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Author: David Gelernter
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385522959
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations? Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right. Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment. Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism. If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square. Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement. A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.
Author: David Gelernter
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385522959
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175
Get Book
Book Description
What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations? Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right. Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment. Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism. If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square. Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement. A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.
Author: Paul Gifford
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780190095871
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
'Religion' can be used to mean all kinds of things, but a substantive definition---based on the premise of superhuman powers--can clarify much. It allows us to attempt to differentiate religion from culture, ethnicity, morality and politics. This definition of religion necessarily implies a perception of reality. Until recent centuries in the West, and in most cultures still, the ordinary, natural and immediate way of understanding and experiencing reality was in terms of otherworldly or spiritual forces. However, a cognitive shift has taken place through the rise of science and its subsequent technological application. This new consciousness has not disproved the existence of spiritual forces, but has led to the marginalization of the other-worldly, which even Western churches seem to accept. They persist, but increasingly as pressure groups promoting humanist values. Claims of 'American exceptionalism' in this regard are misleading. Obama's religion, Evangelical support for Trump, and the mega-church message of success in the capitalist system can all be cultural and political phenomena. This eclipsing of the other-worldly constitutes a watershed in human history, with profound consequences not just for religious institutions but for our entire world order.
Author: C. G. Jung
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691217998
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Extracted from Volumes 11 and 18. This selection of Jung's writings brings together a number of articles that are necessary for the understanding of his interpretation of the religious life and development of Western man: views that are central to his psychological thought.
Author: Ferenc Morton Szasz
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816522453
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
When Americans migrated west, they carried with them not only their hopes for better lives but their religious traditions as well. Yet the importance of religion in the forging of a western identity has seldom been examined. In this first historical overview of religion in the modern American West, Ferenc Szasz shows the important role that organized religion played in the shaping of the region from the late-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. He traces the major faiths over that time span, analyzes the distinctive response of western religious institutions to national events, and shows how western cities became homes to a variety of organized faiths that cast only faint shadows back east. While many historians have minimized the importance of religion for the region, Szasz maintains that it lies at the very heart of the western experience. From the 1890s to the 1920s, churches and synagogues created institutions such as schools and hospitals that shaped their local communities; during the Great Depression, the Latter-day Saints introduced their innovative social welfare system; and in later years, Pentecostal groups carried their traditions to the Pacific coast and Southern Baptists (among others) set out in earnest to evangelize the Far West. Beginning in the 1960s, the arrival of Asian faiths, the revitalization of evangelical Protestantism, the ferment of post-Vatican II Catholicism, the rediscovery of Native American spirituality, and the emergence of New Age sects combined to make western cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco among the most religiously pluralistic in the world. Examining the careers of key figures in western religion, from Rabbi William Friedman to Reverend Robert H. Schuller, Szasz balances specific and general trends to weave the story of religion into a wider social and cultural context. Religion in the Modern American West calls attention to an often overlooked facet of regional history and broadens our understanding of the American experience.
Author: Daniel Dubuisson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801873201
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
The Western Construction of Religion not only provides a critical assessment of the whole history of religionas it is understood in the West but offers better ways of constructing the study of this central part of human experience.
Author: Jens Zimmermann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199697752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
Jens Zimmermann suggests that the West can rearticulate its identity and renew its cultural purpose by recovering the humanistic ethos that originally shaped Western culture. He traces the religious roots of humanism, and combines humanism, religion and hermeneutic philosophy to re-imagine humanism for our current cultural and intellectual climate.
