After Progress

After Progress PDF Author: John Michael Greer
Publisher: New Society Publisher
ISBN: 1550925865
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The acclaimed climate futurist examines our unquestioning faith in progress, and its limits in the face of peak oil and climate change. Since the Industrial Age began, scientific and technological progress has been nothing short of miraculous. As a result, progress itself has become the new religion of the West. Our faith in it is so complete that many of us ignore the perils of peak oil and climate change, believing that our lab-coated high priests will surely bring forth yet another miracle to save us all. Unfortunately, progress as we've known it has been entirely dependent on the breakneck exploitation of half a billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels. As the age of this cheap, abundant energy draws to a close, progress is grinding to a halt. Unforgiving planetary limits are teaching us that our blind faith in endless exponential growth is a dangerous myth. After Progress addresses this looming paradigm shift, exploring the shape of history from a perspective on the far side of the coming crisis. With a startling examination of the role our belief systems play in our collective fate, John Michael Greer makes a persuasive argument for seeking new sources of meaning, value, and hope for the era ahead.

After Progress

After Progress PDF Author: John Michael Greer
Publisher: New Society Publisher
ISBN: 1550925865
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The acclaimed climate futurist examines our unquestioning faith in progress, and its limits in the face of peak oil and climate change. Since the Industrial Age began, scientific and technological progress has been nothing short of miraculous. As a result, progress itself has become the new religion of the West. Our faith in it is so complete that many of us ignore the perils of peak oil and climate change, believing that our lab-coated high priests will surely bring forth yet another miracle to save us all. Unfortunately, progress as we've known it has been entirely dependent on the breakneck exploitation of half a billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels. As the age of this cheap, abundant energy draws to a close, progress is grinding to a halt. Unforgiving planetary limits are teaching us that our blind faith in endless exponential growth is a dangerous myth. After Progress addresses this looming paradigm shift, exploring the shape of history from a perspective on the far side of the coming crisis. With a startling examination of the role our belief systems play in our collective fate, John Michael Greer makes a persuasive argument for seeking new sources of meaning, value, and hope for the era ahead.

Industrial Religion

Industrial Religion PDF Author: Susan I. Rotroff
Publisher: American School of Classical Studies at Athens
ISBN: 1621390152
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This study focuses on the "saucer pyres," a series of 70 deposits excavated in the residential and industrial areas bordering the Athenian Agora. Each consisted of a shallow pit, its floor sometimes marked by heavy burning, with a votive deposit of pottery and fragments of burnt bone, ash, and charcoal. Most of the pots were miniatures (including the eponymous saucers) but a few larger vessels were found, along with offerings associated with funerary cult. The deposits represent a largely Athenian phenomenon, with few parallels elsewhere. When first found in the 1930s, the deposits were interpreted as baby burials. Recent zooarchaeological analysis of the bones, however, reveals that they are the remains of sheep and goats, and that the deposits were sacrificial rather than funerary. The present study investigates the nature of those sacrifices, taking into account the contents of the pyres, their spatial distribution, and their relationship to buildings around the Agora and elsewhere. In light of a strong correlation between pyres and industrial activity, the author argues that the pyres document workplace rituals designed to protect artisans and their enterprises.

Religion and Advanced Industrial Society

Religion and Advanced Industrial Society PDF Author: James A. Beckford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429679149
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book, first published in 1989, demonstrates that sociologists have much to gain from a strengthening of the connections between general theories about the changing character of modern western societies and specific studies of religion. It combines an exegesis of sociological classics in the study of religion, and a history of their influence upon the subject’s development; a criticism of Talcott Parson’s attempt to synthesise classical viewpoints into a single theory of modernity; a discussion of post-Parsonian theories of religion’s declining importance; and an argument that some quasi-Marxist thinkers may offer fresh insights into the place of religion in capitalist societies.

The Industrial Revolution and British Society

The Industrial Revolution and British Society PDF Author: Patrick O'Brien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521437448
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This text is a wide-ranging survey of the principal economic and social aspects of the first Industrial Revolution.

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain PDF Author: Joseph Stubenrauch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191086134
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain argues that British evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries invented new methods of spreading the gospel, as well as new forms of personal religious practice, by exploiting the era's growth of urbanization, industrialization, consumer goods, technological discoveries, and increasingly mobile populations. While evangelical faith has often been portrayed standing in inherent tension with the transitions of modernity, Joseph Stubenrauch demonstrates that developments in technology, commerce, and infrastructure were fruitfully linked with theological shifts and changing modes of religious life. This volume analyzes a vibrant array of religious consumer and material culture produced during the first half of the nineteenth century. Mass print and cheap mass-produced goods--from tracts and ballad sheets to teapots and needlework mottoes--were harnessed to the evangelical project. By examining ephemera and decorations alongside the strategies of evangelical publishers and benevolent societies, Stubenrauch considers often overlooked sources in order to take the pulse of "vital" religion during an age of upheaval. He explores why and how evangelicals turned to the radical alterations of their era to bolster their faith and why "serious Christianity" flowered in an industrial age that has usually been deemed inhospitable to it.

