Author: Michael L. Raposa
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813918983
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Boredom matters, writes Michael Raposa, because it represents a threat to spiritual life. Boredom can undermine prayer and meditation and signal the failure of religious imagination. If you engage it seriously, however, it can also be the starting point for philosophical reflection and spiritual insight. It can serve as a prelude to the discovery or rebirth of religious meaning. Boredom, then, is a paradox, surprisingly complex and ambiguous. Being bored with someone or something can represent a trivial matter--being bored with one's clothes or a magazine article--or a matter of significant consequence--being bored with one's marriage or the music one loves to play. Boredom can signify a moral failure or the presence of virtue. Appreciating the value of boredom does not require that one welcome, much less celebrate, its occurrence. Raposa simply invites us to pay attention to boredom's many possible lessons. The principal methods Raposa employs are philosophical. Drawing on Peirce's idea that all experience is interpreted experience, Raposa sees boredom as a failure of interpretation, an inability to read signs in life as religiously meaningful. The Gospel of Mark depicts a prayerful and passionate Jesus juxtaposed with his drowsy disciples in Gethsemane. Their failure to discern what is happening in their midst, Raposa suggests, is a powerful example of what medieval Christian theologians called acedia, their term for boredom with the rituals of spiritual devotion. But these descriptions of acedia bear a striking resemblance to mystical accounts of the "dark night," a terrifying but necessary stage in the mystic's spiritual journey. Drawing on this notion and others from eastern and western religious traditions, Raposa asks us to see boredom playing an ambivalent role in spiritual life, often serving as a metaphorical midwife for the birth of religious knowledge. His subject, he admits, seems tongue-in-cheek at first, but a stunning depth is quickly revealed. His lucid, witty, and intelligent discussion offers a path to the kind of meaning that is a fundamental desideratum in human experience.
Author: Patrick Gamsby
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666900982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life culls together the scattered fragments of Henri Lefebvre’s (1901–1991) unrealized sociology of boredom. In assembling these fragments, sprinkled through Lefebvre’s vast oeuvre, Patrick Gamsby constructs the core elements of Lefebvre’s latent theory of boredom. Themes of time (modernity, everyday), space (urban, suburban), and mass culture (culture industry, industry culture) are explored throughout the book, unveiling a concealed dialectical movement at work with the experience of boredom. In analyzing the dialectic of boredom, Gamsby argues that Lefebvre’s project of a critique of everyday life is key for making sense of the linkages between boredom and everyday life in the modern world.
Author: Michael L. Raposa
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813919256
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The Gospel of Mark depicts a prayerful and passionate Jesus juxtaposed with his drowsy disciples in Gethsemane. Their failure to discern what is happening in their midst, Raposa suggests, is a powerful example of what medieval Christian theologians called "acedia," their term for boredom with the rituals of spiritual devotion. But these descriptions of acedia bear a striking resemblance to mystical accounts of the "dark night," a terrifying although necessary stage in the mystic's spiritual journey. Drawing on this notion and others from Eastern and Western religious traditions, Raposa asks us to see boredom as playing an ambivalent role in spiritual life, often serving as a metaphorical midwife for the birth of religious knowledge.
Author: Peter Toohey
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300172168
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
In the first book to argue for the benefits of boredom, Peter Toohey dispels the myth that it's simply a childish emotion or an existential malaise like Jean-Paul Sartre's nausea. He shows how boredom is, in fact, one of our most common and constructive emotions and is an essential part of the human experience. This informative and entertaining investigation of boredom--what it is and what it isn't, its uses and its dangers--spans more than 3,000 years of history and takes readers through fascinating neurological and psychological theories of emotion, as well as recent scientific investigations, to illustrate its role in our lives. There are Australian aboriginals and bored Romans, Jeffrey Archer and caged cockatoos, Camus and the early Christians, Durer and Degas. Toohey also explores the important role that boredom plays in popular and highbrow culture and how over the centuries it has proven to be a stimulus for art and literature. Toohey shows that boredom is a universal emotion experienced by humans throughout history and he explains its place, and value, in today's world. "Boredom: A Lively History "is vital reading for anyone interested in what goes on when supposedly nothing happens.
