Unruly Gods

Unruly Gods PDF Author: Meir Shahar
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824817244
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The first study in English to offer a systematic introduction to the Chinese pantheon of divinities. It challenges received wisdom about Chinese popular religion, which, until now, presented all Chinese deities as mere functionaries and bureaucrats. The essays in this volume eloquently document the existence of other metaphors that allowed Chinese gods to challenge the traditional power structures and traditional mores of Chinese society. The authors draw on a variety of disciplines and methodologies to throw light on various aspects of the Chinese supernatural. The gallery of gods and goddesses surveyed demonstrates that these deities did not reflect China's socio-political order but rather expressed and negotiated tensions within it. In addition to reflecting the existing order, Chinese gods shaped it, transformed it, and compensated for it, and, as such, their work offers fresh perspectives on the relations between divinity and society in China.

Unruly Gods

Unruly Gods PDF Author: Meir Shahar
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824817244
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book

Book Description
The first study in English to offer a systematic introduction to the Chinese pantheon of divinities. It challenges received wisdom about Chinese popular religion, which, until now, presented all Chinese deities as mere functionaries and bureaucrats. The essays in this volume eloquently document the existence of other metaphors that allowed Chinese gods to challenge the traditional power structures and traditional mores of Chinese society. The authors draw on a variety of disciplines and methodologies to throw light on various aspects of the Chinese supernatural. The gallery of gods and goddesses surveyed demonstrates that these deities did not reflect China's socio-political order but rather expressed and negotiated tensions within it. In addition to reflecting the existing order, Chinese gods shaped it, transformed it, and compensated for it, and, as such, their work offers fresh perspectives on the relations between divinity and society in China.

Unruly Gods

Unruly Gods PDF Author: Meir Shahar
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824865421
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The first study in English to offer a systematic introduction to the Chinese pantheon of divinities. It challenges received wisdom about Chinese popular religion, which, until now, presented all Chinese deities as mere functionaries and bureaucrats. The essays in this volume eloquently document the existence of other metaphors that allowed Chinese gods to challenge the traditional power structures and traditional mores of Chinese society. The authors draw on a variety of disciplines and methodologies to throw light on various aspects of the Chinese supernatural. The gallery of gods and goddesses surveyed demonstrates that these deities did not reflect China's socio-political order but rather expressed and negotiated tensions within it. In addition to reflecting the existing order, Chinese gods shaped it, transformed it, and compensated for it, and, as such, their work offers fresh perspectives on the relations between divinity and society in China.

God's Unruly Friends

God's Unruly Friends PDF Author: Ahmet T. Karamustafa
Publisher: ONEWorld
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Wandering dervishes formed a prominent feature of most Muslim communities and although social misfits, were revered by the public yet denounced by cultural elites. This survey of this type of piety, traces the history of the different dervish groups that roamed the lands in Asia as well as the Middle East and Southeast Europe.

Chosen by the Devil

Chosen by the Devil PDF Author: Kala Aster
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Book 2 of the Unruly Gods series When three gods escaped Olympus, they had no idea how much trouble would come from it. Daphne is more comfortable with research than magic. The youngest Fate guarding the Gates of Crossing came into her powers late and the only way she can compete with the others is through knowledge. Is it any wonder why she'd fall for the thoughtful and intellectual Hades? Too bad that retreating into her scrolls isn't helping to snuff out the desires raging inside her for the god. Hades is desperate to resist his new and unsettling feelings toward the quietest Fate, especially when they're thrown together on a journey to uncover new information. The bookish Fate is a glowing light in his otherwise dark existence, and he sees that there is more to the raven-haired beauty than she knows. He's determined to help her harness the full potential of her powers... though he's losing his heart to her in the process. When they learn that Zeus has declared the unruly gods and their accomplice Fates as enemies-with their punishment being death-the gods and Fates must band together to come up with a plan. Can Daphne and Hades survive the wrath of the most powerful god? Or will their love be extinguished before it even begins?

Unruly Saint

Unruly Saint PDF Author: D.L. Mayfield
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
ISBN: 1506473601
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In 1933, in the shadow of the Great Depression, Dorothy Day started the most prominent Catholic radical movement in United States history, the Catholic Worker Movement, a storied organization with a lasting legacy of truth and justice. Day's newspaper, houses of hospitality, and ministry of paying attention to the inequality of her world would eventually become world famous, just as she--a high-energy activist with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee cup in the other--would become a figure of promise for the poor. The ways in which Day and her fellow workers both found the love of God in and expressed it for their neighbors during a time of great social, political, economic, and spiritual upheaval would become a model of activism for decades to come. In Unruly Saint, activist, writer, and neighbor D. L. Mayfield brings a personal lens to Day's story. In exploring the founding of the Catholic Worker movement and newspaper by revisiting the early years of Day's life, Mayfield turns her attention to what it means to be a good neighbor today. Through a combination of biography, observations on the current American landscape, and theological reflection, this is at once an achingly relevant account and an encouraging blueprint for people of faith in tumultuous times. It will resonate with today's activists, social justice warriors, and those seeking to live in the service of others.

