeping in Jewish Sources
178
On the Iconology of the Magdalenes Tears
201
Weeping in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe
229
The Mystery of Tears in Orthodox Spirituality
242
Holy Tears in Eastern Christianity
255
Gods Weeping and the Sanctification of Ground Zero
274
Tikkun haolam
301
INDEX
303

Tears and Transformation in South Asian Majlis Poetry
145
Bridal Tears in Marriage Rites of Passage among the ÒyóYorùbá of Nigeria
165
CONTRIBUTORS
313
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Kimberley Christine Patton is Professor of the Comparative and Historical Study of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity (Oxford, forthcoming) and is coeditor and a contributing author of A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in a Postmodern Age (California). John Stratton Hawley is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. Two of his early books--Krishna, the Butter Thief and At Play with Krishna--were published by Princeton University Press.

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