Encounters Between Secular & Sacred Knowledge

Encounters Between Secular & Sacred Knowledge PDF Author: Peter Rudge
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781922229519
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
A quick glance at this book will indicate that it deals with many areas of knowledge. There are thirty in all and they are presented in the first chapter in a purely secular form with which most potential readers will be familiar. There is no need for such people to go any further; they may well be content with a standard presentation of the respective subjects. But it is possible for inquiring minds to go further and seek the way in which those subjects are presented in sacred contexts. No doubt many people read the Bible but they may well be surprised when they look into Chapter 2 and see how many of these secular subjects emerge in the text of the Bible. Then there is a further way of perceiving the sacred connections of many of these subjects by looking back into their history and origins, as in Chapter 3. The obvious examples are those of astronomy and Galileo's conflict with the church; in the life sciences, Charles Darwin's evolution was in antagonism with traditional Christian beliefs about creation. Readers are advised to pick and choose whatever topics attract their interest and trace them through the first three chapters. The remainder of the book is an attempt to rethink and rephrase in modern terms the principle of St Thomas Aquinas that "theology is the queen of the sciences."

Encounters Between Secular & Sacred Knowledge

Encounters Between Secular & Sacred Knowledge PDF Author: Peter Rudge
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781922229519
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
A quick glance at this book will indicate that it deals with many areas of knowledge. There are thirty in all and they are presented in the first chapter in a purely secular form with which most potential readers will be familiar. There is no need for such people to go any further; they may well be content with a standard presentation of the respective subjects. But it is possible for inquiring minds to go further and seek the way in which those subjects are presented in sacred contexts. No doubt many people read the Bible but they may well be surprised when they look into Chapter 2 and see how many of these secular subjects emerge in the text of the Bible. Then there is a further way of perceiving the sacred connections of many of these subjects by looking back into their history and origins, as in Chapter 3. The obvious examples are those of astronomy and Galileo's conflict with the church; in the life sciences, Charles Darwin's evolution was in antagonism with traditional Christian beliefs about creation. Readers are advised to pick and choose whatever topics attract their interest and trace them through the first three chapters. The remainder of the book is an attempt to rethink and rephrase in modern terms the principle of St Thomas Aquinas that "theology is the queen of the sciences."

Between Sacred and Secular Knowledge

Between Sacred and Secular Knowledge PDF Author: Yanbi Hong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000471527
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines how different social forces, including state ideology and policies, religious culture and ethnic identities, and economic market forces, affect Muslim parents’ perceptions and attitudes toward public and religious education. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and a cognitive rationality framework, this book investigates ethnic minorities’ educational attainment and its shaping mechanisms. Instead of attributing the undereducation of ethnic minorities solely to structural factors such as economic constraints, cultural conflicts and state policies, this study focuses on the critical role of perceptions and expectations through which many structural factors function. The fieldwork in a predominantly Muslim village in northwest China reveals that public education and religious education are complementary in the daily pursuit of well-being. And the study further argues that the practical oriented logic of rural Muslims sheds light on the research of inequality in educational attainment. The book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students studying ethnic minority education in China. Those who are researching on Islam and Muslims’ identity, especially in a multiethnic society, may also find this research insightful and helpful.

More Perfect Unions

More Perfect Unions PDF Author: Rebecca L. Davis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674056256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
The American fixation with marriage, so prevalent in today's debates over marriage for same-sex couples, owes much of its intensity to a small group of reformers who introduced Americans to marriage counseling in the 1930s. Today, millions of couples seek help to save their marriages each year. Over the intervening decades, marriage counseling has powerfully promoted the idea that successful marriages are essential to both individuals' and the nation's well-being. Rebecca Davis reveals how couples and counselors transformed the ideal of the perfect marriage as they debated sexuality, childcare, mobility, wage earning, and autonomy, exposing both the fissures and aspirations of American society. From the economic dislocations of the Great Depression, to more recent debates over government-funded "Healthy Marriage" programs, counselors have responded to the shifting needs and goals of American couples. Tensions among personal fulfillment, career aims, religious identity, and socioeconomic status have coursed through the history of marriage and explain why the stakes in the institution are so fraught for the couples involved and for the communities to which they belong. Americans care deeply about marriages—their own and other people's—because they have made enormous investments of time, money, and emotion to improve their own relationships and because they believe that their personal decisions about whom to marry or whether to divorce extend far beyond themselves. This intriguing book tells the uniquely American story of a culture gripped with the hope that, with enough effort and the right guidance, more perfect marital unions are within our reach.

Imagining the Middle East

Imagining the Middle East PDF Author: Matthew F. Jacobs
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807869317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Get Book Here

Book Description
As its interests have become deeply tied to the Middle East, the United States has long sought to develop a usable understanding of the people, politics, and cultures of the region. In Imagining the Middle East, Matthew Jacobs illuminates how Americans' ideas and perspectives about the region have shaped, justified, and sustained U.S. cultural, economic, military, and political involvement there. Jacobs examines the ways in which an informal network of academic, business, government, and media specialists interpreted and shared their perceptions of the Middle East from the end of World War I through the late 1960s. During that period, Jacobs argues, members of this network imagined the Middle East as a region defined by certain common characteristics--religion, mass politics, underdevelopment, and an escalating Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict--and as a place that might be transformed through U.S. involvement. Thus, the ways in which specialists and policymakers imagined the Middle East of the past or present came to justify policies designed to create an imagined Middle East of the future. Jacobs demonstrates that an analysis of the intellectual roots of current politics and foreign policy is critical to comprehending the styles of U.S. engagement with the Middle East in a post-9/11 world.

