Schleiermacher cosmic view in order to understand religion

#Schleiermacher cosmic view in order to understand religion plus

A congregationРІР‚в„ўs thick description of its universe is expressed in local metaphors, not universal propositions. One should not expect to encounter fully developed cosmologies in the settings of parish story. In the present section the focus is the setting of parish story, its world view. Character corresponds to the storyРІР‚в„ўs ethos, its wishes, style, and norms, elements to be examined in the next major section of this book. I make a similar analytical distinction between the setting of parish story and its characterization. Ethos instead comprises its preferences and valuations of that life. World view encompasses a communityРІР‚в„ўs perceptions and suspicions about what is happening in life.

World view indicates the universe that the group constructs ethos, by contrast, reflects the values and dispositions that the group maintains. Then, in that tension, the plot thickens, and world view as story is related, binding even in the light of its contradiction the self to the Other, the finite frame to the worldРІР‚в„ўs outcome.Р”Р„nthropologists such as Geertz and Robert Redfield 3 make a distinction between the world view of a community and its ethos. This working picture of reality often goes unexpressed until challenged. Setting is a groupРІР‚в„ўs cosmic construction that accounts for crises. And the religious response to this suspicion is in each case the same: the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of the world which will account for, even celebrate, the perceived ambiguities, puzzles and paradoxes of human experience. The strange opacity of certain empirical events, the dumb senselessness of intense or inexorable pain, and the enigmatic unaccountability of gross inequity all raise the uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence manРІР‚в„ўs life in the world, has no genuine order at all - no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence.

Both the strength and the frailty of setting are associated with crises that challenge its significance. It was when my own life was most pointedly threatened, for example, that stories about the world were told with greatest frequency.

No world view is irrefutable, even to its ardent supporters, and indeed it is often in conjunction with events that challenge its adequacy that it is most urgently expressed. World views, both ancient and modern, are fragile and incomplete constructions, subject to damaging contradiction. In traditional societies, world views may be more uniform and explicit than those we encountered in Western, technological ones, but the social need to construct a commonly satisfactory setting for our lives was also evident in the sophisticated encounters in my hospital room. In GeertzРІР‚в„ўs words, world view is the 'picture' a group shares 'of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order.' 1 A community over time develops a shared sense of what is really going on in the world. In an ethnographic analysis of a community the setting is termed its world view. So important is the development of setting in the narrative of a local church that three chapters will be devoted to exploring ways to analyze and understand the meanings implied in setting. Along with plot and characterization, setting is a principal element of storytelling. One of the major undertakings of narrative discourse is the establishment of settings, the conditions within which the events of a tale gain their reasonableness.

#Schleiermacher cosmic view in order to understand religion plus

That faith, plus other perceptions about our personal lives and the course of human history, provided a dimension to our stories that I call their setting: the world the story sets in which storyРІР‚в„ўs plot can credibly unfold and its character develop. Woven into their telling was the Christian faith that I and most of my friends subscribe to. The accounts tended to be stories - personal recollections, tales of similar happenings, hopes, prayers, and resolutions about the future. In the uncertainty of my sickroom we tried to find accounts that, in the face of dying, would disclose the point of my life. I sought a plausible account of the world that explained my plight. What, I asked myself on my hospital bed, was a decent chap like me doing in such deadly circumstances? What on earth was going on? The threat of my death provoked for me an unprecedented search for meaning. Not long ago a tumor was taken from my chest and I was told that I carry an indolent but incurable form of cancer. Hopewell Chapter 4 The Struggle For Setting