EHE Book Reviews

Archetype/Myth/Metaphor/Symbol Record Type: Review ID: 1375
Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation Farley, Edward
The author, who is a Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University, is deeply concerned about the many problems that beset humans and the planet in the late 20th century. In this work he follows up an "intuition" "that many of these societal problems are partly the result of a loss or diminishment at the very heart of culture—some would say the loss of culture itself—namely, a loss of the society’s powerful deep symbols. Five chapters deal with a specific deep symbol: Tradition, obligation (duty, responsibility), reality, law, and hope. In each instance he attempts "to revise the very being and idea of a selected deep symbol [in order to show] the way the symbol expresses something about the world itself" (p. x). Throughout he related deep symbols to what he calls the "interhuman" but which he uses as if it refers to the transpersonal and to the relations between individuals. The words of power are outgrowths of human relationships. In the last chapter he discusses how these symbols are entangled with each other and how they relate to the sacred and the interhuman. I suggest that these deep symbols have their origin in EHEs and that the EHEs people are having today will revitalize these symbols.
Publisher Information:	Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996. Chap. notes: 127-141; Ind: 143-145

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Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation