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Article: The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth.(Review)
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- February 3, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth.
By Wendy Doniger. Columbia University Press, 200 pp., $26.95.
Not too many years ago theologians and comparative scholars could talk about the mythic worldview and the nature of the sacred. Whether their evaluation of mythology was positive or negative, many felt confident that its universal patterns and meaning could be understood. Earlier generations of theorists, from Sigmund Freud to Sir James Frazier, from Carl Jung to Mircea Eliade, proposed all-encompassing theories to explain the dynamics of mythology. Meanwhile, theologians sought to make sense of myth in relation to the Bible, either by sharply ...