Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: ‘… through a glass darkly’
Victoria Barker

Reflections on literature, art and music
1. Men of faith: Stravinsky, Maritain, and the ideal Christian artifex
Sarah Penicka
2. Moctezuma’s revenge: iconoclasm in film
Frances Di Lauro
3. Artists do the big picture: arts practice as cultural and religious renewal
Rod Pattenden
4. Norse influences on Tolkien’s elves and dwarves
Peter Wilkin
5. Trauma, testimony, transcendence: representing diaspora in new Canadian literature
Jamie S. Scott

Reconsidering the study of the sacred in methodology
6. Geist and normativity in Hegel’s early theological writings
Philip Andrew Quadrio
7. Concerning Voltaire’s English enterprise
Chris Hartney
8. Post-secular thought? God, no! Slavoj Zizek the Lacanian Real and the swerve of symbolic space
Mark Crees
9. Art and politics in the Systemprogramme
Philip A. Quadrio

Symbols and stories in review
10. Crossing the river of flowing sands: a comparison of the journeys of Xuan Zang and Sir Aural Stein
Julian Droogan
11. It’s all very simplistic, this Buddhism stuff
Brendon Stewart
12. The meditative experience: contemporary expressions of fundamental principles
Dharmacari Ratnavyuha
13. Mystical experience and its critique of pure reason in the spiritual epistemology of Sūhrawardī and Rūmī
Milad Milan
14. Manichean studies in the 21st century
Andrew Wearring

Discourses on NRMS
15. Modern German heathenry and the radical traditionalists
Lauren Bernauer
16. Alternative worlds: metaphysical questing and virtual community amongst the Otherkin
Danielle Kirby
17. Rockchopping with Little Pebble: mainstream, fringe and criminal
Shelly Wickham and Christopher Hartney
18. Thinking about Levinas in relation to a spiritual community
John Paul Healy

Afterword
The garden and the gardener: towards a cinematic twist for America’s prelapsarian fantasy
Christopher Hartney

About the Author

Frances di Lauro is a senior lecturer and Chair of the Writing Studies department at the University of Sydney.