Old Ideas, New Practices: When Religion Is for Relationships

Old Ideas, New Practices: When Religion Is for Relationships PDF Author: Bernard Lawrence Potvin
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725284669
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book is an upstream solution to the problems, issues, and questions young people struggle with downstream—alienation, boredom, and mistrust of religion. It includes over a hundred teaching strategies, tactics, logistics, and relationship builders that teachers in homes, schools, and churches can use. This book is a treasure chest of old ideas cast into new and proven teaching practices, each to be mined for the gem in it. Potvin’s interest in writing this book, however, is not to focus on what is broken and ineffective in Christian religious education (and a lot of education is broken and ineffective) but on what he has learned to be proven to be effective. He has drawn from his PhD studies, parenting with its perturbations and insights, and over forty years of teaching in universities, public, and faith-based schools. Jesus gave us our program of studies, with much to think about and practice what could work—to bring us to our true self, friendship with the Creator, love for others, and justice for all. And given the unprecedented trend towards home education and online teaching, designed for and led by parents, new practices based on old ideas may be just what the doctor ordered.

Old Ideas, New Practices: When Religion Is for Relationships

Old Ideas, New Practices: When Religion Is for Relationships PDF Author: Bernard Lawrence Potvin
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725284669
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is an upstream solution to the problems, issues, and questions young people struggle with downstream—alienation, boredom, and mistrust of religion. It includes over a hundred teaching strategies, tactics, logistics, and relationship builders that teachers in homes, schools, and churches can use. This book is a treasure chest of old ideas cast into new and proven teaching practices, each to be mined for the gem in it. Potvin’s interest in writing this book, however, is not to focus on what is broken and ineffective in Christian religious education (and a lot of education is broken and ineffective) but on what he has learned to be proven to be effective. He has drawn from his PhD studies, parenting with its perturbations and insights, and over forty years of teaching in universities, public, and faith-based schools. Jesus gave us our program of studies, with much to think about and practice what could work—to bring us to our true self, friendship with the Creator, love for others, and justice for all. And given the unprecedented trend towards home education and online teaching, designed for and led by parents, new practices based on old ideas may be just what the doctor ordered.

Why We Need Religion

Why We Need Religion PDF Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469692
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.

The Third Spaces of Digital Religion

The Third Spaces of Digital Religion PDF Author: Nabil Echchaibi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000841413
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
This exciting volume explores how religious meaning is generated and performed in our present digital media ecosystem. It uses the spatial metaphor of a third space to visualize the mobility of everyday religion and to explore the dynamic ways in which contemporary subjects imagine, produce, and navigate new religious and spiritual places. Comprised of seven original essays, this book provides a rigorous discussion of the complex intersections of the digital and religion, demonstrating how third spaces of religion stand out by virtue of their in-betweenness. They exist between private and public, between institution and individual, between authority and individual autonomy, between large media framings and individual "pro-sumption," and between local and translocal. Including probing analysis of how Muslim, Catholic, and Neo-Pagan identities are cultivated and developed online, case studies reflect on the creative outcomes of this condition of in-betweenness and the emergence of other places of religious and spiritual meaning. Blending theoretical analysis with grounded empirical research, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary religion, media and religion, sociology of religion, religion, and popular culture.

Introducing Anthropology of Religion

Introducing Anthropology of Religion PDF Author: Jack David Eller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134131925
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This lively and readable survey introduces students to key areas of the field and shows how to apply an anthropological approach to the study of contemporary world religions. Written by an experienced teacher, it covers all of the traditional topics of anthropology of religion, including definitions and theories, beliefs, symbols and language, and ritual and myth, and combines analytic and conceptual discussion with up-to-date ethnography and theory. Eller includes copious examples from religions around the world – both familiar and unfamiliar – and two mini-case studies in each chapter. He also explores classic and contemporary anthropological contributions to important but often overlooked issues such as violence and fundamentalism, morality, secularization, religion in America, and new religious movements. Introducing Anthropology of Religion demonstrates that anthropology is both relevant and essential for understanding the world we inhabit today.

