The Temple-goers

The Temple-goers PDF Author: Aatish Taseer
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141933038
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A young man returns home to Delhi after several years abroad and resumes his place among the city's cosmopolitan elite - a world of fashion designers, media moguls and the idle rich. But everything around him has changed - new roads, new restaurants, new money, new crime - everything, that is, except for the people, who are the same, only maybe slightly worse. Then he meets Aakash, a charismatic and unpredictable young man on the make, who introduces him to the squalid underside of this sprawling city. Together they get drunk and work out, visit temples and a prostitute, and our narrator finds himself disturbingly attracted to Aakash's world. But when Aakash is arrested for murder, the two of them are suddenly swept up in a politically sensitive investigation that exposes the true corruption at the heart of this new and ruthless society. In a voice that is both cruel and tender, The Temple-goers brings to life the dazzling story of a city quietly burning with rage.

The Temple-goers

The Temple-goers PDF Author: Aatish Taseer
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141933038
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
A young man returns home to Delhi after several years abroad and resumes his place among the city's cosmopolitan elite - a world of fashion designers, media moguls and the idle rich. But everything around him has changed - new roads, new restaurants, new money, new crime - everything, that is, except for the people, who are the same, only maybe slightly worse. Then he meets Aakash, a charismatic and unpredictable young man on the make, who introduces him to the squalid underside of this sprawling city. Together they get drunk and work out, visit temples and a prostitute, and our narrator finds himself disturbingly attracted to Aakash's world. But when Aakash is arrested for murder, the two of them are suddenly swept up in a politically sensitive investigation that exposes the true corruption at the heart of this new and ruthless society. In a voice that is both cruel and tender, The Temple-goers brings to life the dazzling story of a city quietly burning with rage.

Buddhism after Mao

Buddhism after Mao PDF Author: Ji Zhe
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824880242
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
With well over 100 million adherents, Buddhism emerged from near-annihilation during the Cultural Revolution to become the largest religion in China today. Despite this, Buddhism’s rise has received relatively little scholarly attention. The present volume, with contributions by leading scholars in sociology, anthropology, political science, and religious studies, explores the evolution of Chinese Buddhism in the post-Mao period with a depth not seen before in a single study. Chapters critically analyze the effects of state policies on the evolution of Buddhist institutions; the challenge of rebuilding temples under the watchful eye of the state; efforts to rebuild monastic lineages and schools left broken in the aftermath of Mao’s rule; and the development of new lay Buddhist spaces, both at temple sites and online. Through its multidisciplinary perspectives, the book provides both an extensive overview of the social and political conditions under which Buddhism has grown as well as discussions of the individual projects of both monastic and lay entrepreneurs who dynamically and creatively carve out spaces for Buddhist growth in contemporary Chinese society. As a wide-ranging study that illuminates many facets of China’s Buddhist revival, Buddhism after Mao will be required reading for scholars of Chinese Buddhism and of Buddhism and modernity more broadly. Its detailed case studies examining the intersections among religion, state, and contemporary Chinese society will be welcomed by sociologists and anthropologists of China, political scientists focusing on the role of religion in state formation in Asian societies, and all those interested in the relationship between religion and social change.

Merit and a Sense of Home.

Merit and a Sense of Home. PDF Author: Nokchachom Cheskhun Stier
Publisher: Galda Verlag
ISBN: 3962033076
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book provides an insight on the Buddhist way of Thai temple life in German Diasporic context. It is based on input from several Thai Buddhist communities in Germany where the first-generation Thai transmigrants construct and form a sense of belonging by actively participating in temple life. It also explores the multifaceted role that Thai temples play in the lives of Thai transmigrants. Moreover, this book combines the anthropology of diasporas with Buddhism and identity.

