[p2p-research] Fwd: The Participatory Turn (Paper Back available this July!)

Wed May 27 04:34:33 CEST 2009

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <JorgeNF at aol.com>
Date: Wed, May 27, 2009 at 3:21 AM
Subject: The Participatory Turn (Paper Back available this July!)
To: jferrer at ciis.edu

 Dear friends,

Greetings. I am delighted to let you know that the paperback edition of *The
Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies *(SUNY Press,
2008), is coming out this July and can be now pre-ordered at the SUNY Press
web page: http://sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61696.

Given the prohibitive cost of the hardcover edition, some of you asked me to
keep you informed about this release. I hope the book may be of interest for
you and your research.

Warmly,

Jorge Ferrer, Ph.D.
Chair
Department of East-West Psychology
California Institute of Integral Studies
1453 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Tel. 415-575-6262
jferrer at ciis.edu
http://ciis.edu/faculty/ferrer.html*
*
*Revisioning Transpersonal Theory*:
http://sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=60450
*The Participatory Turn*: http://sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61696

       *Summary*   [image: Read Intro or First
Chapter]<http://sunypress.edu/pdf/61696.pdf>

  *Cuts through traditional debates to argue that religious phenomena are
cocreated by human cognition and a generative spiritual power.*

Can we take seriously religious experience, spirituality, and mysticism,
without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or simply
asserting their validity as a dogmatic fact? The contributors to this volume
argue that we can, and they offer a new way: the “participatory turn,” which
proposes that individuals and communities have an integral and irreducible
role in bringing forth ontologically rich religious worlds. They explore the
ways this approach weaves together and gives voice to a number of robust
trends in contemporary religious scholarship, including the renewed study of
lived spirituality, the postmodern emphasis on embodied and gendered
subjectivity, the admission of alternate epistemic perspectives, the
irreducibility of religious pluralism, and the pragmatist emphasis on
transformation—all trends that raise serious challenges to the currently
prevalent linguistic paradigm.

The first part of the book situates the participatory turn in the context of
contemporary Religious Studies; the second part shows how this approach can
be applied to various global traditions, ancient and contemporary, from
Western esotericism to Jewish mysticism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sufism, and
socially engaged Buddhism.

“As Rainer Maria Rilke reminded us, the essential thing is to ‘live our
questions now’ and in the very posing of such questions, this brave and
hopeful book offers much not only to the future of Religious Studies but
also to the future of religious expression and interreligious dialogue.” — *
Tikkun*

“What a truly hopeful and beautiful book this is. Skillfully negotiating
between the Charybdis of a reductive but precious rationalist contextualism
and the Scylla of the profound but not always sufficiently critical
religious traditions, these authors propose a new, more dialectical path for
the future of Religious Studies—a path of participation that recognizes in a
rare fashion the truly creative nature of that fundamentally mysterious
process of human consciousness we so mundanely call ‘interpretation.’
Catalyzed by a marvelous opening essay on the history and meaning of this
participatory turn, the volume promises to become for a new generation what
Katz’s and Forman’s pioneering volumes were for earlier ones.” — Jeffrey J.
Kripal, author of *The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of
Religion  *

“In its quiet, careful way, *The Participatory Turn* is at once a nuanced
portrait of a great sea change taking place in Religious Studies and a
clear-eyed manifesto on behalf of that change. In their brilliant
introduction, Ferrer and Sherman have managed to condense and summarize a
vast and complex field, clarified its multitude of diverse strands, and set
forth a richly coherent philosophical synthesis. One senses that with this
book and the intellectual shift it describes, the academic study of religion
has, quite dramatically, come in from the cold. The book delineates a
pathway for the discipline to enter back into direct engagement with the
great mystery it seeks to illuminate, employing the many critical advances
of the past century’s scholarship but in a manner that is no longer
constrained by the hidden reductionism of many conventional academic
assumptions. *The Participatory Turn* presents an emerging orientation for
Religious Studies that is not only cogent and empowering but perhaps even
inevitable.” — Richard Tarnas, author of *The Passion of the Western Mind:
Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View*

Contributors include G. William Barnard, Bruno Barnhart, William Chittick,
Jorge N. Ferrer, Lee Irwin, Sean Kelly, Brian L. Lancaster, Beverly J.
Lanzetta, Robert McDermott, Donald Rothberg, and Jacob H. Sherman.

*Jorge N. Ferrer* is Chair of the Department of East-West Psychology at the
California Institute of Integral Studies and the author of *Revisioning
Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality*, also
published by SUNY Press. *Jacob H. Sherman* is a doctoral candidate in the
Faculty of the Divinity at the University of Cambridge.
     [image: line to separate header from information]*
Table Of Contents*

  Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Participatory Turn in Spirituality, Mysticism, and
Religious Studies
*Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman *

*PART I. Participation and Spirit: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives*

1. A Genealogy of Participation
*Jacob H. Sherman*

2. Participation, Complexity, and the Study of Religion
*Sean Kelly*

3. Spiritual Knowing as Participatory Enaction: An Answer to the Question of
Religious Pluralism
*Jorge N. Ferrer*

*PART II. Surveying the Traditions: Participatory Engagements*

4. Engaging with the Mind of God: The Participatory Path of Jewish Mysticism
*Brian L. Lancaster*

5. Esoteric Paradigms and Participatory Spirituality in the Teachings of
Mikhaël Aïvanhov
*Lee Irwin *

6. Wound of Love: Feminine Theosis and Embodied Mysticism in Teresa of Avila
*Beverly J. Lanzetta*

7. Ibn al-‘Arabê on Participating in the Mystery
*William C. Chittick*

8. One Spirit, One Body: Jesus’ Participatory Revolution
*Bruno Barnhart *

9. Participation Comes of Age: Owen Barfield and the Bhagavad Gita
*Robert McDermott*

10. Pulsating with Life: The Paradoxical Intuitions of Henri Bergson
*G. William Barnard *

11. Connecting Inner and Outer Transformation: Toward an Extended Model of
Buddhist Practice
*Donald Rothberg*

Contributors
Index

------------------------------
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