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Author: Michael L. Raposa
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813918983
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
Boredom matters, writes Michael Raposa, because it represents a threat to spiritual life. Boredom can undermine prayer and meditation and signal the failure of religious imagination. If you engage it seriously, however, it can also be the starting point for philosophical reflection and spiritual insight. It can serve as a prelude to the discovery or rebirth of religious meaning. Boredom, then, is a paradox, surprisingly complex and ambiguous. Being bored with someone or something can represent a trivial matter--being bored with one's clothes or a magazine article--or a matter of significant consequence--being bored with one's marriage or the music one loves to play. Boredom can signify a moral failure or the presence of virtue. Appreciating the value of boredom does not require that one welcome, much less celebrate, its occurrence. Raposa simply invites us to pay attention to boredom's many possible lessons. The principal methods Raposa employs are philosophical. Drawing on Peirce's idea that all experience is interpreted experience, Raposa sees boredom as a failure of interpretation, an inability to read signs in life as religiously meaningful. The Gospel of Mark depicts a prayerful and passionate Jesus juxtaposed with his drowsy disciples in Gethsemane. Their failure to discern what is happening in their midst, Raposa suggests, is a powerful example of what medieval Christian theologians called acedia, their term for boredom with the rituals of spiritual devotion. But these descriptions of acedia bear a striking resemblance to mystical accounts of the "dark night," a terrifying but necessary stage in the mystic's spiritual journey. Drawing on this notion and others from eastern and western religious traditions, Raposa asks us to see boredom playing an ambivalent role in spiritual life, often serving as a metaphorical midwife for the birth of religious knowledge. His subject, he admits, seems tongue-in-cheek at first, but a stunning depth is quickly revealed. His lucid, witty, and intelligent discussion offers a path to the kind of meaning that is a fundamental desideratum in human experience.
Author: Michael L. Raposa
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813918983
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Get Book Here
Book Description
Boredom matters, writes Michael Raposa, because it represents a threat to spiritual life. Boredom can undermine prayer and meditation and signal the failure of religious imagination. If you engage it seriously, however, it can also be the starting point for philosophical reflection and spiritual insight. It can serve as a prelude to the discovery or rebirth of religious meaning. Boredom, then, is a paradox, surprisingly complex and ambiguous. Being bored with someone or something can represent a trivial matter--being bored with one's clothes or a magazine article--or a matter of significant consequence--being bored with one's marriage or the music one loves to play. Boredom can signify a moral failure or the presence of virtue. Appreciating the value of boredom does not require that one welcome, much less celebrate, its occurrence. Raposa simply invites us to pay attention to boredom's many possible lessons. The principal methods Raposa employs are philosophical. Drawing on Peirce's idea that all experience is interpreted experience, Raposa sees boredom as a failure of interpretation, an inability to read signs in life as religiously meaningful. The Gospel of Mark depicts a prayerful and passionate Jesus juxtaposed with his drowsy disciples in Gethsemane. Their failure to discern what is happening in their midst, Raposa suggests, is a powerful example of what medieval Christian theologians called acedia, their term for boredom with the rituals of spiritual devotion. But these descriptions of acedia bear a striking resemblance to mystical accounts of the "dark night," a terrifying but necessary stage in the mystic's spiritual journey. Drawing on this notion and others from eastern and western religious traditions, Raposa asks us to see boredom playing an ambivalent role in spiritual life, often serving as a metaphorical midwife for the birth of religious knowledge. His subject, he admits, seems tongue-in-cheek at first, but a stunning depth is quickly revealed. His lucid, witty, and intelligent discussion offers a path to the kind of meaning that is a fundamental desideratum in human experience.
Author: Michael L. Raposa
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813919256
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The Gospel of Mark depicts a prayerful and passionate Jesus juxtaposed with his drowsy disciples in Gethsemane. Their failure to discern what is happening in their midst, Raposa suggests, is a powerful example of what medieval Christian theologians called "acedia," their term for boredom with the rituals of spiritual devotion. But these descriptions of acedia bear a striking resemblance to mystical accounts of the "dark night," a terrifying although necessary stage in the mystic's spiritual journey. Drawing on this notion and others from Eastern and Western religious traditions, Raposa asks us to see boredom as playing an ambivalent role in spiritual life, often serving as a metaphorical midwife for the birth of religious knowledge.
Author: Patrick Gamsby
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666900982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life culls together the scattered fragments of Henri Lefebvre’s (1901–1991) unrealized sociology of boredom. In assembling these fragments, sprinkled through Lefebvre’s vast oeuvre, Patrick Gamsby constructs the core elements of Lefebvre’s latent theory of boredom. Themes of time (modernity, everyday), space (urban, suburban), and mass culture (culture industry, industry culture) are explored throughout the book, unveiling a concealed dialectical movement at work with the experience of boredom. In analyzing the dialectic of boredom, Gamsby argues that Lefebvre’s project of a critique of everyday life is key for making sense of the linkages between boredom and everyday life in the modern world.
