Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean

Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean PDF Author: Dionigi Albera
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253016908
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
“Will spark debate . . . and hopefully further research into points of contact between the monotheistic religions, and others.” —The Levantine Review While devotional practices are usually viewed as mechanisms for reinforcing religious boundaries, in the multicultural, multiconfessional world of the Eastern Mediterranean, shared shrines sustain intercommunal and interreligious contact among groups. Heterodox, marginal, and largely ignored by central authorities, these practices persist despite aggressive, homogenizing nationalist movements. This volume challenges much of the received wisdom concerning the three major monotheistic religions and the “clash of civilizations,” as contributors examine intertwined religious traditions along the shores of the Near East from North Africa to the Balkans.

Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean

Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean PDF Author: Dionigi Albera
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253016908
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
“Will spark debate . . . and hopefully further research into points of contact between the monotheistic religions, and others.” —The Levantine Review While devotional practices are usually viewed as mechanisms for reinforcing religious boundaries, in the multicultural, multiconfessional world of the Eastern Mediterranean, shared shrines sustain intercommunal and interreligious contact among groups. Heterodox, marginal, and largely ignored by central authorities, these practices persist despite aggressive, homogenizing nationalist movements. This volume challenges much of the received wisdom concerning the three major monotheistic religions and the “clash of civilizations,” as contributors examine intertwined religious traditions along the shores of the Near East from North Africa to the Balkans.

Shared Sacred Sites

Shared Sacred Sites PDF Author: Karen Barkey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692123379
Category : Jerusalem
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
There could be no better illustration of coexistence than the extensive history of religious sites shared by members of different beliefs and backgrounds. Chronicles of the three Abrahamic religions are full of examples of cohabitation, hospitality, and tolerance despite a world torn apart by cultural, ethnic, and spiritual struggles. Maps of the Mediterranean and Near East are strewn with shrines that have long been the sites of convergence for prayers, wishes, and contemplation, yet their origins of sharing differ. Often local populations perceive a benefit of another group's sacred space, either recognized by open-minded leaders who preach unity or by members of different religious groups who share said space for pragmatic reasons. Our contemporary world contains numerous cases of such crossings, many of which are documented in this catalogue. Shared Sacred Sites is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, which was organized as a contemporary "pilgrimage" in Manhattan through three venues. At The New York Public Library, the exhibition shares the history of the Holy Land with a look at Jerusalem as both holy city and center of pilgrimage for three faiths. The Morgan Library & Museum brings an altogether different aspect of the story of coexistence in a display of the celebrated Morgan Picture Bible produced in Paris around 1250, which offers the most exquisite visualizations of the events of the Old Testament. The Graduate Center of The City University of New York gathers contemporary examples compiled by an international team with various explorations and experiences in sanctuaries, presenting a medley of artifacts, contemporary art, multimedia, and photographs.

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism PDF Author: Gwynn Kessler
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119113970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 615

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Book Description
An innovative approach to the study of ten centuries of Jewish culture and history A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism explores the Jewish people, their communities, and various manifestations of their religious and cultural expressions from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Presenting a collection of 30 original essays written by noted scholars in the field, this companion provides an expansive examination of ancient Jewish life, identity, gender, sacred and domestic spaces, literature, language, and theological questions throughout late ancient Jewish history and historiography. Editors Gwynn Kessler and Naomi Koltun-Fromm situate the volume within Late Antiquity, enabling readers to rethink traditional chronological, geographic, and political boundaries. The Companion incorporates a broad methodology, drawing from social history, material history and culture, and literary studies to consider the diverse forms and facets of Jews and Judaism within multiple contexts of place, culture, and history. Divided into five parts, thematically-organized essays discuss topics including the spaces where Jews lived, worked, and worshiped, Jewish languages and literatures, ethnicities and identities, and questions about gender and the body central to Jewish culture and Judaism. Offering original scholarship and fresh insights on late ancient Jewish history and culture, this unique volume: Offers a one-volume exploration of “second temple,” “Greco-Roman,” and “rabbinic” periods and sources Explores Jewish life across most of the geographic places where Jews or Judaeans were known to have lived Features original maps of areas cited in every essay, including maps of Jewish settlement throughout Late Antiquity Includes an outline of major historical events, further readings, and full references A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: 3rd Century BCE - 7th Century CE is a valuable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, literature, and ethnic identity, as well as general readers with interest in Jewish history, world religions, Classics, and Late Antiquity.

