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By JCS Editor – December 21, 2023

  • Reviews
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Book Review

The Oxford Handbook of Meditation

Currents Home

By JCS Editor – December 21, 2023

  • Reviews
Quick read

Book Review

The Oxford Handbook of Meditation

Read the new Review of The Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2019), edited by Miguel Farias, David Brazier, and Mansur Lalljee. Reviewed by Stephen Dawson (University of Lynchburg). 

This review examines this expansive and valuable recently edited volume on the study of meditation. Dawson attends to larger conceptual orientations of the volume and its specific contributions in his review, and finds that “the breadth of different approaches to meditation is, in fact, one of the Handbook’s prime virtues. In addition to generous descriptions of meditation practices embedded in a variety of religious traditions, readers encounter an array of different empirical approaches to the study of meditation. Attention is also paid to the diverse ends, religious and secular, that meditation practice can engage. Discussions of meditation are polyphonic—they comprise many voices. The plurality of voices is, however, balanced by listening; conversations take place on these pages. The Handbook amply displays the diverse multidisciplinary discussions underway in the field of meditation studies.”

See the publisher’s page: The Oxford Handbook of Meditation.

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