Religion and Outer Space examines religion in and on the final frontier. This book offers a first-of-its-kind roadmap for thinking about complex encounters of religion and outer space. A multidisciplinary group of scholarly experts takes up some of the most intriguing scientific, spiritual, trade/commercial, and even military dimensions of the complex entanglements of religion and outer space. Attending to the historical reality that the interconnections between religion and the heavens are as old as religions themselves, the volume starts with an examination of "outer space" elements in the most sacred writings of the world’s religions. It then explores some of the religious questions inevitable in this encounter, analyzing cultural constructions (both literary and actual) of religion and outer space. It ends with examinations of the role of religion in the very real and very present business of space exploration. What might motivate the spread of religion (or at least fantasies of religion in its myriad possibilities) into new interior and exterior dimensions of the cosmos? Only the future will tell. Religion and Outer Space is essential reading for students and academics with an interest in religion and space, religion and science, space exploration, religion and science fiction, popular culture, and religion in America.

"It is well known that religion, as well as philosophy, depends upon language for the expression of its truths. This seems a simple proposition, but what are its consequences? If language is the sole medium of development of the higher thoughts and feelings, in its genesis may we not hope to discover the deepest truths of life and mind? Before the complex symbols which we call words came into use, and hence before the mind acquired the faculty of forming thoughts or extended comparisons, activities or motions were the only medium of expression between sentient beings. Language is the development of these expressive actions, and so highly complex has it become, so far removed from its rude beginnings, that it seems another order of creation, a system of miraculous origin. But when we remember that intelligence is a concomitant development with language, that thought or spirit is but a building up of words into ideas, and that these words are merely condensed memories, common experiences which have become current from tongue to tongue, is it not evident that there is no impenetrable mystery in speech, and that its product, mind, is a synthesis of simple and familiar truths? Again, when we retrace sensibility or feeling, from which language has been gradually evolved, to its beginnings in organic life, we find no absolute demarcations; we find that all life, whether mental or physical, is interdependent"--Introduction.