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| 215 Notes Preface 1. For one example, see William E. Paden, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 2. Leszek Kołakowski finds this idea central to religion: “The crucial insight we find in religious experience, repeatedly recurring in various sacred books, may be summed up in one single word: alibi—elsewhere” [Metaphysical Horror (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 28]. 3. Transcendence is a contested category in religious thought, and I am using it here to indicate “what lies beyond,” however that is construed in the religious traditions we are considering. For current discussion of the term, see the essays in Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2007). 4. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 244. 5. Lenworth M. Jacobs, Karyl Burns, Barbara Bennet Jacobs, “Views of the Public and Trauma Professionals on Death and Dying from Injuries,” Archives of Surgery 143:8 (August 2008), 730–735. 6. Charlotte J. Martin argues this point eloquently in Dynamics of Hope: Eternal Life and Daily Christian Living (Collegeville. MN: Liturgical Press, 2002). Chapter 1 1. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, 1902, 1928), 518–519. 2. The inclusion of faithful dissent is one difference between this book and the fine survey by Kenneth L. Woodward, The Book of Miracles: The Meaning of the Miracle Stories in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 3. John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959). 4. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 282. 5. The Implied Reader, 284. 6. Richard H. Davis, ed., Images, Miracles, and Authority in Asian Religious Traditions (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 5. 216 | Notes to Chapter 1 7. George Butte, an original narrative theorist, thoughtfully explores the reflexive state of modern consciousness in I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). 8. “Miracles,” The Brill Dictionary of Religion, edited by Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill Publications, 2007), volume 3, 1233. 9. This sentence from Sam Harris is typical: “Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity—a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible” [The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 25]. 10. End of Faith, 110. 11. “Modern Power and the Reconfiguration of Religious Traditions,” Stanford Electronic Humanities Review 5, 1 (1996). Posted online at http://www.stanford.edu/group/ SHR/5-1/text/asad.html. Accessed 14 November 2007. 12. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 236. 13. Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, The Power and the Glory: Fundamentalisms Project (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 34–35. 14. Corrine G. Dempsey, “Lessons in Miracles from Kerala, South India: Stories of Three ‘Christian’ Saints,” History of Religions 39:2 (November 1999), 150–176. 15. Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, in Chicago Sun Times (14 March 2006). 16. Text is from Present Procedure in Causes of Beatification and Canonization, section 18, posted online at: http://www.vicariatusurbis.org/Beatificazione/Causaen.asp. 17. “Any solemn celebrations or panegyric speeches about Servants of God whose sanctity of life is still being legitimately examined are prohibited in Churches” (Norms to be Observed in Inquiries by Bishops in the Causes of Saints, 7 February 1983, section 36). 18. Divinus Perfectionus Magister, section 15. 19. Divinus Perfectionus Magister, section 12. 20. Norms to be Observed in Inquiries by Bishops in the Causes of Saints, section 21. a): “The Bishop or his delegate is to call some witnesses ex officio, who can contribute to completing the inquiry, if it be the case, particularly if they are opposed to the cause” (emphasis added). 21. Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 9. 22. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 39. 23. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 162. 24. David Hume...

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