Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation

Religious Perspectives on Suicide

Inbunden, Engelska, 2018

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Death is an element at the center of all religious imagination. Analysts from Freud to Agamben have pondered religion's fascination with death, and religious art is saturated with images of suffering unto death. As this volume shows, religious fascination with death extends to the notion of elective death, its circumstances, the virtue of those who perform it, and how best to commemorate it.The essays in Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation address the legendary foundations for those elective deaths which can be categorized as religiously sanctioned suicides. Broadly condemned as cowardice across the world's moral codes, suicide under certain circumstances-such as martyrdom, self-sacrifice, or self-immolation-carries a dynamic importance in religious legends, some tragic and others uplifting. Believers respond to such legends presumably because choosing death is seen as heroic and redemptive for the individuals who die, for their communities, or for humanity. Envisioning suicide as virtuous clashes with popular conceptions of suicide as weak, immoral, and even criminal, but that is precisely the point. This volume offers analyses from renowned scholars with the literary tools and historical insights to investigate the delicate issue of religiously sanctioned elective death.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2018-06-07
Mått236 x 160 x 22 mm
Vikt641 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor358
FörlagOUP USA
ISBN9780190656485

Tillhör följande kategorier

1. Introduction: On Death, Religion, and Rubrics for SuicideMargo Kitts2. To Die For: The Evolution of Early Jewish MartyrdomShmuel Shepkaru3. Performing Christian MartyrdomsGail Streete4. Collective Martyrdom and Religious Suicide: The Branch Davidians and Heaven's GateCatherine Wessinger5. Martyrdom and its Contestations in the Formative Period of IslamAsma Afsaruddin6. The Death of Musa al- Kazim (d. 184/799): Knowledge and Suicide in Early Twelver Shi'ismNajam Haider7. Apologia for Suicide: Martyrdom in Contemporary Jihadist DiscourseMohammed M. Hafez8. Hindu Ascetic DeathMary Storm9. SatiDavid Brick10. Dying Heroically: Jainism and the Ritual Fast to DeathAnne Vallely11. The Tropics of Heroic Death: Martyrdom and the Sikh TraditionLouis E. Fenech12. The Meanings of Sacrifice: The LTTE, Suicide, and the Limits of the Religion QuestionBenjamin Schonthal13. To Extract the Essence from this Essenceless Body: Self-Sacrifice and Self-Immolation in Indian BuddhismReiko Ohnuma14. Reflection on Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist TraditionsJimmy Yu15. Relinquishing the Body to Reach the Pure Land: Buddhist Ascetic Suicide in Premodern JapanJacquelyn I. Stone

...this anthology offers a rich survey of attitudes toward suicide in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish texts, early Christian traditions, several periods of Islam, Indian traditions including Buddhism, Jainism, and the Sikhs, Chinese Taoist and Buddhist traditions,and Pure Land Buddhism in pre-modern Japan. ...Kitts' anthology constitutes a rich source for undertaking such analysis in a broad, comparative perspective.