Author: J. Douglas Kenyon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591439914
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Reveals the thread that unites the spiritual paths that have opposed orthodox religion over the centuries and the challenge they provide to the status quo • Contains 40 essays by 18 key investigators of heresies and suppressed spiritual traditions, including Steven Sora, Ian Lawton, Jeff Nisbet, P.M.H. Atwater, John Chambers, and Vincent Bridges • Edited by Atlantis Rising publisher, J. Douglas Kenyon Following the model of his bestselling Forbidden History, J. Douglas Kenyon has assembled from his bi-monthly journal Atlantis Rising material that explores the hidden path of the religions banned by the orthodox Church--from the time before Christ when the foundations of Christianity were being laid to the tumultuous times of the Cathars and Templars and the Masons of the New World. Revealed in this investigation of the roots of Western faith are the intimate ties of ancient Egyptian religion to Christianity, the true identities of the three magi, the link forged by the Templars between early Christianity and the Masons, and how these hidden religious currents still influence the modern world. This book serves as a compelling introduction to the true history of the heretical religious traditions that played as vital a role in society as the established faiths that continuously tried to suppress them. Born in the same religious ferment that gave birth to Christianity, these spiritual paths survived in the “heresies” of the Middle Ages, and in the theories of the great Renaissance thinkers and their successors, such as Isaac Newton and Giordano Bruno. Brought to the New World by the Masons who inspired the American Revolution, the influence of these forbidden religions can be still found today in “The Star Spangled Banner” and in such Masonic symbols as the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill.
Author: Dr. Rashad Richey
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668498814
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Book Description
Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Globalization, Political Economics, grade: EP, , course: Doctor of Philosophy, language: English, abstract: The present paper investigates the effect of Western religion on governance, policies, and politics, within both the domestic and the global contexts. This question, however, leads into the need for deep ideological analysis. The paper thus defines the concept of Western religion, and then proceeds to show how Western religion is inseparable from Western civilization, including modern values which are often called secular but which, in fact, have ideological roots that can be traced to Western religion. Over the course of this analysis, an opposition emerges between Western religion on the one hand and secular progressivism on the other—the latter of which is both derived from and antagonistic toward Western religion. The contours of this ideological conflict and their implications are explored through the development of a comprehensive theoretical framework. The independent research of the present paper consists of an interview with a selected congressman. The interview seeks to delve into the congressman's views regarding Western religion and its effects on governance, policies, and politics. This data is analyzed using a qualitative method. Finally, the present paper analyzes and discusses the statements of the congressman in the interview in light of the previously developed theoretical framework. The main conclusion that is reached is that although the congressman is insightful in several respects, he seems to lack a general awareness of the nature of ideology, or the fact that secular progressivism is in ideological conflict with Western religion, even as the former cannot escape the influence of the latter. A key recommendation that emerges from this conclusion is that it is perhaps necessary for both politicians in particular and Americans in general to develop a deeper understanding of the nature of ideology, especially as this pertains to politics.
Author: Arvind-Pal S. Mandair
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231147244
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 537
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Book Description
Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair unsettles the politics of knowledge construction in which the category of "religion" continues to be central. Through a case study of Sikhism, he launches an extended critique of religion as a cultural universal. At the same time, he presents a portrait of how certain aspects of Sikh tradition were reinvented as "religion" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. India's imperial elite subtly recast Sikh tradition as a sui generis religion, which robbed its teachings of their political force. In turn, Sikhs began to define themselves as a "nation" and a "world religion" that was separate from, but parallel to, the rise of the Indian state and global Hinduism. Rather than investigate these processes in isolation from Europe, Mandair shifts the focus closer to the political history of ideas, thereby recovering part of Europe's repressed colonial memory. Mandair rethinks the intersection of religion and the secular in discourses such as history of religions, postcolonial theory, and recent continental philosophy. Though seemingly unconnected, these discourses are shown to be linked to a philosophy of "generalized translation" that emerged as a key conceptual matrix in the colonial encounter between India and the West. In this riveting study, Mandair demonstrates how this philosophy of translation continues to influence the repetitions of religion and identity politics in the lives of South Asians, and the way the academy, state, and media have analyzed such phenomena.
Author: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hinduism
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
In this book, author Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a philosopher and former President of India, describes leading ideas of Indian philosophy and religion. He traces the probable influence of Indian mysticism on Greek thought and Christian development, through Alexandrian Judaism, Christian Gnosticism, and Neo-Platonism. Radhakrishnan argues that Christianity arose out of an eastern background, became wedded to Graeco-Latin culture, and will find rebirth in a renewed alliance with this Eastern heritage--From publisher description.
