Description

About the Book

This edition excavates the many layers of meaning hidden beneath the simple-sounding biblical myth of Adam and Eve. It critically scrutinizes the myth from the points of view of academic disciplines like history, literature, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology and sociology, religion and spirituality. Its underlying assumption is that scriptural stories ideologically sum up and reinforce the knowledge, thought and behavior structure of ancient or established cultural identities. Hence it brings to the interpretation of the myth not only the traditional methodological tool of belief, but also the critically unconventional tool of suspicion. It does it in the expectation and the hope of inspiring scholars of all religions and cultures to look critically at their own ethnic traditions and histories and so avoid the danger that fundamentalism threatens the globe with.

About the Book

Ignatius Jesudasan is a senior Jesuit priest currently residing at the Arul Kadal Jesuit regional theology centre at Chennai and engaged in inter-disciplinary theological reflection. His academic background includes an under-graduate degree in history and post-graduate diplomas or degrees in philosophy, English language and literature and Catholic theology. He did his doctoral studies at the Marquette University inter-disciplinary program of Theology and Society with course work in sociology as his optional subject. His dissertation, entitled A Gandhian Theology of Liberation, was published in the USA and India in English and in Italian and German in the respective linguistic lands. More recently he brought out a topical book titled Roots of Religious Violence: A Critique of Ethnic Metaphors. He is presently working on a few more Bible-related studies relating to history narration in metaphors.