Doing Theology in the New Normal

Doing Theology in the New Normal PDF Author: Jione Havea
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334060648
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Responses to the recent pandemic have been driven by fear, with social distancing and locking down of communities and borders as the most effective tactics. Out of fear and strategies that separate and isolate, emerges what has been described as the “new normal” (which seems to mutate daily). Truly global in scope, with contributors from across the world, this collection revisits four old responses to crises – assure, protest, trick, amend – to explore if/how those might still be relevant and effective and/or how they might be mutated during and after a global pandemic. Together they paint a grounded, earthy, context-focused picture of what it means to do theology in the new normal.

The Self-Disclosure of God

The Self-Disclosure of God PDF Author: William C. Chittick
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791498964
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
The Self-Disclosure of God offers the most detailed presentation to date in any Western language of the basic teachings of Islam's greatest mystical philosopher and theologian. It represents a major step forward in making available to the Western reading public the enormous riches of Islamic teachings in the fields of cosmology, mystical philosophy, theology, and spirituality. The Self-Disclosure of God continues the author's investigations of the world view of Ibn al-ʿArabī, the greatest theoretician of Sufism and the "seal of the Muhammadan saints." The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the relation between God and the cosmos, the structure of the cosmos, and the nature of the human soul. A long introduction orients the reader and discusses a few of the difficulties faced by Ibn al-ʿArabī's interpreters. Like Chittick's earlier work, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, this book is based primarily on Ibn al-ʿArabī's monumental work, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah "The Meccan Openings." More than one hundred complete chapters and subsections are translated, not to mention shorter passages that help put the longer discussions in context. There are detailed indices of sources, Koranic verses and hadiths. The book's index of technical terminology will be an indispensable reference for all those wishing to delve more deeply into the use of language in Islamic thought in general and Sufism in particular.

A Human-Shaped God

A Human-Shaped God PDF Author: Charles Halton
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 1646982215
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
A Human-Shaped God approaches the humanlike accounts of God in the Old Testament as the starting places for theology and uses them to build a picture of the divine. This understanding of God is then brought into conversation with traditional conceptions that depict God as a being who knows everything that happens, is at every place at the same time, is constant and unchanging, and does not ultimately have material form. But instead of pitting the Old Testament's humanlike view of God against traditional theology and assuming that only one of these understandings is correct, A Human-Shaped God posits that theologians should embrace both of these constructions simultaneously. This is a new way of theological inquiry that embraces both the humanlike characteristics of God and the transcendence of God in traditional theology. By seeing and understanding the humanlike depictions of God in the Old Testament and by using the rich language of traditional theology together in tandem, the reader acquires a much deeper and meaningful understanding of God.

Kuan-yin

Kuan-yin PDF Author: Chün-fang Yü
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231502753
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
By far one of the most important objects of worship in the Buddhist traditions, the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara is regarded as the embodiment of compassion. He has been widely revered throughout the Buddhist countries of Asia since the early centuries of the Common Era. While he was closely identified with the royalty in South and Southeast Asia, and the Tibetans continue to this day to view the Dalai Lamas as his incarnations, in China he became a she—Kuan-yin, the "Goddess of Mercy"—and has a very different history. The causes and processes of this metamorphosis have perplexed Buddhist scholars for centuries. In this groundbreaking, comprehensive study, Chün-fang Yü discusses this dramatic transformation of the (male) Indian bodhisattva Avalokitesvara into the (female) Chinese Kuan-yin—from a relatively minor figure in the Buddha's retinue to a universal savior and one of the most popular deities in Chinese religion. Focusing on the various media through which the feminine Kuan-yin became constructed and domesticated in China, Yü thoroughly examines Buddhist scriptures, miracle stories, pilgrimages, popular literature, and monastic and local gazetteers—as well as the changing iconography reflected in Kuan-yin's images and artistic representations—to determine the role this material played in this amazing transformation. The book eloquently depicts the domestication of Kuan-yin as a case study of the indigenization of Buddhism in China and illuminates the ways this beloved deity has affected the lives of all Chinese people down the ages.

Religious Violence Today [2 volumes]

Religious Violence Today [2 volumes] PDF Author: Michael Jerryson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 630

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Book Description
Through sections containing overview essays and reference entries related to particular religions, this resource explores the rise of religious violence, hate crime, and persecution around the world. Religious violence and persecution have been growing steadily both within the United States and around the world. Drawing on the expertise of a wide range of scholars, this current and comprehensive reference helps readers understand the persecution of members of particular faiths as well as violence committed by members of those faiths. In doing so, it promotes a greater understanding of the role of religion in global politics, domestic and international terrorism, and religious bigotry. The book contains sections on particular religious traditions from around the world. Each section begins with an overview essay surveying violence related to that particular religion, whether committed by or against members of that faith. Reference entries in each section then provide objective, fundamental information about particular topics related to violence and the religion discussed. The entries provide cross-references and suggestions for further reading, and the work closes with a bibliography of resources for further study.