The serpent's gift : gnostic reflections on the study of religion / / Jeffrey J. Kripal.

• Author: ProQuest (Firm); Kripal, Jeffrey J. 1962-
• TeilnehmendeR: ProQuest (Firm)
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Language: English
• Physical Description: xiv, 223 p.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the serpent's gift. Faith, reason, and gnosis ; The premodern, the modern, and the postmodern ; Toward a gnostic (post)modernity ; Medi(t)ations ; Writing as hissing ; Autobiographical and pedagogical contexts ; The essays -- The apocryphon of the beloved. Invocation ; The quest for the heretical Jesus ; "One will know them by their roots" ; From the womb ; Sexual healings: dispelling the demons of abuse ; Sexual teachings ; The man Jesus loved ; The woman Jesus loved ; The secret -- Restoring the Adam of light. The Adam of light awakened by her ; The fiery brook ; The sacrilegious secret of Christian theology ; Implications of the method ; The historical and intellectual contexts ; "Man is God to man" : the virtues of pluralism and polytheism -- Completing the incarnation of love (and sex) : embodiment in Feuerbach's thought ; The sexuality of numbers ; The cancer and the cure ; Toward a mystical humanism: a gnostic rereading -- Comparative mystics. The rebuke of the gnostic and the oriental Renaissance ; Comparative mystics ; Ramakrishna: colonialism, universalism, mysticism ; Doctrinal and historical-critical analysis ; Ramakrishna and the comparativist ; The critical study of religion as a modern mystical tradition ; The scandal of comparison ; Professional heresy: the gnostic study of religion -- Interlude: Logoi mystikoi; or how to think like a gnostic -- Mutant marvels. Educational and sexual allegory ; On puberty and powers ; Denying the demiurge ; Toward a more radical empiricism ; Dissociation and the release of nonordinary energies ; On death as dissociation ; Real X-Men ; On x-clusions and x-ceptions ; Political allegory; or, how (not) to be an X-Man -- Conclusion: return to the garden. The other tree ; The forbidden fruit ; "When He becomes troubled, He will be astonished" ; The flaming sword and the bridal chamber.