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The Religious Creativity of Modern Humanity: Some Observations on Eliade's Unfinished Thought1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

B. S. Rennie
B. S. Rennie
Affiliation:
Department of Religion and Philosophy, Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, 16172-002
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Abstract

Eliade proposed to ‘undertake to analyze the religious creativity of modern societies’ in his History of Religious Ideas but never did so. In this paper I have attempted to suggest the general direction that his analysis would have taken – the identification of the real with the actual is a religious valorization of contemporary humanity. This is not a generic shift from religion to non-religion but a belief of a religious nature which constitutes a novel departure from the traditional operations of the religious mind. It is accompanied by a refusal to countenance our creative involvement in the construction of reality. This Eliade labels ‘modern’ and ‘historical’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 221 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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