Handbook of Religion and the Asian City

Handbook of Religion and the Asian City PDF Author: Peter van der Veer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520961080
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Handbook of Religion and the Asian City highlights the creative and innovative role of urban aspirations in Asian world cities. It does not assume that religion is of the past and that the urban is secular, but instead points out that urban politics and governance often manifest religious boundaries and sensibilities—in short, that public religion is politics. The essays in this book show how projects of secularism come up against projects and ambitions of a religious nature, a particular form of contestation that takes the city as its public arena. Questioning the limits of cities like Mumbai, Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Bangkok, and Shanghai, the authors assert that Asian cities have to be understood not as global models of futuristic city planning but as larger landscapes of spatial imagination that have specific cultural and political trajectories. Religion plays a central role in the politics of heritage that is emerging from the debris of modernist city planning. Megacities are arenas for the assertion of national and transnational aspirations as Asia confronts modernity. Cities are also sites of speculation, not only for those who invest in real estate but also for those who look for housing, employment, and salvation. In its potential and actual mobility, the sacred creates social space in which they all can meet. Handbook of Religion and the Asian City makes the comparative case that one cannot study the historical patterns of urbanization in Asia without paying attention to the role of religion in urban aspirations.

Shiva's Waterfront Temples

Shiva's Waterfront Temples PDF Author: Subhashini Kaligotla
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258941
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This handsomely illustrated volume explores the medieval Deccani temple complexes at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Pattadakal, with careful attention to their makers. The vibrant red sandstone temples of India's Deccan Plateau, such as the Pattadakal temple cluster, have attracted visitors since the eighth century or earlier. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the coronation place of the Chalukya dynasty, Pattadakal and its neighboring sites are of major historical importance. In Shiva's Waterfront Temples, Subhashini Kaligotla situates these buildings in the cosmopolitan milieu of Deccan India and considers how their makers and awestruck visitors would have seen them in their day. Kaligotla reconstructs how architects and builders approached the sites, including their use of ornamentation, responsiveness to courtly values such as pleasure and play, and ingenious juxtaposition of the first millennium's Nagara and Dravida aesthetics, a blend largely unique to Deccan plateau architecture. With over 130 color illustrations, this original book elucidates the Deccan's special place in the lexicon of medieval South Asian architecture.

From Comrades to Bodhisattvas

From Comrades to Bodhisattvas PDF Author: Gareth Fisher
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824847938
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
From Comrades to Bodhisattvas is the first book-length study of Han Chinese Buddhism in post-Mao China. Using an ethnographic approach supported by over a decade of field research, it provides an intimate portrait of lay Buddhist practitioners in Beijing who have recently embraced a religion that they were once socialized to see as harmful superstition. The book focuses on the lively discourses and debates that take place among these new practitioners in an unused courtyard of a Beijing temple. In this non-monastic space, which shrinks each year as the temple authorities expand their commercial activities, laypersons gather to distribute and exchange Buddhist-themed media, listen to the fiery sermons of charismatic preachers, and seek solutions to personal moral crises. Applying recent theories in the anthropology of morality and ethics, Gareth Fisher argues that the practitioners are attracted to the courtyard as a place where they can find ethical resources to re-make both themselves and others in a rapidly changing nation that they believe lacks a coherent moral direction. Spurred on by the lessons of the preachers and the stories in the media they share, these courtyard practitioners inventively combine moral elements from China’s recent Maoist past with Buddhist teachings on the workings of karma and the importance of universal compassion. Their aim is to articulate a moral antidote to what they see as blind obsession with consumption and wealth accumulation among twenty-first century Chinese. Often socially marginalized and sidelined from meaningful roles in China’s new economy, these former communist comrades look to their new moral roles along a bodhisattva path to rebuild their self-worth. Each chapter focuses on a central trope in the courtyard practitioners’ projects to form new moral identities. The Chinese government’s restrictions on the spread of religious teachings in urban areas curtail these practitioners' ability to insert their moral visions into an emerging public sphere. Nevertheless, they succeed, at least partially, Fisher argues, in creating their own discursive space characterized by a morality of concern for fellow humans and animals and a recognition of the organizational abilities and pedagogical talents of its members that are unacknowledged in society at large. Moreover, as the later chapters of the book discuss, by writing, copying, and distributing Buddhist-themed materials, the practitioners participate in creating a religious network of fellow-Buddhists across the country, thereby forming a counter-cultural community within contemporary urban China. Highly readable and full of engaging descriptions of the real lives of practicing lay Buddhists in contemporary China, From Comrades to Bodhisattvas will interest specialists in Chinese Buddhism, anthropologists of contemporary Asia, and all scholars interested in the relationship between religion and cultural change.