Sharing the Sacra

Sharing the Sacra PDF Author: Glenn Bowman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454862
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
"Shared" sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chinese funerals in late imperial Beijing or the refashioning of memorial commemoration in the wake of the Vietnam war) and particular events (the visit of Pope John Paul II to shared shrines in Sri Lanka or the Al-Qaeda bombing of an ancient Jewish synagogue on the Island of Djerba in Tunisia), the volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the wider contexts within which social interactions take place and shows that tolerance and intercommunalism are simultaneously possible and perpetually under threat.

Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites

Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites PDF Author: Elazar Barkan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538065
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted—or not—by conflict, and the policy consequences. These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. Although religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of "religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of hatred and violence, while in other instances they remain noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress to peace and calm.

Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces

Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces PDF Author: Tsypylma Darieva
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785337831
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with religious conviviality. Based on fresh ethnographies in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Federation, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces

Profane Landscapes, Sacred Spaces PDF Author: Miroslav Bárta
Publisher: New Directions in Anthropological Archaeology
ISBN: 9781781794098
Category : Environmental archaeology
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Ever since Herodotus, it has been observed that Egypt - that is, ancient Egyptian civilisation - was a gift of the Nile. However, only recently have Egyptologists come to appreciate that Egypt was as much a gift of the desert as a gift of the water, at least as regards its very beginnings. To understand the civilisation that originally settled along the Nile Valley and in the Delta, we must study not only the remains of ancient monuments, excavated artefacts and reconstructed texts, but take proper account of the landscape, conditions and environment that shaped Egypt's culture, religion and ideology. This volume addresses various aspects of how the world was perceived in the minds of Egyptians, and how Egyptians subsequently reshaped their surrounding landscape in harmony with their view of geography and cosmological ideas. Profane landscape and sacred space thus blend into one multi-faceted concept.

Architecture of the Sacred

Architecture of the Sacred PDF Author: Bonna D. Wescoat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110737829X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality PDF Author: Vasudha Narayanan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118660080
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality provides a thoughtfully organized, inclusive, and vibrant project of the multiple ways in which religion and materiality intersect. The contributions explore the way that religion is shaped by, and has shaped, the material world, embedding beliefs, doctrines, and texts into social and cultural contexts of production, circulation, and consumption. The Companion not only contains scholarly essays but has an accompanying website to demonstrate the work of performers, architects, and expressive artists, ranging from musicians and dancers to religious practitioners. These examples offer specific illustrations of the interplay of religion and materiality in everyday life. The project is organized from a comparative perspective, highlighting examples and case studies from traditions originating in both East and West. To summarize, the volume: Brings together the leading figures, theories and ideas in the field in a systematic and comprehensive way Offers an interdisciplinary approach drawing together religious studies, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography, the cognitive sciences, ecology, and media studies Takes a comparative perspective, covering all the major faith traditions

Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe

Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe PDF Author: John Eade
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317080823
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Since the beginning of the anthropology of pilgrimage, scant attention has been paid to pilgrimage and pilgrim places in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. Seeking to address such a deficit, this book brings together scholars from central, eastern and south-eastern Europe to explore the crossing of borders in terms of the relationship between pilgrimage and politics, and the role which this plays in the process of both sacred and secular place-making. With contributions from a range of established and new academics, including anthropologists, historians and ethnologists, Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe presents a fascinating collection of case studies and discussions of religious, political and secular pilgrimage across the region.