Description
Book SynopsisAcross the world from personal relationships to global politics, differencescultural, religious, racial, gender, age, abilityare at the heart of the most disruptive and disturbing concerns. While it is laudable to nurture an environment promoting the tolerance of difference, Creative Encounters, Appreciating Difference argues for the higher goal of actually appreciating difference as essential to creativity and innovation, even if often experienced as stressful and complex. Even encounters that are apparently harmful and negatively valued (arguments, conflict, war, oppression) usually heighten the potential for creativity, innovation, movement, action, and identity.Drawing on classic encounters that have played a significant role in the founding of the academic study of religion and the social sciences, this book explores in some depth the dynamics of encounter to reveal both its problematic and creative aspects and to develop perspectives and strategies to assure encounters both inclu
Trade ReviewThis volume provides a comprehensive view of Sam Gill’s scholarship over a lifetime, a synthetic vantage point not otherwise available. Scholars will welcome this important and stimulating work. -- Gregory Alles
Table of ContentsCreative Encounters, Appreciating Difference: An Introduction I: Appreciating Difference: Encountering, Moving, Naming 1: Moving Beyond Place 2: Territory 3: I Don’t Want to Be a Mystic! On Self-Moving and Religious Experience 4: Not by Any Name II: Creations of Encounter 5: Mother Earth and Numbakulla 6: Storytracking the Arrernte through the Academic Bush 7: Mother Earth: An American Myth III: Aesthetic of Impossibles 8: Myth and an Aesthetic of Impossibles 9: Tomorrow’s Eve and the Next Gen Study of Religion IV: Gesture 10: Gesture Posture Prosthesis 11: They Jump Up of Themselves 12: As Prayer Goes So Goes Religion V: Play 13: No Place to Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith as homo ludens, the Academic Study of Religion sub specie ludi 14: To Risk Meaning Nothing: Charles Sanders Peirce & the Logic of Discovery VI: Creative Encounters 15: Creative Encounters