Marriage, a History

Marriage, a History PDF Author: Stephanie Coontz
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Marriage
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Just when the clamor over "traditional" marriage couldn't get any louder, along comes this groundbreaking book to ask, "What tradition?" In Marriage, a History, historian and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz takes readers from the marital intrigues of ancient Babylon to the torments of Victorian lovers to demonstrate how recent the idea of marrying for love is - and how absurd it would have seemed to most of our ancestors. It was when marriage moved into the emotional sphere in the nineteenth century, she argues, that it suffered as an institution just as it began to thrive as a personal relationship. This enlightening and hugely entertaining book brings intelligence, perspective, and wit to today's marital debate.

Jesus > Religion

Jesus > Religion PDF Author: Jefferson Bethke
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 1400205409
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Abandon dead, dry, religious rule-keeping and embrace the promise of being truly known and deeply loved. Jefferson Bethke burst into the cultural conversation with a passionate, provocative poem titled "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus." The 4-minute video became an overnight sensation, with 7 million YouTube views in its first 48 hours (and 23+ million in a year). Bethke's message clearly struck a chord with believers and nonbelievers alike, triggering an avalanche of responses running the gamut from encouraged to enraged. In his New York Times bestseller Jesus > Religion, Bethke unpacks similar contrasts that he drew in the poem--highlighting the difference between teeth gritting and grace, law and love, performance and peace, despair, and hope. With refreshing candor, he delves into the motivation behind his message, beginning with the unvarnished tale of his own plunge from the pinnacle of a works-based, fake-smile existence that sapped his strength and led him down a path of destructive behavior. Along the way, Bethke gives you the tools you need to: Humbly and prayerfully open your mind Understand Jesus for all that he is View the church from a brand-new perspective Bethke is quick to acknowledge that he's not a pastor or theologian, but simply an ordinary, twenty-something who cried out for a life greater than the one for which he had settled. On this journey, Bethke discovered the real Jesus, who beckoned him with love beyond the props of false religion. Praise for Jesus > Religion: "Jeff's book will make you stop and listen to a voice in your heart that may have been drowned out by the noise of religion. Listen to that voice, then follow it--right to the feet of Jesus." --Bob Goff, author of New York Times bestsellers Love Does and Everybody, Always "The book you hold in your hands is Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz meets C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity meets Augustine's Confessions. This book is going to awaken an entire generation to Jesus and His grace." --Derwin L. Gray, lead pastor of Transformation Church, author of Limitless Life: Breaking Free from the Labels That Hold You Back

Religion in China Today

Religion in China Today PDF Author: Daniel L. Overmyer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521538237
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Table of contents

Popular Religion in Modern China

Popular Religion in Modern China PDF Author: Lan Li
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317077954
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Since the early 1980s, China's rapid economic growth and social transformation have greatly altered the role of popular religion in the country. This book makes a new contribution to the research on the phenomenon by examining the role which popular religion has played in modern Chinese politics. Popular Religion in Modern China uses Nuo as an example of how a popular religion has been directly incorporated into the Chinese Community Party's (CCP) policies and how the religion functions as a tool to maintain socio-political stability, safeguard national unification and raise the country's cultural 'soft power' in the eyes of the world. It provides rich new material on the interplay between contemporary Chinese politics, popular religion and economic development in a rapidly changing society.

Media, Religion and Culture

Media, Religion and Culture PDF Author: Jeffrey H. Mahan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317692357
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Religion has always been shaped by the media of its time, and today we live in a media culture that informs much of what we think and how we behave. Religious believers, communities and institutions use media as tools to communicate, but also as locations where they construct and express identity, practice religion, and build community. This lively book offers a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary field of religion, media, and culture. It explores: the religious content of media texts and the reception of those texts by religious consumers who appropriate and reuse them in their own religious work; how new forms of media provide fresh locations within which new religious voices emerge, people reimagine the "task" of religion, and develop and perform religious identity. Jeffrey H. Mahan includes case study examples from both established and new religions and each chapter is followed by insightful reflections from leading scholars in the field. Illustrated throughout, the book also contains a glossary of key terms, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading.

Christianity Is Not Religion

Christianity Is Not Religion PDF Author: James a. Fowler
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1929541244
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Jim Fowler explains that Christianity is not a book-religion, not a belief-system, not morality, not role-playing, not social problem-solving, not an ideological option, and not an ...ism, before concluding with the positive emphasis that Christianity IS Christ.