Author: Barbara Dalle Pezze
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042025662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The past thirty years saw a growing academic interest in the phenomenon of boredom. If initially the analyses were mostly a-historical, now the historicity of boredom is widely recognised, though often it is taken as evidence of its permanence as a constant "quality" of the human condition, expression of a metaphysical malady inherent to the fact of being human. New trends in the literature focus on the peculiar relationship between boredom and modernity and attempt to embrace the new social, cultural and political factors which provoked the epochal change of modernity and relate them to a change in the parameters of human experience and the crisis of subjectivity. The very changes that characterise modernity are the same that led to the "democratisation" of boredom: modernity and boredom are shown to be inextricably connected and inseparable. This volume aims at contributing to the growing body of literature on boredom with a number of essays which reflect on the connection of boredom and modernity and focus on particular texts, authors, or aspects of the phenomenon. The approach is multidisciplinary, in keeping with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in our culture and societies, with essays reflecting on philosophy, literature, film, media and psychology.
Author: Agnė Narušytė
Publisher: VDA leidykla
ISBN: 9955854960
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Author: Sharday C. Mosurinjohn
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013305
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
The spiritual crisis of the twenty-first century is overload boredom. There is more information, content, and stimulation than ever before, and none of it is waiting passively to be consumed. The demands exceed our capacities. The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom makes the case that withdrawal and resistance are not our only options: we can choose kēdia, an ethic of care. Rather than conceiving the world of information as external, Sharday Mosurinjohn turns to the sensational and emotional, focusing on the ways the digital age has radically reconfigured our interior lives. Using an innovative method of affective aesthetic speculation, Mosurinjohn engages the world of art, literature, and comedy for a series of unexpected case studies that make strange otherwise familiar scenes of overload boredom: texting, browsing social media, and performing information work. Ultimately, she shows that the opposite of boredom is not interest but meaning, and that we can only make it by curating the overload. The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom is a bold and original intervention for the present condition, unsettling the framing of existing work around technological modernity and its discontents.
Author: Katharine Sarah Moody
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317114817
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Is the affirmation or intensification of life a value in itself? Can life itself be thought? This book breaks new ground in religious and philosophical thinking on the concept of life. It captures a moment in which such thinking is regaining its force and attraction for scholars, and the relevance of thought to social, cultural, political and religious dilemmas about how and why to live. Bringing together original contributions by highly distinguished authors in the field of Continental philosophy of religion, including John D. Caputo, Pamela Sue Anderson, Philip Goodchild, Alison Martin and Don Cupitt, this book has a distinctiveness based on its refusal to sit easily within either secular philosophical or theological approaches. The concept of life mobilizes a thinking that crosses narrow disciplinary boundaries, whilst retaining philosophical rigour. Three sections explore the various dimensions of the question of life: The Politics of Life'; 'Life and the Limits of Thinking'; and 'Life and Spirituality'. This book will be of interest to a broad range of readers in the humanities, particularly to philosophers, theologians, cultural theorists and all those interested in philosophical or theological debates on the concept of life.
Author: Elena Carrera
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009412353
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
This Element challenges prevailing views of boredom as a modern phenomenon and as an experience occurring inside our minds. It discusses the changing perspectives on boredom within psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 100 years. It also analyzes visual and textual material from France, Germany, Britain, Argentina and Spain, which illustrates the kinds of social situations, people and interactions that have been considered tedious or boring in the past five centuries. Examining the multidirectional ways in which words like ennuyeux, 'tedious', langweilig, aburrido and 'boring' have been transferred between different cultural contexts (to denote a range of interrelated feelings that include displeasure, unease and annoyance), it demonstrates how the terms, concepts and categories through which individuals have experienced their states of mind are not simply culture-bound. They have also travelled across geographical and linguistic barriers, through translation, imitation and adaptation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Author: Dr. Erica Brown
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1580236383
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Break the Surface of Spiritual Boredom to Find the Reservoir of Meaning Within We need to be bored. When we get bored and take responsibility for our boredom, we arrive at a new level of interest, introspection, or action that has been stirred by the very creativity used to keep boredom away. The relationship between boredom and creativity is far from accidental. Creative minds are often stimulated by boredom, regarding it as a brain rest until the next great idea looms on the horizon of the otherwise unoccupied mind. from Chapter 10 Boredom is a crisis of our age. In religious terms, boredom is sapping spirituality of its mystical and wholesome benefits, slowly corroding our ability to recognize blessing and beauty in our lives, to experience wonder and awe. What happens when our need for constant newness minimizes our interest in prayer, learning, and the mysteries of nature? This intriguing look at spiritual boredom helps you understand just what this condition is, particularly as it relates to Judaism, and what the absence of inspiration means to the present and future of the Jewish tradition. Drawing insights from psychology, philosophy, and theology as well as ancient Jewish texts, Dr. Erica Brown explores the many ways boredom manifests itself within Judaismin the community, classroom, and synagogueand shows its potentially powerful cultural impact on a faith structure that advises sanctifying time, not merely passing it.
