Charles M. Mueller

This book comprehensively introduces Cognitive Linguistics and applies its tools to religious language. Drawing on authentic samples from a range of faiths, text types, and modes of interactive discourse, the authors accessibly define concepts like embodied cognition, agency, metaphor analysis, and Dynamic Systems Theory; illustrate how they can be used in analyzing religious language; and offer thorough pedagogical material to aid learning and application. Advanced students and scholars of linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive science, and religious and biblical studies will benefit from this practical guide to understanding and conducting research on religious discourse.

This book comprehensively introduces Cognitive Linguistics and applies its tools to religious language. Drawing on authentic samples from a range of faiths, text types, and modes of interactive discourse, the authors accessibly define concepts like embodied cognition, agency, metaphor analysis, and Dynamic Systems Theory; illustrate how they can be used in analyzing religious language; and offer thorough pedagogical material to aid learning and application. Advanced students and scholars of linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive science, and religious and biblical studies will benefit from this practical guide to understanding and conducting research on religious discourse.

Investigations of mysticism often focus on the past, while largely ignoring current developments.This book contributes to a reversal of that trend with a rigorous examination of a wide selection of contemporary Buddhist and Christian authors. The focus is on the intriguing intersections and subtle divergences now emerging in areas such as ineffability, nonconceptuality, paradox, inverted agency, unity, and self-dissolution. The analysis combines the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics with a range of methodological approaches, from discourse and thematic analysis to corpus linguistics.Wide-ranging, systematic, and informative, the book is invaluable to all of those interested in the phenomenon of mysticism within the modern world.