Becoming the Church

Becoming the Church PDF Author: Claude R. Alexander
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 1514005735
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Many today have given up on church. But God has not and does not give up on the church. The church is God's idea. And once we truly understand what God has in mind for his people, we can become who he wants us to be. Bishop Claude Alexander shows how the original Christians did not always understand what the church was supposed to be, but God worked in them anyway to become the community that he intended. After the resurrection of Jesus, his followers were transformed from disillusion and doubt to become a people of conviction and new life. The book of Acts describes the unfolding purposes, principles, and practices discovered by the apostles as they gave themselves to Christ's call. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we too can be transformed by Jesus and model to the world what it means to know him—as the church.

Spiritual Temples

Spiritual Temples PDF Author: Andrew Weeks
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595492126
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
It is appropriate for us Latterday Saints to desire spiritual experiences, if we want them for the right reasons. The Prophet Joseph Smith demonstrated this when, at the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, he prayed: "let thy house be filled with a mighty rushing wind, with thy glory." Joseph specifically asked for a heavenly experience. Of course, his faith had waxed strong in the Lord; but then again, shouldn't ours? So writes Andrew S. Weeks in Spiritual Temples: Heavenly Experiences in the Houses of God, a thought-provoking, inspiring book that is also studiously and reverently researched. Weeks writes about the history of temple worship and its restoration in the latter days, which sparked a stream of heavenly manifestations given to prophets and other faithful saints, fulfilling the Lord's words that temples are "consecrated" for "obtaining revelations." Present-day temple building, the future of temple work, and worthiness are also discussed. "I will appear unto my servants, and speak unto them with mine own voice," the Lord promised, "if my people will keep my commandments, and do not pollute this holy house." Spiritual Temples supports the premise that, whether through inspiration or direct manifestation, heavenly experiences are available to temple visitors today.

The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Temples

The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Temples PDF Author: Himanshu Prabha Ray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000785815
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 688

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Book Description
This handbook is a comprehensive study of the archaeology, social history and the cultural landscape of the Hindu temple. Perhaps the most recognizable of the material forms of Hinduism, temples are lived, dynamic spaces. They are significant sites for the creation of cultural heritage, both in the past and in the present. Drawing on historiographical surveys and in-depth case studies, the volume centres the material form of the Hindu temple as an entry point to study its many adaptations and transformations from the early centuries CE to the 20th century. It highlights the vibrancy and dynamism of the shrine in different locales and studies the active participation of the community for its establishment, maintenance and survival. The illustrated handbook takes a unique approach by focusing on the social base of the temple rather than its aesthetics or chronological linear development. It fills a significant gap in the study of Hinduism and will be an indispensable resource for scholars of archaeology, Hinduism, Indian history, religious studies, museum studies, South Asian history and Southeast Asian history. Chapters 1, 4 and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Letters to the Church

Letters to the Church PDF Author: Francis Chan
Publisher: David C Cook
ISBN: 0830775838
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
If God had it His way, what would your church look like? The New York Times bestselling author of Crazy Love challenges readers to be the Church as God intends. Do you want more from your church experience? Does the pure gospel put you in a place of awe? Are you ready to rethink church as you know it? Sit with Pastor Francis Chan and be reminded that you are a part of something much bigger than yourself, something sacred. In his most powerful book yet, Chan digs deep into biblical truth, reflects on his own failures and dreams, and shares stories of ordinary people God is using to change the world. Chan says, “We’ve strayed so far from what God calls Church. We all know it. We know that what we’re experiencing is radically different from the Church in Scripture. For decades, church leaders like myself have lost sight of the inherent mystery of the Church. We have trained people sitting in the pews to become addicted to lesser things. It’s time for that to change.” When Jesus returns, will He find us caring for His Bride—even more than for our own lives? Letters to the Church reminds us of how powerful, how glorious the Church once was … and calls us to once again be the Church God intended us to be.