Date(s) - 05/25/2016
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Location
Sanctuary
Categories
We will look at lectures from the Teaching Company’s series on Comparative Religion. Our topics are: The Sacred (Sacred Time, Sacred Space, and Sacred Objects), The Holy, and the Profane. Religious traditions assign sacred meaning to time, place and objects based on experiences in which the sacred is manifest.
The sacred stories or myths recounting these manifestations of the sacred become a foundational building block for religions. Examples include: Sacred Times such as Easter, Yom Kippur and Ramadan; Sacred Places such as Jerusalem and Mecca; and Sacred Objects such as the Ark of the Covenant, the bread and wine of communion, the relics of Buddha, and the waters of the Ganges River. Three different 20th century frameworks for understanding the origins of religion include: Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy; Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane; and Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion.