Faith and Fiction: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Interplay Between Metaphor and Religion: A Selection of Papers from the 25th Laud-Symposium of the Gerhard Mercator University of Duisberg on Metaphor and Religion

Faith and Fiction is a collection of essays which partly stems from the 25th LAUD-Symposium on ‘Metaphor and Religion’ (University of Duisburg, April 1-5, 1997). It investigates the relationship between religious experience and the use of metaphors and thus explores the tensions between faith and fiction. Herein, special attention is paid to the type of situation in which the confrontation of a community or an individual with religion is not self-evident or even discordant. In order to address the diversity of the problem area, the volume opts for an interdisciplinary approach. Section I analyses ‘religious metaphors’ from the viewpoint of contemporary linguistics. In section II, the significance of metaphors in a ‘meta-religious’ discourse is considered. The philosophical dialogue with religion and metaphor is discussed in section III, and the final section submits religious poems to a formal and interpretative examination.