Author: Lars Svendsen
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861892171
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Am account of boredom, something that we have all suffered from, yet actually know very little about.
Author: Barbara Dalle Pezze
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042025662
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
The past thirty years saw a growing academic interest in the phenomenon of boredom. If initially the analyses were mostly a-historical, now the historicity of boredom is widely recognised, though often it is taken as evidence of its permanence as a constant "quality" of the human condition, expression of a metaphysical malady inherent to the fact of being human. New trends in the literature focus on the peculiar relationship between boredom and modernity and attempt to embrace the new social, cultural and political factors which provoked the epochal change of modernity and relate them to a change in the parameters of human experience and the crisis of subjectivity. The very changes that characterise modernity are the same that led to the "democratisation" of boredom: modernity and boredom are shown to be inextricably connected and inseparable. This volume aims at contributing to the growing body of literature on boredom with a number of essays which reflect on the connection of boredom and modernity and focus on particular texts, authors, or aspects of the phenomenon. The approach is multidisciplinary, in keeping with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in our culture and societies, with essays reflecting on philosophy, literature, film, media and psychology.
Author: Adam S. Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474236995
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace is the first book to explore key religious themes - from boredom to addiction, and distraction – in the work of one of America's most celebrated contemporary novelists. In a series of short, topic-focussed chapters, the book joins a selection of key scenes from Wallace's novels Infinite Jest and The Pale King with clear explanations of how they contribute to his overall account of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. Adam Miller explores how Wallace's work masterfully investigates the nature of first-world boredom and shows, in the process, how easy it is to get addicted to distraction (chemical, electronic, or otherwise). Implicitly critiquing, excising, and repurposing elements of AA's Twelve Step program, Wallace suggests that the practice of prayer (regardless of belief in God), the patient application of attention to things that seem ordinary and boring, and the internalization of clichés may be the antidote to much of what ails us in the 21st century.
Author: Agnė Narušytė
Publisher: VDA leidykla
ISBN: 9955854960
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Author: Sharday C. Mosurinjohn
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228013305
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
The spiritual crisis of the twenty-first century is overload boredom. There is more information, content, and stimulation than ever before, and none of it is waiting passively to be consumed. The demands exceed our capacities. The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom makes the case that withdrawal and resistance are not our only options: we can choose kēdia, an ethic of care. Rather than conceiving the world of information as external, Sharday Mosurinjohn turns to the sensational and emotional, focusing on the ways the digital age has radically reconfigured our interior lives. Using an innovative method of affective aesthetic speculation, Mosurinjohn engages the world of art, literature, and comedy for a series of unexpected case studies that make strange otherwise familiar scenes of overload boredom: texting, browsing social media, and performing information work. Ultimately, she shows that the opposite of boredom is not interest but meaning, and that we can only make it by curating the overload. The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom is a bold and original intervention for the present condition, unsettling the framing of existing work around technological modernity and its discontents.
Author: Simon D. Podmore
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222826
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Simon D. Podmore claims that becoming a self before God is both a divine gift and an anxious obligation. Before we can know God, or ourselves, we must come to a moment of recognition. How this comes to be, as well as the terms of such acknowledgment, are worked out in Podmore's powerful new reading of Kierkegaard. As he gives full consideration to Kierkegaard's writings, Podmore explores themes such as despair, anxiety, melancholy, and spiritual trial, and how they are broken by the triumph of faith, forgiveness, and the love of God. He confronts the abyss between the self and the divine in order to understand how we can come to know ourselves in relation to a God who is apparently so wholly Other.
Author: Michael L. Raposa
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823289532
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 470
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Book Description
In Theosemiotic, Michael Raposa uses Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory to rethink certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. He first sketches a history that links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures (both within the tradition of American religious thought and beyond), as well as to other classical pragmatists and to later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce’s ideas, Raposa develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves emphasizing the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception. His central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is “perfused” with signs. Religious meaning emerges out of a process of continually reading and re-reading certain signs. Theology is explored here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. By drawing on both Peirce’s logic of vagueness and his logic of relations, Raposa makes sense out of how we talk about God as personal, and also how we understand the character of genuine communities. An investigation of what Peirce meant by “musement” illuminates the nature and purpose of prayer. Theosemiotic is portrayed as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. At the same time, the potential links between any philosophical theology conceived as theosemiotic and liberation theology are exposed.
