Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity

Basham, Megan

Scott, J Barton

<p>This book explores the shifting and negotiated boundaries of religion, spirituality, and secular thinking in Britain and North America during the twentieth century. It contributes to a growing scholarship that problematises secularization theory, arguing that religion and spirituality increasingly took diverse new forms and identities, rather than simply being replaced by a monolithic secularity. </p><p>The volume examines the way that thinkers, writers, and artists manipulated and reimagined orthodox belief systems in their work, using the notion of heresy to delineate the borders of what was considered socially and ethically acceptable. It includes topics such as psychospiritual approaches in medicine, countercultures and religious experience, and the function of blasphemy within supposedly secular politics. The book argues that heresy and heretical identities established fluid borderlands. These borderlands not only blur simple demarcations of the religious and secular in the twentieth century, but also infer new forms of heterodoxy through an exchange of ideas. </p><p>This collection of essays offers a nuanced take on a topic that pervades the study of religion. It will be of great use to scholars of Heresy Studies, Religious Studies and Comparative Religion, Social Anthropology, History, Literature, Philosophy, and Cultural Studies.</p>

<p>This book explores the shifting and negotiated boundaries of religion, spirituality and secular thinking in Britain and North America during the Twentieth Century.</p>

Humans have been uttering profane words and incurring the consequences for millennia. But contemporary events--from the violence in 2006 that followed Danish newspaper cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed to the 2012 furor over the<i> Innocence of Muslims</i> video--indicate that controversy concerning blasphemy has reemerged in explosive transnational form. In an age when electronic media transmit offense as rapidly as profane images and texts can be produced, blasphemy is bracingly relevant again. <p/> In this volume, a distinguished cast of international scholars examines the profound difficulties blasphemy raises for modern societies. Contributors examine how the sacred is formed and maintained, how sacrilegious expression is conceived and regulated, and how the resulting conflicts resist easy adjudication. Their studies range across art, history, politics, law, literature, and theology. Because of the global nature of the problem, the volume's approach is comparative, examining blasphemy across cultural and geopolitical boundaries.

Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff