Who Owns Religion?

Who Owns Religion? PDF Author: Laurie L. Patton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022667603X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
Who Owns Religion? focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves. Taking the reader through several compelling case studies, Patton identifies two trends of the ’80s and ’90s that fueled that rise: the growth of multicultural identity politics, which enabled a form of volatile public debate she terms “eruptive public space,” and the advent of the internet, which offered new ways for religious groups to read scholarship and respond publicly. These controversies, she shows, were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western scholarship to interpret religions at all. Patton’s book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Scholars of religion, she argues, have multiple masters and must move between them while writing histories and speaking about realities that not everyone may be interested in hearing.

Who Owns Religion?

Who Owns Religion? PDF Author: Laurie L. Patton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022667598X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
Who Owns Religion? focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves. Taking the reader through several compelling case studies, Patton identifies two trends of the ’80s and ’90s that fueled that rise: the growth of multicultural identity politics, which enabled a form of volatile public debate she terms “eruptive public space,” and the advent of the internet, which offered new ways for religious groups to read scholarship and respond publicly. These controversies, she shows, were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western scholarship to interpret religions at all. Patton’s book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Scholars of religion, she argues, have multiple masters and must move between them while writing histories and speaking about realities that not everyone may be interested in hearing.

Create Your Own Religion

Create Your Own Religion PDF Author: Daniele Bolelli
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
ISBN: 1938875028
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
Create Your Own Religion is a call to arms--an open invitation to question all the values, beliefs, and worldviews that humanity has so far held as sacred in order to find the answers we need to the very practical problems facing us. Writer, philosopher, and professor of comparative religion, Daniele Bolelli, leads the reader through three thousand years of mythology, misogyny, misinformation, and the flat-out lies about "revealed truth" that continue to muddle our ability to live a peaceful life, free of guilt and shame and the ultimate fear of death. "Our worldviews are in desperate need of some housecleaning," says Bolelli. "We enter the 21st century still carrying on our backs the prejudices and ways of thinking of countless past generations. What worked for them may or may not still be of use, so it is our job to make sure to save the tools that can help us and let go of the dead weight."

Who Owns Religion?

Who Owns Religion? PDF Author: Laurie L. Patton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022667603X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
Who Owns Religion? focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves. Taking the reader through several compelling case studies, Patton identifies two trends of the ’80s and ’90s that fueled that rise: the growth of multicultural identity politics, which enabled a form of volatile public debate she terms “eruptive public space,” and the advent of the internet, which offered new ways for religious groups to read scholarship and respond publicly. These controversies, she shows, were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western scholarship to interpret religions at all. Patton’s book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Scholars of religion, she argues, have multiple masters and must move between them while writing histories and speaking about realities that not everyone may be interested in hearing.

How to Start Your Own Religion

How to Start Your Own Religion PDF Author: Philip Athans
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1440538824
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
Yes, world domination and eternal adoration can be yours! "The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion." —Attributed to L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology Wouldn't you like to control countless worshippers with a single word? To call forth bountiful offerings of gold and silver? Wouldn't you love to make your acolytes bow in awe of your greatness? Starting a new religion can be fun and profitable. You'll laugh along with Philip Athans (founder, leader, and sole member of the Church of Phil), as he shows you how to: Gather the flock and keep 'em coming back for more Organize mysterious and complex rituals Interrogate (or just ridicule) the hell out of nonbelievers Recruit celebrity spokespeople, from Tom Cruise to Uma Thurman If you've ever felt the need to sacrifice on an altar beneath a blood-red moon, or just make Friday a holy day (three-day weekend, anyone?), this is the only sacred creed you need. Live long and prosper.

