Varieties of Religious Establishment

Varieties of Religious Establishment PDF Author: Lori G. Beaman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317002539
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Advocacy for religious freedom has become a global project while religion, and the management of religion, has become of increasing interest to scholars across a wider range of disciplines. Rather than adopting the common assumption that religious freedom is simply incompletely realized, the authors in this book suggest that the starting point for understanding religion in public life today should be religious establishment. In the hyper-globalized world of the politics of religious freedom today, a focus on establishments brings into view the cultural assumptions, cosmologies, anthropologies, and institutions which structure religion and religious diversity. Leading international scholars from a diverse range of disciplines explore how countries today live with religious difference and consider how considering establishments reveals the limitations of universal, multicultural, and interfaith models of religious freedom. Examining the various forms religion takes in Tunisia, Canada, Taiwan, South Africa, and the USA, amongst others, this book argues that legal protections for religious freedom can only be understood in a context of socially and culturally specific constraints.

Varieties of Religious Establishment

Varieties of Religious Establishment PDF Author: Lori G. Beaman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317002539
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Advocacy for religious freedom has become a global project while religion, and the management of religion, has become of increasing interest to scholars across a wider range of disciplines. Rather than adopting the common assumption that religious freedom is simply incompletely realized, the authors in this book suggest that the starting point for understanding religion in public life today should be religious establishment. In the hyper-globalized world of the politics of religious freedom today, a focus on establishments brings into view the cultural assumptions, cosmologies, anthropologies, and institutions which structure religion and religious diversity. Leading international scholars from a diverse range of disciplines explore how countries today live with religious difference and consider how considering establishments reveals the limitations of universal, multicultural, and interfaith models of religious freedom. Examining the various forms religion takes in Tunisia, Canada, Taiwan, South Africa, and the USA, amongst others, this book argues that legal protections for religious freedom can only be understood in a context of socially and culturally specific constraints.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience PDF Author: William James
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1877527467
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 824

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Book Description
Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

The Varieties of Religious Repression

The Varieties of Religious Repression PDF Author: Ani Sarkissian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019934809X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Religious repression--the non-violent suppression of civil and political rights--is a growing and global phenomenon. Though most often practiced in authoritarian countries, levels of religious repression nevertheless vary across a range of non-democratic regimes, including illiberal democracies and competitive authoritarian states. In The Varieties of Religious Repression, Ani Sarkissian argues that seemingly benign regulations and restrictions on religion are tools that non-democratic leaders use to repress independent civic activity, effectively maintaining their hold on power. Sarkissian examines the interaction of political competition and the structure of religious divisions in society, presenting a theory of why religious repression varies across non-democratic regimes. She also offers a new way of understanding the commonalties and differences of non-democratic regimes by focusing on the targets of religious repression. Drawing on quantitative data from more than one hundred authoritarian states, as well as case studies of sixteen countries from around the world, Sarkissian explores the varieties of repression that states impose on religious expression, association, and political activities, describing the obstacles these actions present for democratization, pluralism, and the development of an independent civil society.

Varieties of Religion Today

Varieties of Religion Today PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674012530
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterpiece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place. Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.

William James: Writings 1902-1910 (LOA #38)

William James: Writings 1902-1910 (LOA #38) PDF Author: William James
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 9780940450387
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1410

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Book Description
Philosopher and psychologist William James was the best known and most influential American thinker of his time. The five books and nineteen essays collected in this Library of America volume represent all his major work from 1902 until his death in 1910. Most were originally written as lectures addressed to general audiences as well as philosophers and were received with great enthusiasm. His writing is clear, energetic, and unpretentious, and is marked by the devotion to literary excellence he shared with his brother, Henry James. In these works William James champions the value of individual experience with an eloquence and enthusiasm that has placed him alongside Emerson and Whitman as a classic exponent of American democratic culture. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James explores “the very inner citadel of human life” by focusing on intensely religious individuals of different cultures and eras. With insight, compassion, and open-mindedness, he examines and assesses their beliefs, seeking to measure religion’s value by its contributions to individual human lives. In Pragmatism (1907) James suggests that the conflicting metaphysical positions of “tender-minded” rationalism and “tough-minded” empiricism be judged by examining their actual consequences. Philosophy, James argues, should free itself from unexamined principles and closed systems and confront reality with complete openness. In A Pluralistic Universe (1909) James rejects the concept of the absolute and calls on philosophers to respond to “the real concrete sensible flux of life.” Through his discussion of Kant, Hegel, Henri Bergson, and religion, James explores a universe viewed not as an abstract “block” but as a rich “manyness-in-oneness,” full of independent yet connected events. The Meaning of Truth (1909) is a polemical collection of essays asserting that ideas are made true not by inherent qualities but by events. James delights in intellectual combat, stating his positions with vigor while remaining open to opposing ideas. Some Problems of Philosophy (1910) was intended by James to serve both as a historical overview of metaphysics and as a systematic statement of his philosophical beliefs. Though unfinished at his death, it fully demonstrates the psychological insight and literary vividness James brought to philosophy. Among the essays included are the anti-imperialist “Address on the Philippine Question,” “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” a candid personal account of the 1906 California disaster, and “The Moral Equivalent of War,” a call for the redirection of martial energies to peaceful ends, as well as essays on Emerson, the role of university in intellectual life, and psychic research. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Varieties of Religious Experience ILLUSTRATED

