Author: John Torpey
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 081359054X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 118
Get Book Here
Book Description
How should we think about the “shape” of human history since the birth of cities, and where are we headed? Sociologist and historian John Torpey proposes that the “Axial Age” of the first millennium BCE, when some of the world’s major religious and intellectual developments first emerged, was only one of three such decisive periods that can be used to directly affect present social problems, from economic inequality to ecological destruction. Torpey’s argument advances the idea that there are in fact three “Axial Ages,” instead of one original Axial Age and several subsequent, smaller developments. Each of the three ages contributed decisively to how humanity lives, and the difficulties it faces. The earliest, or original, Axial Age was a moral one; the second was material, and revolved around the creation and use of physical objects; and the third is chiefly mental, and focused on the technological. While there are profound risks and challenges, Torpey shows how a worldview that combines the strengths of all three ages has the potential to usher in a period of exceptional human freedom and possibility.
Author: Robert N. Bellah
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067401
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 561
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book makes the bold claim that intellectual sophistication was born worldwide during the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter. A variety of utopian visions emerged and led to both reform and repression.
Author: Robert N. Bellah
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674252934
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 777
Get Book Here
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal
Author: Christopher Peet
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030144321
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book introduces readers to the concept of the Axial Age and its relevance for a world in crisis. Scholars have become increasingly interested in philosopher Karl Jaspers’ thesis that a spiritual revolution in consciousness during the first millennium BCE decisively shaped world history. Axial ideas of transcendence develop into ideologies for world religions and civilizations, in turn coalescing into a Eurasian world-system that spreads globally to become the foundation of our contemporary world. Alongside ideas and ideologies, the Axial Age also taught spiritual practices critically resisting the new scale of civilizational power: in small counter-cultural communities on the margins of society, they turn our conscious focus inward to transform ourselves and overcome the destructive potentials within human nature. Axial spiritualities offer humanity a practical wisdom, a profound psychology, and deep hope: to transform despair into resilience, helping us face with courage the ecological and political challenges confronting us today.
Author: Jenny Reddish
Publisher: Seshat Histories
ISBN: 9780996139564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520
Get Book Here
Book Description
Applying insights from a massive historical research project-Seshat: Global History Databank-this edited volume reveals that there was no single "Axial Age" in human history. Instead, it points to cross-cultural parallels in the co-evolution of egalitarian ideals and constraints on political authority with sociopolitical complexity. The first book-length publication to make use of Seshat's systematic approach to collecting information about the human past, Seshat History of the Axial Age expands the Axial Age debate beyond first-millennium BCE Eurasia. Fourteen chapters survey earlier and later periods as well as developments in regions previously neglected in Axial Age discussions. The conclusion? There was no identifiable Axial Age confined to a few Eurasian hotspots in the last millennium BCE. However, "axiality" as a cluster of traits emerged time and again whenever societies reached a certain threshold of scale and level of complexity. Co-editors Daniel Hoyer and Jenny Reddish paired some of the world's leading historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists with members of the Seshat team. Hoyer, Project Manager with Seshat, is a historian and social scientist specializing in cross-cultural historical analysis. Reddish, Seshat's Lead Editor, is an anthropologist working on the material correlates of cultural systems from societies around the world. She is based at the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna. Seshat: Global History Databank was founded in 2011 to bring together the most current and comprehensive knowledge about human history in one place, collecting what is known about the social and political organization of human societies to track how civilizations have evolved over time. Seshat History of the Axial Age is the first entry in the Seshat Histories series.
Author: J©đhann P©Łll © rnason
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004139559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 586
Get Book Here
Book Description
A collection of essays by social theorists, historical sociologists and area specialists in classical, biblical and Asian studies. The contributions deal with cultural transformations in major civilizational centres during the "Axial Age," the middle centuries of the last millennium BCE, and their long-term consequences.
Author: Baruch Halpern
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900419455X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Get Book Here
Book Description
Karl Jaspers dubbed the period, 800-400 BCE, the Axial Age. Axial it was, for out of it emerged the idea of Greek culture, with its influence on Roman and later empires. Jaspers’ Axial Age was the chrysalis of culturally-meaningful modernity. Trade expands intellectual horizons. The economic and political effects permeate such social domains as technology, language and worldview. In the last category, many issues take on an emotional freight – the birth of science, monotheism, philosophy, even theory itself. Cultural Contact and Appropriation in the Axial-Age Mediterranean World: A Periplos, explores adaptation, resistance and reciprocity in Axial-Age Mediterranean exchange (ca. 800-300 BCE). Some essayists expand on an international discussion about myth, to which even the Church Fathers contributed. Others explore questions of how vocabulary is reapplied, or how the alphabet is reapplied, in a new environment. Detailed cases ground participants’ capacity to illustrate both the variety of the disciplinary integuments in which we now speak, one with the other, across disciplines, and the sheer complexity of constructing a workable programme for true collaboration.
Author: Mark W. Muesse
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1451438613
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361
Get Book Here
Book Description
By setting traditions and thinkers such as Zoroaster, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle side by side, we are able to see more clearly the questions with which they struggled, their similarities and differences, and how their ideas have influenced religious thought down to our day.
Author: Stephen K. Sanderson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350047430
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book Here
Book Description
Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era.
Author: E. Halton
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
ISBN: 9781349494873
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 145
Get Book Here
Book Description
In 1873, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated a theory of 'the moral revolution' to characterize the historical shift from roughly 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, as part of a critical theory of history. This book brings light to the now eclipsed theory and offers new contexts and understandings of the phenomenon.
