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cover image
The Spiritual Quest
Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science
Rating :
rating
Author(s) :
Robert M. Torrance
Pages :
367
Pub Date :
1994
Edition(s) at Erowid :
---(---)
Publisher :
University of California Press
ISBN :
0520211596
BLURBS #
". . . A splendid and powerful proposal for a universal structure of human experience that can embrace the efforts of science, philosophy, and religion as more similar than different."
-- Leo D. Lefubure, Religious Studies Review

"This brilliantly written work . . . displays a dazzling array of knowledge from contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and anthropology to myth, religion, and science."
-- Choice

"The Spiritual Quest assesses where we have been in making sense of the human situation as religious. It identifies both unproductive and path-breaking modes of inquiry. It also reveals the very edge of the current known -- the nature of spiritual being that humans share."
-- Kenneth M. Morrison, American Indian Culture & Research

"This is an important book for the history of religions, for it redeems the universalist hypothesis from the cave of the Jungians (supplying a critical corrective to Joseph Campbell and, more significantly, to Mircea Eliade), nimbly side-steps the vortex of the structuralists, and beats back the dragon of deconstruction. His sophisticated use of contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and the anthropology of shamanic cultures makes this Platonic approach to the narrative of human experience, this old faith in human universals, newly compelling."
-- Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Professor of History of Religions, University of Chicago, and author of Other People's Myths: The Cave of Echoes

"This is a magnificent effort to approach the question of our most expansive psychic activity, the quest for transcending our limited universe. This is a brilliant work, which opens the gate to much new research."
-- Ake Hultkrantz, author of Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama