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Mourning Religion: A Response

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Abstract

Mourning Religion is a brilliant collection of essays responding both to Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” and Peter Homans’ assertion that the academic study of religion represents a creative expression of mourning the loss of religion in secular (western) society. This essay poses questions concerning the role of theology as a mode of analysis; Ricoeur’s concept of “second naiveté” in relation to disillusionment and religion; Celia Brickman’s reflections on globalization, marginalization, and a shift in psychological language from “primitivity” to “vulnerability”; the role of the body in the work of religious studies; melancholia as “re-membering” amid multiplicity and fragmentation; and mourning as protest and resistance. The essay concludes with a reflection on ambiguity and transcendence in dialogue with Freud’s essay “On Transience.”

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Notes

  1. Von Unwerth (2005) identifies Rilke as the “young but already famous poet” whom Freud describes as one of his interlocutors in the “summer walk through a smiling countryside.” This conversation is the opening gambit for his reflections in the essay “On Transience” (Freud, 1916).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia Theological Seminary, P.O. Box 520, Decatur, GA, 30030, USA

    Pamela Cooper-White

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  1. Pamela Cooper-White
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Correspondence to Pamela Cooper-White.

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Cooper-White, P. Mourning Religion: A Response. Pastoral Psychol 59, 365–371 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-009-0265-z

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