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Article: MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM.('Religion and Its Monsters')
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- March 8, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Commonweal 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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Religion and Its
Monsters
Timothy K. Beal
Routledge, $19.95, 256 pp.
There's something real about monsters. That is why they keep coming back to hound us--in our imaginations, in our films, even in our experience of God. In this highly readable book, Timothy Beal says that monsters of all traditions bring us face-to-face with the unheimlich, a term that Beal borrows from Freud. It refers, Beal says, to "that which threatens one's sense of 'at-homeness,' not from the outside but from within the house." When the thing we fear most arises amid what we know best, when we face "otherness within sameness," we confront a monster. Order may emerge from the encounter ...