Secular Music, Sacred Space

Secular Music, Sacred Space PDF Author: April Stace
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498542182
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Get Book Here

Book Description
Easter Sunday, 2009, was the Sunday heard ‘round the evangelical internet: NewSpring Church, the second-largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention and among the top one hundred largest churches in the US, had begun their service with the song “Highway to Hell” by hard rock band AC/DC. They had brazenly crossed the sacred/secular musical divide on the most important Sunday of the year, and commentary abounded on the value of such a step. Many were offended at the “desecration” of such a holy day, deriding Newspring as the “theater of the absurd.” Others cheered NewSpring’s engagement with “the culture” and suggested that music could be used to convert non-Christians. No mere debate over stylistic preferences, many expressed that foundational aspects of evangelical identity were at stake. While many books have been written about religious music that utilizes popular music styles (a.k.a. “contemporary Christian music”), there has yet to be a scholarly treatment of how and why popular, secular music is utilized by churches. This book addresses that lacuna by examining this emerging trend in evangelical and “emerging” churches in America. What is the motivation behind using music that seemingly has no connection to Christian theology, values, or themes—such as music by Katy Perry, AC/DC, or Van Halen—and what can we learn about post-denominational evangelical churches in America by uncovering these motives? In this book, April Stace uncovers several themes from an ethnographic study of these churches: the increasingly-porous boundary between the sacred and the secular, the importance placed on “authenticity” in contemporary American culture, how evangelicals are responding to what they perceive is an increasingly-secular society, the “turn to the subject” of contemporary culture, the desire to leave a space for expression of doubt in the worship service without fully authorizing that doubt, and the individualization of the construction of religious identity in the modern era.

The Sense of History: Secular and Sacred

The Sense of History: Secular and Sacred PDF Author: Martin Cyril D'Arcy
Publisher: Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description


Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony

Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony PDF Author: Marion Grau
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 056756150X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offers a progressive Christian approach to soteriology and missiology in a global, postcolonial context. This book proposes an integration of gospel and culture. It aims to steer a third course towards an integration of the knowledge and treasures, the losses and laments of Christianities forged in colonizing and colonized societies.

Empowering Visions

Empowering Visions PDF Author: Christiane Brosius
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843311348
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
Illustrated throughout with over 80 full colour images, Empowering Visions explores the role of images and mass media in Hindutva, the cultural-nationalist movement that moved to the forefront of politics in India in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The author investigates when, why and in what way the moving image, and videos in particular, came to play a central role in the process of self-representation and self-constitution of Hindu nationalist groups and organizations in the overlapping domains of politics, religion and economics.The videos analysed here have been included in massive public political spectacles such as election rallies and patriotic pilgrimages. They have also been employed for in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization of militant cadres for temporary, often violent, agitation. With the help of these media, different political and cultural-religious organizations, subsumed under the umbrella of Hindutva, have attempted to constitute notions of 'Indianness' as 'Hinduness', to challenge and provoke both the government in power and specific minority groups such as the Muslims in India. How this was done, who stood behind the making of the videos and how they were made up and distributed, are questions that lie at the heart of this study. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist movements, "Empowering Visions" argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audio-visual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.

Between the Sacred and the Worldly

Between the Sacred and the Worldly PDF Author: Nancy van Deusen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804780483
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
This groundbreaking work argues that the seminal concept of recogimiento functioned as a metaphor for the colonial relationship between Spain and Lima. Ubiquitous and flexible, recogimiento had three related meanings—two cultural and one institutional—that developed over a 200-year period in Renaissance Spain and the viceregal capital, Lima. Female and male religious conceptualized recogimiento as a mystical praxis that aspired toward "union" with God, and it was also articulated as a fundamental virtue of enclosure and quiescent conduct for women. As an institutional practice, recogimiento involved substantial numbers of women and girls living in convents, lay pious houses, schools, and institutions (called recogimientos) that admitted schoolgirls, prostitutes, women petitioning for divorce, and the spiritually devout. In a broader sense, practices of recogimiento both conformed to and transgressed imagined boundaries of the sacred and the worldly in colonial Lima. Recogimiento also reflected the process of transculturation, or the adaptation of particular cultural values to local contingencies. Through an analysis of more than 600 ecclesiastical litigation suits, and drawing on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, the author shows how recogimiento was experienced by a range of individuals: from viceroys and archbishops to female foodsellers, shop owners, and secluded mystics. She argues that by 1650 women representing different races and classes in Lima claimed recogimiento as integral to their public, familial, and internal identities. The social and cultural history of Lima between 1550 and 1713 illustrates the complexities of conjugal relations, sexuality, and social norms in the viceregal capital, demonstrates the inextricable link between sacred and secular realms in colonial society, and delineates the process of transculturation between Spain and Lima.

Secular Assemblages

Secular Assemblages PDF Author: Marek Sullivan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350123684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Âme (1649) to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and 'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.