Author: David Morgan
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Common views of religion typically focus on the beliefs and meanings derived from revealed scriptures, ideas, and doctrines. David Morgan has led the way in radically broadening that framework to encompass the understanding that religions are fundamentally embodied, material forms of practice. This concise primer shows readers how to study what has come to be termed material religion—the ways religious meaning is enacted in the material world. Material religion includes the things people wear, eat, sing, touch, look at, create, and avoid. It also encompasses the places where religion and the social realities of everyday life, including gender, class, and race, intersect in physical ways. This interdisciplinary approach brings religious studies into conversation with art history, anthropology, and other fields. In the book, Morgan lays out a range of theories, terms, and concepts and shows how they work together to center materiality in the study of religion. Integrating carefully curated visual evidence, Morgan then applies these ideas and methods to case studies across a variety of religious traditions, modeling step-by-step analysis and emphasizing the importance of historical context. The Thing about Religion will be an essential tool for experts and students alike. Two free, downloadable course syllabi created by the author are available online.
Author: Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030957799
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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Book Description
In Why Do Religious Forms Matter?, Pooyan Tamimi Arab reflects on the Early Modern roots and contemporary relevance of a materialist perspective on the politics of religious diversity. Taking as a starting point the insight that religions manifest in myriad sensible forms—in architecture, in images, in the use of objects in rituals, and in distinctive ways of speaking—Tamimi Arab traces to Spinoza the material-religion approach prevalent in anthropology and religious studies. It is in Locke’s political philosophy, however, that forms are tied to toleration—understood as a neutrally applied civil right—which Tamimi Arab discusses through contemporary case studies of mosque construction, amplified calls to prayer, and the right to ritual slaughter. Going beyond the Enlightenment criticism and toleration of religions, the book concludes with an inclusive reading of Rawls’s ideal of public reason, which assumes forms of discourse—religious and non-religious—to always be several. Religious forms thus turn out to be indispensable to liberal democracy itself.
Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469692
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.
Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986911
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 889
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Book Description
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
Author: Allen D. Hertzke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199930899
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Based on a symposium held in Istanbul, Turkey.
Author: James W. Watts
Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK)
ISBN: 9781781797693
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Religious and secular communities ritualize some books in one, two, or three dimensions. They ritualize the dimension of semantic interpretation through teaching, preaching, and scholarly commentary. This dimension receives almost all the attention of academic scholars. Communities also ritualize a text's expressive dimension through public reading, recitation, and song, and also by reproducing its contents in art, theatre and film. This dimension is receiving increasing scholarly attention, especially in religious studies and anthropology. A third textual dimension, the iconic dimension, gets ritualized by manipulating the physical text, decorating it, and displaying it. This dimension has received almost no academic attention, yet features prominently in the most common news stories about books, whether about e-books, academic libraries, rare manuscript discoveries, or scripture desecrations. By calling attention to the iconic dimension of books, James Watts argues that we can better understand how physical books mediate social value and power within and between religious communities, nations, academic disciplines, and societies both ancient and modern.How and Why Books Matter will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in books, reading, literacy, scriptures, e-books, publishing, and the future of the book. It also addresses scholarship in religion, cultural studies, literacy studies, biblical studies, book history, anthropology, literary studies, and intellectual history.
Author: Mary Shanahan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131714869X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
In the current climate, and in an age of increasing hostility towards religion and the study of religion, religious education is a much-debated area. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of contributors from the USA, Britain and Ireland, and Australia, representing a variety of religious perspectives, Does Religious Education Matter? provocatively demonstrates that it is vital that religious education is presented as it ’really’ is: a valuable and rich resource that, when taught and engaged with appropriately, stimulates essential qualities for global and responsible citizenship: critical thinking, tolerance, respect, and mutual understanding.
Author: Paul Babie
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811524890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
This book draws together leaders in science, the health sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences to investigate the role of religion, its meaning and relevance, for their area of specialization. It provides a much-needed fresh perspective on the way in which religion operates within the modern, neo-liberal world. The book approaches the topic by way of a critical engagement between religion, broadly defined, and the individual disciplines in which each of the contributors is expert. Rather than simply taking the dogmatic position that religion offers something to every possible discipline, each of the chapters in this collection addresses the question: is there something that religion can offer to the discipline in question? That is the value of the book – it takes a truly critical stance on the place of religion in contemporary society.
Author: Associate Professor of American Religious History and Culture Gary Laderman
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 145873174X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
Widely praised in hardcover as a fascinating and important addition to religious and cultural studies, Sacred Matters reveals the remarkable ways that religious practices permeate American cultural life.In a country where references to God are as normal as proclaiming love of country, support for the military, or security for the nation's children, religion scholar Gary Laderman casts his eye over our deeply hidden spiritual landscape, questioning whether our conventional views even begin to capture the rich and strange diversity of religious life in America. A compelling read, Sacred Matters shows that genuinely religious practices and experiences can be found in the unlikeliest of places-in science laboratories and movie theaters, at the Super Bowl and Star Trek conventions, and in Americans' obsession with prescription drugs and pornography. When devoted fans make a pilgrimage to Graceland because of their love for Elvis, Laderman argues, their behavior doesn't just seem religious, it is religious-enacting a well-known ritual pattern toward saints in the history of Christianity. In a dramatic reframing of what is holy and secular, Sacred Matters makes a powerful and illuminating case that religion is everywhere-and that we have barely begun to reckon with its hold on our cultural life.
Author: Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030957803
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
In Why Do Religious Forms Matter?, Pooyan Tamimi Arab reflects on the Early Modern roots and contemporary relevance of a materialist perspective on the politics of religious diversity. Taking as a starting point the insight that religions manifest in myriad sensible forms-in architecture, in images, in the use of objects in rituals, and in distinctive ways of speaking-Tamimi Arab traces to Spinoza the material-religion approach prevalent in anthropology and religious studies. It is in Locke's political philosophy, however, that forms are tied to toleration-understood as a neutrally applied civil right-which Tamimi Arab discusses through contemporary case studies of mosque construction, amplified calls to prayer, and the right to ritual slaughter. Going beyond the Enlightenment criticism and toleration of religions, the book concludes with an inclusive reading of Rawls's ideal of public reason, which assumes forms of discourse-religious and non-religious-to always be several. Religious forms thus turn out to be indispensable to liberal democracy itself. Pooyan Tamimi Arab is Assistant Professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. He is a board member of the Amsterdam Spinoza Circle and member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
