Book contents
- The Joy of Religion
- The Joy of Religion
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Variety and Mystery of Religious Pleasure
- Chapter 2 The Nature and Cultivation of Complex Pleasure
- Chapter 3 The Discovery of Mastery Pleasure
- Chapter 4 Philo’s Mastery, Plotinus’s Play, and the Mystic’s Joy
- Chapter 5 Pleasure, Play, and Magical Thinking
- Chapter 6 Church-Sect Theory and Pleasure
- Chapter 7 Narratives and Rituals of Pleasure
- Chapter 8 A Scholar’s Shabbat in Central Virginia
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
What about Joy?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2019
- The Joy of Religion
- The Joy of Religion
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Variety and Mystery of Religious Pleasure
- Chapter 2 The Nature and Cultivation of Complex Pleasure
- Chapter 3 The Discovery of Mastery Pleasure
- Chapter 4 Philo’s Mastery, Plotinus’s Play, and the Mystic’s Joy
- Chapter 5 Pleasure, Play, and Magical Thinking
- Chapter 6 Church-Sect Theory and Pleasure
- Chapter 7 Narratives and Rituals of Pleasure
- Chapter 8 A Scholar’s Shabbat in Central Virginia
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Because this book was written in English, the two words that dominated were pleasure and joy. Joy was the interesting word, the one that can presumably teach us about religion and positive feelings. But joy is a fairly vague word, and besides, a great deal of the material comes from other languages. Can we learn something new about joy, even here, at the tail end of the book? Would it pay to look at the word in the languages of religious documents – Italian, French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Sanskrit? Translation is messy business, but it may be possible to pick gioia, joie, alegria, Freude, simha, or sukha. But this dictionary exercise is not very interesting and certainly not revealing. A better idea is going back to the sources.
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- The Joy of ReligionExploring the Nature of Pleasure in Spiritual Life, pp. 216 - 219Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020