In Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner, Ralph H. Craig III tells the story of Tina Turner’s life as a tale of two dreams. The first is well known to the general public: achieving commercial success—as she put it, “[to] fill a football stadium” (p. 165). The second is to be a religious teacher, and it is this dream that Craig identifies as the main throughline of Turner’s life. Craig’s thesis is that “Turner’s story is fundamentally a religious one” (p. 6), and his stellar book takes care in crafting a compelling narrative of Turner’s life in terms of religion and spirituality. Published within Eerdmans’s Library of Religious Biography series, this book will be an exciting and insightful read for fans of Tina Turner because of Craig’s focus on Turner’s spirituality and religiosity in telling her story, which amounts to an intervention in previous accounts of Turner’s life that have not paid sufficient attention to this aspect of her life.
Tag: books
Book Reviews
Book reviews in this volume include: Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds. By David L. McMahan. Oxford University Press, 2023.Reviewed by Dhivan Jones, University of Chester Learning from the West, Learning from the East: The Emergence of the Study of Buddhism in Japan and Europe Before 1900. Edited by Stephen Kigensan Licha and Hans Martin Kräme.…
Self-Referential Passages in Mahāyāna Sutra Literature
This study explores self-referential passages in Mahāyāna sutra literature. It argues that these passages serve to mediate a reader or listener’s approach to a text in much the same manner as paratexts mediate one’s approach to a text through external or adjacent devices such as commentaries; these passages, rather than being paratextual and outside of a text, are rather within the body of the text itself. This study explicates the types of self-referential passages in Mahāyāna literature, including encouragement to practice and propagate the text; turning it into a book; preserving the text; statements regard- ing the text’s benefits; identification of the text with other qualities or principles; the qualifications required for obtaining the text; and passages for the entrustment of the text. After noting the relative absence of such passages outside of Mahāyāna literature, it is argued that such passages reveal that for some of the adherents of the disparate early Mahāyāna, textuality was a medium of unprecedented value and utility in promoting novel texts and doctrines.