Religion on the Edge

Religion on the Edge PDF Author: Courtney Bender
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199938644
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The thirteen essays in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the essays reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blindspots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. Religion on the Edge addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the U.S. or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? Religion on the Edge offers groundbreaking new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion. By challenging many of its long-standing empirical and analytic tendencies, the contributors to this volume show how their work informs and is informed by debates in other fields and the analytical purchase gained by bringing these many conversations together. Religion on the Edge will be a crucial resource for any scholar seeking to understand our post-modern, post-secular world.

Religion on the Edge

Religion on the Edge PDF Author: Courtney Bender
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199938644
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
The thirteen essays in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the essays reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blindspots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. Religion on the Edge addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the U.S. or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? Religion on the Edge offers groundbreaking new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion. By challenging many of its long-standing empirical and analytic tendencies, the contributors to this volume show how their work informs and is informed by debates in other fields and the analytical purchase gained by bringing these many conversations together. Religion on the Edge will be a crucial resource for any scholar seeking to understand our post-modern, post-secular world.

Returning from the Abyss

Returning from the Abyss PDF Author: Walter Brueggemann
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing Corp
ISBN: 1646982460
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The Pivotal Moments in the Old Testament series helps readers see Scripture with new eyes, highlighting short, key texts—pivotal moments—that shift our expectations and invite us to turn toward another reality transformed by God's purposes and action. The book of Jeremiah tells the story of a prophetic mission that seems doomed to fail. God instructs Jeremiah to call to account a people who refuse to turn from their unfaithfulness until it is too late, and they encounter destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Yet underlying the themes of warning and judgment is a steady refrain: God’s desire to draw God’s people back into covenant, even when things seem past the point of no return. What lessons can contemporary readers draw from the narrative of a stubborn people who cling to their exploitative ways and a God who, even so, relentlessly pursues them? In Returning from the Abyss, Walter Brueggemann explores the historical and literary context of the book of Jeremiah to illuminate the dual themes of Israel’s long walk into, and out of, the trauma and devastation of exile. Throughout, Brueggemann points out the role of the prophet in overturning a people’s illusory sense of security in unjust structures that are not of God and leading those same people toward the hope of restoration and return. He also highlights the persistent themes of empire, self-sufficiency, and withholding from neighbor that inform the narratives of both Israel and "American exceptionalism" and examines how the holiness of God is at work in untamed historical processes that point us toward a costly hope for a just economic and political future.

The Abyss Or Life Is Simple

The Abyss Or Life Is Simple PDF Author: Courtney Bender
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022682134X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"Min Kamp-or My Struggle in English-is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the year-by-year translation into English of the novels became something of a slow-gathering storm. Ambiguously figured as autobiographical by some, the six volumes present an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a Norwegian writer, an Everyman of sorts, one with the same name as the author. In its expansiveness, textures, and anti-romanticism, Knausgaard's is a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015 a small group of scholars, all admirers of Knausgaard's work, began meeting to discuss the peculiarly "religious" qualities of My Struggle and other writings. Some were interested in Knausgaard's attention to religious topics, his uses of religious histories, objects, and artworks, while others were curious about his capacity to engage various religious moods in ways that were not critical, suspicious, or celebratory. The group wanted to know, in part, what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, about themselves. The Abyss or Life is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor-a remarkable collection of interlocking essays on everything from ritual, beauty, writing, and morality to divine plans for the end of the world"--

The Best of Simple

The Best of Simple PDF Author: Langston Hughes
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466894865
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Langston Hughes's stories about Jesse B. Semple--first composed for a weekly column in the Chicago Defender and then collected in Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple Stakes a Claim--have been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of readers. In The Best of Simple, the author picked his favorites from these earlier volumes, stories that not only have proved popular but are now part of a great and growing literary tradition. Simple might be considered an Everyman for black Americans. Hughes himself wrote: "...these tales are about a great many people--although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, and several Cousin Minnies--or reasonable facsimiles thereof." As Arnold Rampersad has written, Simple is "one of the most memorable and winning characters in the annals of American literature, justly regarded as one of Hughes's most inspired creations."

A Little Life

A Little Life PDF Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804172706
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 833

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Negative Ecstasies

Negative Ecstasies PDF Author: Jeremy Biles
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823265218
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

Ecce Monstrum

Ecce Monstrum PDF Author: Jeremy Biles
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823227782
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a ferociously religioussensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. Ecce Monstrum investigates this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred.Bataille enacts a monstrousmode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists-a mode at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this mode through investigations of Bataille's sacrificialinterpretations of Kojve's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist Andr Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with hyperchristianity; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's religious sensibility

My Bright Abyss

My Bright Abyss PDF Author: Christian Wiman
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374216789
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming PDF Author: Rod Dreher
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455521906
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
The Little Way of Ruthie Leming follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie's funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations-Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting. As David Brooks poignantly described Dreher's journey homeward in a recent New York Times column, Dreher and his wife Julie "decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being part of a community."

Life on Mars

Life on Mars PDF Author: Tracy K. Smith
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 155597659X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 79

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Book Description
Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize * Poet Laureate of the United States * * A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * * A New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * New poetry by the award-winning poet Tracy K. Smith, whose "lyric brilliance and political impulses never falter" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What Would your life say if it could talk? —from "No Fly Zone" With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.