Mediation and Immediacy

Religion, like any other domain of culture, is mediated through symbolic forms and communicative behaviors, which allow the coordination of group conduct in ritual and the representation of the divine or of tradition as an intersubjective reality. While many traditions hold out the promise of immediate access to the divine, or to some transcendent dimension of experience, such promises depend for their realization as well on the possibility of mediation, which is necessarily conducted through channels of communication and exchange, such as prayers or sacrifices. An understanding of such modes of semiosis is therefore necessary even and especially when mediation is denied by a tradition in the name of the 'ineffability" of the deity or of mystical experience.

This volume models and promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-cultural perspective on these issues by asking prominent semioticians, historians of religion and of art, linguists, sociologists of religion, and philosophers of law to reflect from a semiotic perspective on the topic of mediation and immediacy in religious traditions.

Autorentext

Jenny Ponzo, Massimo Leone, Universität Turin, Italien und Robert A. Yelle, Universität München, Deutschland.

Klappentext

In the volume, some of the most reputed scholars in the fields of religious studies and semiotics propose contributions on a crucial and cross-cultural issue: in what ways do religions conceive the contact with the sacred, through what paradigms of mediation or immediacy? The volume explores the nuances, subtleties, and contradictions of this dialectics, through essays that bear on several religious cultures and historical epochs.