His ideas have resonated much more widely. Otto’s influence, however, has never been confined to systematic religious thought and the study of religions. Part Two turns to the area that Otto, more than any other German theologian or philosopher of religion, opened up: an engagement with the world of religions. The first section of the volume addresses Otto’s ideas and their contexts. This volume gathers together essays by scholars from a variety of perspectives – theology, religious studies, intellectual history, and various cultural studies – to address the question of what Otto’s legacy for the 21st century might be. As thinkers and scholars have turned in many other intellectual directions, they have tended to see Otto as representative of a past to be rejected. However, since the 1960s, Otto has been increasingly overlooked and neglected. His vocabulary broke through narrow disciplinary bounds and was taken up by people in a variety of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. His book, The Idea of the Holy, became something of a sensation in its time, and his account of numinous experience as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans had an effect that few other ideas in the study of religions have had. Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) is widely recognized as one of the most important contributors to the study of religions at the beginning of the 20th century.
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