Religion in the Age of Decline

Religion in the Age of Decline PDF Author: S. J. D. Green
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521521208
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The seemingly inexorable decline of Christianity in Britain has long fascinated historians, sociologists and churchmen. They have also been exasperated by their failure to understand its origins or chart its progress. Sceptical both of traditional accounts and of their more recent rejection by revisionist writers, S. J. D. Green concentrates scholarly attention for the first time on the 'social history of the chapel' in a characteristic industrial-urban setting. He demonstrates just why so many churches were built in late Victorian Britain, who built them, who went to them, and why. He evaluates the 'associational ideal' during its period of greatest success, and explains the causes of its decline. In this way, Religion in the Age of Decline offers a fresh interpretation of the extent and the implications of the decline of religion in twentieth-century Britain.

A History of Religion East and West

A History of Religion East and West PDF Author: Trevor Ling
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349152900
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
The religious traditions of Asia and Europe, the 'East' and 'West' of the title, are sometimes regarded as being in sharp contrast with each other, the one 'mystical', the other 'prophetic'. Whenever their religions are not so contrasted they are usually treated in isolation from each other: the religion of Israel, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. Dr Ling, however, stresses that there is considerable overlap and interpenetration between the two types and areas, and that it is important to see the historical inter-relation between these religions and to observe how, during given periods of history, there are parallel developments or significant divergences. He covers the period 1500 B.C. to the present time, providing an outline of the development of Asian and European religious traditions and institutions, and discussing the social and economic factors involved in the development of religous traditions, although he shows that such factors alone do not account for the religious life of man. Dr Ling goes on to interpret the contemporary significance of these religions and their potential for the future life of humanity. He suggests that the present stage of religious advance is characterised by open-endedness towards the future; not all religions exhibit this character, but none has yet exhausted the possibilities of development. This book is intended for use an an introduction to the study of religion. Although reference is made in the text to sources of further information, the book can be used without reference to them.

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain PDF Author: Joseph Stubenrauch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019878337X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
It demonstrates that developments in technology, commerce, and infrastructure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were closely linked to theological shifts and changing modes of religious life as British evangelicals developed new methods of spreading the gospel and new forms of personal religious practice.

Addicted to Lust

Addicted to Lust PDF Author: Samuel L. Perry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190844221
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Few cultural issues alarm conservative Protestant families and communities like the seemingly ubiquitous threat of pornography. Thanks to widespread access to the internet, conservative Protestants now face a reality in which every Christian man, woman, and child with a smartphone can access limitless pornography in their bathroom, at work, or at a friend's sleepover. Once confident of their victory over pornography in society at large, conservative Protestants now fear that "porn addiction" is consuming even the most faithful. How are they adjusting to this new reality? And what are its consequences in their lives? Drawing on over 130 interviews as well as numerous national surveys, Addicted to Lust shows that, compared to other Americans, pornography shapes the lives of conservative Protestants in ways that are uniquely damaging to their mental health, spiritual lives, and intimate relationships. Samuel L. Perry demonstrates how certain pervasive beliefs within the conservative Protestant subculture unwittingly create a context in which those who use pornography are often overwhelmed with shame and discouragement, sometimes to the point of depression or withdrawal from faith altogether. Conservative Protestant women who use pornography feel a "double shame" both for sinning sexually and for sinning "like a man," while conflicts over pornography in marriages are escalated by patterns of lying, hiding, blowing up, or threats of divorce. Addicted to Lust shines new light on one of the most talked-about problems facing conservative Christians.

The Spiritual-Industrial Complex

The Spiritual-Industrial Complex PDF Author: Jonathan P. Herzog
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195393465
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In his farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the perils of the military-industrial complex. But as Jonathan Herzog shows in this insightful history, Eisenhower had spent his presidency contributing to another, lesser known, Cold War collaboration: the spiritual-industrial complex.This fascinating volume shows that American leaders in the early Cold War years considered the conflict to be profoundly religious; they saw Communism not only as godless but also as a sinister form of religion. Fighting faith with faith, they deliberately used religious beliefs and institutions as part of the plan to defeat the Soviet enemy. Herzog offers an illuminating account of the resultant spiritual-industrial complex, chronicling the rhetoric, the programs, and the policies that became its hallmarks. He shows that well-known actions like the addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance were a small part of a much larger and relatively unexplored program that promoted religion nationwide. Herzog shows how these efforts played out in areas of American life both predictable and unexpected--from pulpits and presidential appeals to national faith drives, military training barracks, public school classrooms, and Hollywood epics. Millions of Americans were bombarded with the message that the religious could not be Communists, just a short step from the all-too-common conclusion that the irreligious could not be true Americans.Though the spiritual-industrial complex declined in the 1960s, its statutes, monuments, and sentiments live on as bulwarks against secularism and as reminders that the nation rests upon the groundwork of religious faith. They continue to serve as valuable allies for those defending the place of religion in American life.