get your dose of Cook!

Alan Cook, my Walk manager and self-appointed Constant Critic, has written three reactions (visit his blog and keep on scrolling) to Part I of my irreligious religiosity post. Great food for thought there, though if I get time to sit down and do a bit of my own on- and offline bookworming, I might riposte with some critiques of both Rudolf Otto and William James, both of whom are well-intended but perhaps misguided fellows when it comes to discussions of the sacred. Otto and James (mainly Otto; James appears in a blockquote of John Durham) figure in Alan's posts. Not to say that I don't admire these two writers; Otto in particular was part of my Problem of God course at Georgetown in 1987, and I think he popped up again during a Science, Myth and Religion course taught at GU by John Haught.

I'm glad Alan was able to confirm that I wasn't bullshitting in laying out part of Eliade's position (I didn't go into the Omphalos and axis mundi concepts, nor did I cover the concept of the eternal return). My copy of The Sacred and the Profane is in French (Le sacré et le profane) and heavily underlined thanks to all the technical French in its pages; I may remember the content simply because I had to wrestle with it in 1990. Eliade was Romanian, but if I'm not mistaken, most of his scholarly writing was in French. Somewhere in my pile of books are two other works of his, also acquired during my year in Fribourg, Switzerland: Traité d'histoire des religions and Le mythe de l'éternel retour. The Treatise is a long work; I had to read the first section of it for my coursework and never really delved into the rest of the book; The Myth of the Eternal Return is, like The Sacred and the Profane, a short but influential work. I read it through, but need to reread it. Hell, I need to reread my entire library! I'll be doing that once I'm back in Korea.

A tribute to Eliade, which very briefly touches on the controversy over his work, can be found here.


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