Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic Society

Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic Society PDF Author: Kathryn Rountree
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317158687
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Contemporary western Paganism is now a global religious phenomenon with Pagans in many parts of the world sharing much in common - from a nature-revering worldview and lifestyle to a host of chants, invocations, ritual tools and magical practices. But there are also locally-specific differences. Local religious contexts, landscapes, histories, traditions, politics, values and norms all impact on local Paganisms. This is nowhere more evident than in a strongly Catholic society, where religion and culture are deeply entwined. Taking the Mediterranean society of Malta as a case study, this book invites readers inside the world of a small, hidden sub-culture. Showing what it is like being Pagan in a society where the vast majority of the population is Roman Catholic, and Catholicism permeates every sphere of public and domestic, social and political life, Rountree reveals that Paganism here is a unique brew of indigenous and global influences. Pagans employ both creativity and borrowing in constructing identities within a cultural context characterized by antagonism as well as continuity. This book explores the intersections of religious and cultural identity, the global and local, Paganism and Christianity, with insights grounded in rich ethnographic detail based on long-term fieldwork. Rountree makes invaluable comparisons with other studies of modern Pagans and their various worlds.

Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic Society

Crafting Contemporary Pagan Identities in a Catholic Society PDF Author: Kathryn Rountree
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317158679
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Contemporary western Paganism is now a global religious phenomenon with Pagans in many parts of the world sharing much in common - from a nature-revering worldview and lifestyle to a host of chants, invocations, ritual tools and magical practices. But there are also locally-specific differences. Local religious contexts, landscapes, histories, traditions, politics, values and norms all impact on local Paganisms. This is nowhere more evident than in a strongly Catholic society, where religion and culture are deeply entwined. Taking the Mediterranean society of Malta as a case study, this book invites readers inside the world of a small, hidden sub-culture. Showing what it is like being Pagan in a society where the vast majority of the population is Roman Catholic, and Catholicism permeates every sphere of public and domestic, social and political life, Rountree reveals that Paganism here is a unique brew of indigenous and global influences. Pagans employ both creativity and borrowing in constructing identities within a cultural context characterized by antagonism as well as continuity. This book explores the intersections of religious and cultural identity, the global and local, Paganism and Christianity, with insights grounded in rich ethnographic detail based on long-term fieldwork. Rountree makes invaluable comparisons with other studies of modern Pagans and their various worlds.

Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe

Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe PDF Author: Kathryn Rountree
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782386475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

Magic and Witchery in the Modern West

Magic and Witchery in the Modern West PDF Author: Shai Feraro
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030155498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book marks twenty years since the publication of Professor Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon, a major contribution to the historical study of Wicca. Building on and celebrating Hutton’s pioneering work, the chapters in this volume explore a range of modern magical, occult, and Pagan groups active in Western nations. Each contributor is a specialist in the study of modern Paganism and occultism, although differ in their embrace of historical, anthropological, and psychological perspectives. Chapters examine not only the history of Wicca, the largest and best-known form of modern Paganism, but also modern Pagan environmentalist and anti-nuclear activism, the Pagan interpretation of fairy folklore, and the contemporary ‘Traditional Witchcraft’ phenomenon.

Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Modern Paganism

Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Modern Paganism PDF Author: Kathryn Rountree
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137562005
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This volume explores how Pagans negotiate local and global tensions as they craft their identities, both as members of local communities and as cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.” Based on cutting edge international case studies from Pagan communities in the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Malta, it considers how modern Pagans negotiate tensions between the particular and universal, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and world citizenship. The burgeoning of modern Paganisms in recent decades has proceeded alongside growing globalization and human mobility, ubiquitous Internet use, a mounting environmental crisis, the re-valuing of indigenous religions, and new political configurations. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism have both influenced the weaving of unique local Paganisms in diverse contexts. Pagans articulate a strong attachment to local or indigenous traditions and landscapes, constructing paths that reflect local socio-cultural, political, and historical realities. However, they draw on the Internet and the global circulation of people and universal ideas. This collection considers how they confound these binaries in fascinating, complex ways as members of local communities and global networks.

The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland

The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192639315
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
What does religion mean to modern Ireland and what is its recent social and political history? The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland provides in-depth analysis of the relationships between religion, society, politics, and everyday life on the island of Ireland from 1800 to the twenty-first century. Taking a chronological and all-island approach, it explores the complex and changing role of religion both before and after partition. The handbook's thirty-two chapters address long-standing historical and political debates about religion, identity, and politics, including religion's contributions to division and violence. They also offer perspectives on how religion interacts with education, the media, law, gender and sexuality, science, literature, and memory. Whilst providing insight into how everyday religious practices have intersected with the institutional structures of Catholicism and Protestantism, the book also examines the island's increasing religious diversity, including the rise of those with 'no religion'. Written by leading scholars in the field and emerging researchers with new perspectives, this is an authoritative and up-to-date volume that offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the enduring significance of religion on the island.

Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality

Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality PDF Author: Anna Fedele
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135114528
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
This book explores the entanglements of gender and power in spiritual practices and analyzes strategies used by spiritual practitioners to attain what to social scientists might seem an impossible goal: creating spiritual communities without creating gendered hierarchies. What strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop individual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? The chapters in this book together and separately demonstrate that, in order to understand contemporary spirituality, the analytical lenses of gender and power are essential. Furthermore, they show that it is not possible to make a clear distinction between established religions and contemporary spirituality: the two sometimes overlap, and at other times spirituality distances itself from religion while reproducing some of its underlying interpretative frameworks. This book does not take the discourses of spiritual practitioners for granted, yet recognizes the reflexivity of spiritual practitioners and the reciprocal relationship between spirituality and disciplines such as anthropology. The ethnographic descriptions of lived spirituality included in this volume span a wide range of countries, from Portugal, Italy, and the Netherlands to Mexico and Israel.

Druidism, Tengrism, Taaraism: Current Reactivations of Ancient Spiritualities and Religions, From Identity to Politics

Druidism, Tengrism, Taaraism: Current Reactivations of Ancient Spiritualities and Religions, From Identity to Politics PDF Author: Samim Akgönül
Publisher: Transnational Press London
ISBN: 1801352372
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
INTRODUCTION.. 5 Samim Akgönül and Anne-Laure Zwilling I NORTHERN EUROPE: REACTIVATION AS POLITICS A Pagan Eco-fascism? The Ecological Thinking of Aleksey ‘Dobroslav’ Dobrovolsky 19 Adrien Nonjon Stereotyping Estonian Pagans: Right-Wing Extremists or Tree Huggers from the Forest? 39 Ringo Ringvee Note on the Romuva Movement in Lithuania. 53 Massimo Introvigne II FRANCE AND TURKEY: REACTIVATION AS REACTIVE IDENTITY Our Longest Memory.” Indo-European Paganism as the Foundation of the Ethnopolitics of the French “Identitarian Movement”. 63 Stéphane François Atheism, Theism, and Reactivation in Turkey Irreligiosity in a Secular State Under an Islamist Conservative Regime. 75 Samim Akgönül Align the “Ancient One” with Our Lives: Analysing the Resurgence of An Ancient Cult to Shed Light on Contemporary Religiosity in Turkey. 87 Kerem Görkem Arslan Comeback of Witchcraft: Thoughts from France. 111 Damien Karbovnik III ART: A NEW COUNTRY FOR REACTIVATION The Search for Spirituality and Beauty: New Ways of Religiosity among Artists and Intellectuals from Dersim/Tunceli 131 Martin Greve Performance Art as a Ritual of Reviving Pagan Religions. 149 Elif Dastarlı and İlkay Canan Okkalı Conclusion. 161 Samim Akgönül and Anne Laure Zwilling

Contemporary Spiritualities

Contemporary Spiritualities PDF Author: Stefania Palmisano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429672578
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Contemporary alternative spirituality, as studied by sociologists, is usually seen as a recent phenomenon dating from the 1960s and 1970s. However, when viewed from a longer-term perspective this form of religious expression is actually seen to reintroduce concepts that recur throughout Western cultural history. This book argues, therefore, that spirituality in the 21st Century actually shares many of the same characteristics as Classical, Mediaeval, Renaissance and Modern spiritualities. It is neither entirely new, nor is it clearly alternative to more established religions. The book is divided into two parts. The first sets out the context in which contemporary alternative spirituality has formed, charting its development as an academic term and a social phenomenon. The second part looks at how these two elements have developed in countries that are historically Catholic, focussing on specific examples in contemporary Italy: spiritualities based on the sacralisation of nature; those concerned with health and wellbeing; and those which are fascinated by mystery.Catholic majority countries are particularly interesting in this instance, as the Catholic Church has a unique cultural hegemony with which to compare alternative spiritual practices. It concludes that spirituality, if framed in a longer historical perspective, is a way of acting and seeing the world which was built, and continues to be built upon complex relations with various contradictory sources of authority, such as religion, magic thinking, secularism, rationalism, various spheres of lay culture. This is a bold take on the spirituality milieu and as such will be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies working on the sociology of religion, contemporary spirituality and the rise of the "spiritual but not religious".

Is God Back?

Is God Back? PDF Author: Titus Hjelm
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472528409
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Is God Back? Reconsidering the New Visibility of Religion examines the shifting boundary between religion and the public sphere in Europe and the Middle East. Asking what the 'new visibility of religion' means and challenging simplistic notions of living in a 'post-secular' age, the chapters explore how religion is contested and renegotiated in the public sphere – or rather, in different publics – and the effects of these struggles on society, state and religion itself. Whereas religion arguably never went away in the USA, the re-emergence of public religion is a European phenomenon. Is God Back? provides timely case studies from Europe, as well as extending to the Middle East, where fledgling democracies are struggling to create models of governance that stem from the European secular model, but which need to be able to accommodate a much more public form of religiosity. Discussions include the new visibility of neo-Pagan and Native Faith groups in Europe, Evangelical Christians and Church teaching on sexuality in the UK, and Islamic social Movements in the Arab world. Drawing from empirical and theoretical research on religion and national identity, religion and media, church-state relationships, and religion and welfare, Is God Back? is a rich source for students and scholars interested in the changing face of public religion in the modern world, including those studying the sociology of religion, social policy, and theology.