Language, Charisma, and Creativity [antikvár]

Preface As life moves, persuasion moves with it and indeed helps to move it. More bluntly, whatever God may or may not be— living, dead, or merely ailing—religion is a social institution, worship a social activity, and faith a social force. To trace the pattern of their changes is neither to collect relics of revelation nor to assemble a chronicle of error. It is to write a social history of the imagination. Clifford Geertz If the thoughtful attitude toward the place of religion in contemporary life was summed up in the first half of the twentieth century by Sigmund Freud's phrase "the future of an illusion," the corresponding phrase for the second half century has been Peter Berger's "a rumor of angels." Differences among Christians, Jews, Moslems, and Hindus are as salient today as they have ever been, and even the exclusive club of the "world religions" is facing the prospect of admitting the globally dynamic Yoruba religion as a new member. That religious consciousness is not merely persistent but resurgent should be no surprise, for religion has always been one of the defining features of the human world. Just as we have been characterized as Homo sapiens. Homo faber, Homo hierarchicus, Homo loquax, or Homo ludens, we have also rightly been called Homo religiosus. In the above epigraph Geertz offers a pragmatic program for understanding Homo religiosus by identifying religion with persuasion and XI