The Thing about Religion

The Thing about Religion PDF Author: David Morgan
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

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.

The Thing about Religion

The Thing about Religion PDF Author: David Morgan
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

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.

Why We Need Religion

Why We Need Religion PDF Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469692
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

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.

Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not

Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not PDF Author: Robert N. McCauley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199341540
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
A comparison of the cognitive foundations of religion and science and an argument that religion is cognitively natural and that science is cognitively unnatural.

Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature

Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature PDF Author: Bron Taylor
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441122788
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1927

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, originally published in 2005, is a landmark work in the burgeoning field of religion and nature. It covers a vast and interdisciplinary range of material, from thinkers to religious traditions and beyond, with clarity and style. Widely praised by reviewers and the recipient of two reference work awards since its publication (see www.religionandnature.com/ern), this new, more affordable version is a must-have book for anyone interested in the manifold and fascinating links between religion and nature, in all their many senses.

Religion Explained

Religion Explained PDF Author: Pascal Boyer
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 046500461X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many of our questions about religion, says the internationally renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, were once mysteries, but they no longer are: we are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" and "Why is religion the way it is?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Boyer shows how one of the most fascinating aspects of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. And Man Creates God tells readers, for the first time, what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and how it originates. It is a beautifully written, very accessible book by an anthropologist who is highly respected on both sides of the Atlantic. As a scientific explanation for religious feeling, it is sure to arouse controversy.

Teaching about Religion in the Social Studies Classroom

Teaching about Religion in the Social Studies Classroom PDF Author: Charles C. Haynes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780879861131
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description


A Little History of Religion

A Little History of Religion PDF Author: Richard Holloway
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300222149
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
For curious readers young and old, a rich and colorful history of religion from humanity’s earliest days to our own contentious times In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Richard Holloway retells the entire history of religion—from the dawn of religious belief to the twenty-first century—with deepest respect and a keen commitment to accuracy. Writing for those with faith and those without, and especially for young readers, he encourages curiosity and tolerance, accentuates nuance and mystery, and calmly restores a sense of the value of faith. Ranging far beyond the major world religions of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Holloway also examines where religious belief comes from, the search for meaning throughout history, today’s fascinations with Scientology and creationism, religiously motivated violence, hostilities between religious people and secularists, and more. Holloway proves an empathic yet discerning guide to the enduring significance of faith and its power from ancient times to our own.

The Religion of the Future

The Religion of the Future PDF Author: Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784787302
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 478

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new philosophy of religion for a secular world How can we live in such a way that we die only once? How can we organize a society that gives us a better chance to be fully alive? How can we reinvent religion so that it liberates us instead of consoling us? These questions stand at the center of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Religion of the Future: an argument for both spiritual and political revolution. It proposes the content of a religion that can survive without faith in a transcendent God or in life after death. According to this religion—the religion of the future—human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives. They can become more godlike without denying the irreparable flaws in the human condition: our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability.

What is Religion?

What is Religion? PDF Author: Jeppe Sinding Jensen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317545990
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 111

Get Book Here

Book Description
Religious belief is one of the most pervasive and ubiquitous characteristics of human society. Religion has shadowed and illuminated human lives since primitive times, shaping the world views of cultures from isolated tribes to vast empires. Starting from the premise that religion is a concept which can be analysed and compared across time and cultures, What is Religion? brings the most up-to-date scholarship to bear on humankind’s most enduring creation. The book opens with a brief history of the idea of religion, then divides the study of religion into four essential topics - types, representations, practices, and institutions – and concludes with a final, eye-opening chapter on religion today. Packed with case studies from a wide range of religions, past and present, What is Religion? offers a very current, comprehensive, yet intellectually challenging overview of the history, theories, practices, and study of religion. Accessible, wide-ranging, engaging, and short, What is Religion? is written primarily for undergraduate students in the study of religion, but it will also be invaluable for students of anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, and theology as well as anyone interested in how and why humans came and continue to be religious.

Religion and Media

Religion and Media PDF Author: Hent de Vries
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734974
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 676

Get Book Here

Book Description
Counter The twenty-five contributors to this volume - who include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel - confront the conceptual, analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the complex relationship between religion and media. The book's introductory section offers a prolegomenon to the multiple problems raised by an interdisciplinary approach to these multifaceted phenomena. The essays in the following part provide exemplary approaches to the historical and systematic background to the study of religion and media. The third part presents case studies by anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion. The book concludes with two remarkable documents: a chapter from Theodor W. Adorno's study of the relationship between religion and media in the context of political agitation (The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas's Radio Addresses) and a section from Niklas Luhmann's monumental Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Society as a Social System).