A Religion of One's Own

A Religion of One's Own PDF Author: Thomas Moore
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1592408842
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author and trusted spiritual adviser offers a follow-up to his classic Care of the Soul. Something essential is missing from modern life. Many who’ve turned away from religious institutions—and others who have lived wholly without religion—hunger for more than what contemporary secular life has to offer but are reluctant to follow organized religion’s strict and often inflexible path to spirituality. In A Religion of One’s Own, bestselling author and former monk Thomas Moore explores the myriad possibilities of creating a personal spiritual style, either inside or outside formal religion. Two decades ago, Moore’s Care of the Soul touched a chord with millions of readers yearning to integrate spirituality into their everyday lives. In A Religion of One’s Own, Moore expands on the topics he first explored shortly after leaving the monastery. He recounts the benefits of contemplative living that he learned during his twelve years as a monk but also the more original and imaginative spirituality that he later developed and embraced in his secular life. Here, he shares stories of others who are creating their own path: a former football player now on a spiritual quest with the Pueblo Indians, a friend who makes a meditative practice of floral arrangements, and a well-known classical pianist whose audiences sometimes describe having a mystical experience while listening to her performances. Moore weaves their experiences with the wisdom of philosophers, writers, and artists who have rejected materialism and infused their secular lives with transcendence. At a time when so many feel disillusioned with or detached from organized religion yet long for a way to move beyond an exclusively materialistic, rational lifestyle, A Religion of One’s Own points the way to creating an amplified inner life and a world of greater purpose, meaning, and reflection.

Start Your Own Religion

Start Your Own Religion PDF Author: Timothy Leary
Publisher: Ronin Publishing
ISBN: 9781579511012
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
START YOUR OWN RELIGION embodies the Timothy Leary's core attraction—expansive religious (personal) freedom. Become the highest version of yourself! The purpose of life is religious discovery. return to the temple of God—your ow body. Get of out your mind and get high. Religious living is conscious here-and-now aliveness. He urges readers to drop out, turn on tune in. Drop out and detach from external social drams. Turn on with a sacrament that returns you on to your body. Tune in and be reborn. Leary's message thrilled the youth of the 1960s and it is still appealing today.

Imagining Religion

Imagining Religion PDF Author: Jonathan Z. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226763609
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review

Stealing My Religion

Stealing My Religion PDF Author: Liz Bucar
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674987039
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Liz Bucar navigates the thorny terrain of religious appropriation, from yoga classes to non-Muslims who signal allyship by donning hijabs. Exploring the ethics of alleged appropriations, Bucar argues that borrowing isn’t itself a problem, as long as we are invested in our enthusiasms—committed to understanding their roots and diverse meanings.

The Religion

The Religion PDF Author: Tim Willocks
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 1429934948
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 692

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is what we dream of: to be so swept away, so poleaxed by a book that the breath is sucked right out of us. Brace yourselves. May 1565. Suleiman the Magnificent, emperor of the Ottomans, has declared a jihad against the Knights of Saint John the Baptist. The largest armada of all time approaches the knights' Christian stronghold on the island of Malta. The Turks know the knights as the "Hounds of Hell." The knights call themselves "The Religion." In Messina, Sicily, a French countess, Carla La Penautier, seeks passage to Malta in a quest to find the son taken from her at his birth twelve years ago. The only man with the expertise and daring to help her is a Rabelaisian soldier of fortune, arms dealer, former janissary, and strapping Saxon adventurer by the name of Mattias Tannhauser. He agrees to accompany the lady to Malta, where, amid the most spectacular siege in military history, they must try to find the boy—whose name they do not know and whose face they have never seen—and pluck him from the jaws of Holy War. The Religion is the first book of the Tannhauser Trilogy, and from the first page of this epic account of the last great medieval conflict between East and West, it is clear we are in the hands of a master. Not since James Clavell has a novelist so powerfully and assuredly plunged readers headlong into another world and time. Anne Rice transformed the vampire novel. Stephen King reinvented horror. Now, in a spectacular tale of heroism, tragedy, and passion, Tim Willocks revivifies historical fiction.

Consuming Religion

Consuming Religion PDF Author: Kathryn Lofton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648209X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
Introduction: being consumed -- Practicing commodity. Binge religion: social life in extremity ; The spirit in the cubicle: a religious history of the American office -- Revising ritual. Ritualism revived: from scientia ritus to consumer rites ; Purifying America: rites of salvation in the soap campaign -- Imagining celebrity. Sacrificing Britney: celebrity and religion in America ; The celebrification of religion in the age of infotainment -- Valuing family. Religion and the authority in American parenting ; Kardashian nation: work in America's klan ; Rethinking corporate freedom -- Corporation as sect. On the origins of corporate culture ; Do not tamper with the clues: notes on Goldman Sachs -- Conclusion: family matters