Religion Today

Religion Today PDF Author: Ross Aden
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538183390
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Religion Today introduces students to key concepts in religious studies through a compelling problem-solving framework. Each chapter opens with a contemporary case study that helps students engage in current religious issues, explore possible solutions to difficult religious problems today, and learn key themes and concepts in religious studies. To enhance student learning, a free Student Study Guide is available for download from Rowman & Littlefield. The Study Guide features chapter summaries, definition quizzes for students to test themselves on key terms, and possible learning activities.

Religion Today

Religion Today PDF Author: Ross Aden
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538183390
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religion Today introduces students to key concepts in religious studies through a compelling problem-solving framework. Each chapter opens with a contemporary case study that helps students engage in current religious issues, explore possible solutions to difficult religious problems today, and learn key themes and concepts in religious studies. To enhance student learning, a free Student Study Guide is available for download from Rowman & Littlefield. The Study Guide features chapter summaries, definition quizzes for students to test themselves on key terms, and possible learning activities.

Religion in Today's World

Religion in Today's World PDF Author: Melissa M. Wilcox
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317796640
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
Religion is a major force in contemporary society. It is also one of the least understood social and political influences on individuals and communities. In this innovative collection of original essays and classic readings, experts explore the significance of contemporary religiosity: as a source of meaning and motivation, how it unites and divides us, and how it is used politically and culturally. Readers will be introduced to the broad debates in ways that will equip them to analyze, discuss, and make their own judgments about religion and society. This book should be read by anyone interested in understanding religion as a central source of meaning and politics, and is ideally suited for undergraduate teaching on religion and social issues and from a global perspective.

For God's Sake

For God's Sake PDF Author: Antony Loewenstein
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers Aus.
ISBN: 1743289138
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Four Australian thinkers come together to ask and answer the big questions, such as: What is the nature of the universe? Doesn't religion cause most of the conflict in the world? and Where do we find hope? We are introduced to the detail of different belief systems - Judaism, Christianity, Islam - and to the argument that atheism, like organised religion, has its own compelling logic. And we gain insight into the life events that led each author to their current position. Jane Caro flirted briefly with spiritual belief, inspired by 19th century literary heroines such as Elizabeth Gaskell and the Brontë sisters. Antony Lowenstein is proudly culturally, yet unconventionally, Jewish. Simon Smart is firmly and resolutely a Christian, but one who has had some of his most profound spiritual moments while surfing. Rachel Woodlock grew up in the alternative embrace of Baha'i belief but became entranced by its older parent religion, Islam. Provocative, informative and passionately argued, For God's Sake encourages us to accept religious differences but to also challenge more vigorously the beliefs that create discord.

The Encyclopedia of World Religions

The Encyclopedia of World Religions PDF Author: Robert S. Ellwood
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438110383
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
Contains nearly 600 brief entries on the world's religious traditions.

Religion's Sudden Decline

Religion's Sudden Decline PDF Author: Ronald Inglehart
Publisher:
ISBN: 0197547044
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Mass attachment to religion is rapidly declining in most of the world; Why, and What comes next?The world is becoming less religious. Since 2007, there has been a pervasive decline in religious belief and most of the world's people now say that God is less important in their lives than they said He was in the quarter century before 2007. The American public showed the most dramatic shift of all. The United States, which for many years stood as a highly religious outlier among the world's high-income countries, now ranks as the 12th least religious country for which data are available. Many factors contributed to this dramatic worldwide shift, but as Inglehart shows, certain ones stand out. For centuries, virtually all major religions encouraged women to stay home and produce as many children as possible; and they sternly discouraged divorce, abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and any other form of sexual behavior not linked with reproduction. These norms were necessary for societies to survive when facing high infant mortality and low life expectancy: societies that didn't instill them tended to die out. Recent technological advances have greatly increased life expectancy and cut infant mortality to a tiny fraction of its historic levels, making these norms no longer necessary for societal survival. These norms require repressing strong natural urges, but, since they present traditional norms as absolute values, most religions strongly resist change. The resulting tension, together with the fact that rising existential security has made people less dependent on religion, opened the way for an exodus from religion. Utilizing a massive global data base, Inglehart analyzes the conditions under which religiosity collapses, and explores its implications for the future.

Public Religions in the Modern World

Public Religions in the Modern World PDF Author: José Casanova
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619020X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
In a sweeping reconsideration of the relation between religion and modernity, Jose Casanova surveys the roles that religions may play in the public sphere of modern societies. During the 1980s, religious traditions around the world, from Islamic fundamentalism to Catholic liberation theology, began making their way, often forcefully, out of the private sphere and into public life, causing the "deprivatization" of religion in contemporary life. No longer content merely to administer pastoral care to individual souls, religious institutions are challenging dominant political and social forces, raising questions about the claims of entities such as nations and markets to be "value neutral", and straining the traditional connections of private and public morality. Casanova looks at five cases from two religious traditions (Catholicism and Protestantism) in four countries (Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States). These cases challenge postwar—and indeed post-Enlightenment—assumptions about the role of modernity and secularization in religious movements throughout the world. This book expands our understanding of the increasingly significant role religion plays in the ongoing construction of the modern world.

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 universe next door

The universe next door PDF Author: James W. Sire
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1442974605
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description


Religions and Extraterrestrial Life

Religions and Extraterrestrial Life PDF Author: David A. Weintraub
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319050567
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
In the twenty-first century, the debate about life on other worlds is quickly changing from the realm of speculation to the domain of hard science. Within a few years, as a consequence of the rapid discovery by astronomers of planets around other stars, astronomers very likely will have discovered clear evidence of life beyond the Earth. Such a discovery of extraterrestrial life will change everything. Knowing the answer as to whether humanity has company in the universe will trigger one of the greatest intellectual revolutions in history, not the least of which will be a challenge for at least some terrestrial religions. Which religions will handle the discovery of extraterrestrial life with ease and which will struggle to assimilate this new knowledge about our place in the universe? Some religions as currently practiced appear to only be viable on Earth. Other religions could be practiced on distant worlds but nevertheless identify both Earth as a place and humankind as a species of singular spiritual religious importance, while some religions could be practiced equally well anywhere in the universe by any sentient beings. Weintraub guides readers on an invigorating tour of the world’s most widely practiced religions. It reveals what, if anything, each religion has to say about the possibility that extraterrestrial life exists and how, or if, a particular religion would work on other planets in distant parts of the universe.

Varieties of Religion Today

Varieties of Religion Today PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674012530
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterpiece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place. Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.