Vera Chouinard, Edward C. Hall, and Robert Wilton
Ashgate
Hardback
300
Drawing on psychoanalysis, and on literature in the Christian tradition that has for many centuries focused on dreams and visions, Richard Fenn presents a new cross-disciplinary theory of religion. Reflecting that religious language must recover sources of the Christian tradition that have long explored the more primitive aspects of the psyche, the author examines dreams, visions of the afterlife, and descents into hell in the search for a contemporary spiritual discipline. Whereas earlier Christian ascetic practices reinforced the sense of the individual's ultimate helplessness to achieve spiritual maturity, Fenn argues that the psychoanalytic tradition offers a riskier method whose outcome is correspondingly more hopeful and less certain. At the very least, this contemporary descent into hell holds out the promise of a new selfhood that can place certain perennial spiritual struggles in the past.
Ashgate
Hardback
300
Drawing on psychoanalysis, and on literature in the Christian tradition that has for many centuries focused on dreams and visions, Richard Fenn presents a new cross-disciplinary theory of religion. Reflecting that religious language must recover sources of the Christian tradition that have long explored the more primitive aspects of the psyche, the author examines dreams, visions of the afterlife, and descents into hell in the search for a contemporary spiritual discipline. Whereas earlier Christian ascetic practices reinforced the sense of the individual's ultimate helplessness to achieve spiritual maturity, Fenn argues that the psychoanalytic tradition offers a riskier method whose outcome is correspondingly more hopeful and less certain. At the very least, this contemporary descent into hell holds out the promise of a new selfhood that can place certain perennial spiritual struggles in the past.