Theosemiotic

Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

By: Michael L. Raposa

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Paperback | 6 October 2020

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384 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.85

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In Theosemiotic, Michael Raposa uses Charles Peirce's semiotic theory to rethink certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. He first sketches a history that links Peirce's thought to that of earlier figures (both within the tradition of American religious thought and beyond), as well as to other classical pragmatists and to later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce's ideas, Raposa develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves emphasizing the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception. His central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is "perfused" with signs. Religious meaning emerges out of a process of continually reading and re-reading certain signs.
Theology is explored here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. By drawing on both Peirce's logic of vagueness and his logic of relations, Raposa makes sense out of how we talk about God as personal, and also how we understand the character of genuine communities. An investigation of what Peirce meant by "musement" illuminates the nature and purpose of prayer. Theosemiotic is portrayed as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. At the same time, the potential links between any philosophical theology conceived as theosemiotic and liberation theology are exposed.

Industry Reviews

Raposa's book greatly expands the work of inquiry into theology and meaning, making an explicit claim on readers of Peirce and the tradition. . . Raposa's persuasive account brings us face to face with a fulsome challenge of engaging in joining the evolving meaning of the universe.---Roger Ward, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy
Michael Raposa's Theosemiotic is both a consummation and a beginning. A consummation of the theosemiotic he discovered and created in his early study of Charles Peirce and then expanded to incorporate the ideas of a variety of thinkers who explore the work of signs in the cosmos. Raposa's scholarship is impeccable. It is also the beginning of a turn to the practices and feelings of theosemiotic in a very down-to-earth way-to musement, perception, and reflection. Raposa reaches down to the root of Peirce's semiotic and cosmology-that the meanings we enjoy in life are indeed gifts, and that we should treat them with reverence and care.---Doug Anderson, author of Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture

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