The Varieties of Religious Experience ILLUSTRATED PDF Author: William James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James. It comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland between 1901 and 1902. The lectures concerned the psychological study of individual private religious experiences and mysticism, and used a range of examples to identify commonalities in religious experiences across traditions.Soon after its publication, Varieties entered the Western canon of psychology and philosophy and has remained in print for over a century.James later developed his philosophy of pragmatism. There are many overlapping ideas in Varieties and his 1907 book Pragmatism.[he book has 14 chapters covering twenty lectures and a postscript.Lecture I. Religion and Neurology.In this first lecture, James outlines the scope of his investigation. Neither a theologian nor a historian of religion, James states that he is a psychologist and therefore his lectures will concern the psychology of religious feelings, rather than the institutions of religion. This further limits his enquiry to religious phenomena that have been articulated and recorded by individuals, limiting his study to either modern writers or sources from history which have become classic texts. James then distinguishes between questions concerning something's origin and its value, insisting that his purpose is to understand the origin of religious experiences and not to pass judgement on their value. This means that if James finds some material or natural cause of religious experience in his study, this should not lead anyone to conclude that this undermines their religious or spiritual value.Lecture II. Circumscription of the Topic.In his circumscription of the topic, James outlines how he will define religion for the sake of the lectures. Religious institutions are found wanting in this regard since they are not primary but rather depend on the private religious feeling of individuals, especially those of the founders of such institutions. James thus defines the essence of religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine".[3] He then distinguishes religion from moral or philosophical systems such as Stoicism which also teach a particular way or living, arguing that religion is distinguished by the presence of a sentiment which gladly assents to it. Religion is thus that which combines a moral system with a particular positive sentiment.Lecture III. The Reality of the Unseen.James begins his third lecture by noting that all states of mind involve some kind of object but that religious experiences involve an object which cannot be sensibly perceived. This ability to be aware of insensible objects in the mind, such as being aware of a presence in the room, is an ability particular to human beings. These experiences are sometimes connected with religion but not always, and James insists that they are not at all unusual. For those who have had such experiences, they are irrefutable and no rational argument will dissuade someone of their reality, even if the subject cannot explain or answer for the experience themselves. However, James criticises the rationalistic and scientific approaches, which would question these experiences, as being rarely convincing in the sphere of religion: rational arguments about religion are compelling for someone only if they already believe the conclusion. This is just a fact of human psychology for James, not a value judgement: humans are more persuaded irrationally and emotionally than they are by reasons. James concludes his lecture by noting the different kinds of responses such experiences can elicit (joy and sorrow), the variation of which will occupy his following lectures.

William James and Phenomenology

William James and Phenomenology PDF Author: James M. Edie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description


The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience PDF Author: William James
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191627321
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
'By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.' The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is William James's classic survey of religious belief in its most personal, and often its most heterodox, aspects. Asking questions such as how we define evil to ourselves, the difference between a healthy and a divided mind, the value of saintly behaviour, and what animates and characterizes the mental landscape of sudden conversion, James's masterpiece stands at a unique moment in the relationship between belief and culture. Faith in institutional religion and dogmatic theology was fading away, and the search for an authentic religion rooted in personality and subjectivity was a project conducted as an urgent necessity. With psychological insight, philosophical rigour, and a determination not to jump to the conclusion that in tracing religion's mental causes we necessarily diminish its truth or value, in the Varieties James wrote a truly foundational text for modern belief. Matthew Bradley's wide-ranging new edition examines the ideas that continue to fuel modern debates on atheism and faith. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Religious Institutions As Partners in Community Based Development

Religious Institutions As Partners in Community Based Development PDF Author: David M. Scheie
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 0788142658
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
This program is based on the conviction that "churches flourish best when they reach beyond their own walls, and neighborhoods can benefit from the resources and leadership vested in local churches." It aims to: stimulate greater involvement of religious institutions in community revitalization, create new religious community partnerships, strengthen community ministries, and attract new sources of funding for such initiatives. 28 religious institutions and community based organizations received grants and technical assistance. This report presents evaluation findings from the first year of funded activity. Illustrated.

Ecologies of Faith in New York City

Ecologies of Faith in New York City PDF Author: Richard Cimino
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253006848
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Ecologies of Faith in New York City examines patterns of interreligious cooperation and conflict in New York City. It explores how representative congregations in this religiously diverse city interact with their surroundings by competing for members, seeking out niches, or cooperating via coalitions and neighborhood organizations. Based on in-depth research in New York's ethnically mixed and rapidly changing neighborhoods, the essays in the volume describe how religious institutions shape and are shaped by their environments, what new roles they have assumed, and how they relate to other religious groups in the community.