Materialism, Spirituality, & Democracy

Materialism, Spirituality, & Democracy PDF Author: Stephen V. Riley
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1463406878
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book

Book Description
The purpose of this book is about the quest for spiritual maturity as it applies to the Catholic faith and American democracy. It is meant to engage the imagination of small church faith communities and bible study groups in light of Vatican II and what it means to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the Holy Spirit. Vatican II encourages the Church to be a more prophetic and contemplative faith that leads to greater spiritual discernment. Discernment of the Spirits is more important than ever to overcome an imbalance between specialized human activity and a comprehensive view of reality that directs the mind to solutions which are fully human. This was the mind of Christ. In summary, small church faith communities and Bible study groups are encouraged to consider scrutinizing the signs of the time by way of critical social analysis, spiritual discernment, and the work of the Holy Spirit. We the faithful are Cathedral Builders, never to see the end of our work. This is an evolutionary movement. As followers of Christ, we can learn to see ourselves as ongoing co-creators with God for the goodness of the entire human race.

Materialism, Spirituality, & Democracy

Materialism, Spirituality, & Democracy PDF Author: Stephen V. Riley
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1463406878
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book

Book Description
The purpose of this book is about the quest for spiritual maturity as it applies to the Catholic faith and American democracy. It is meant to engage the imagination of small church faith communities and bible study groups in light of Vatican II and what it means to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the Holy Spirit. Vatican II encourages the Church to be a more prophetic and contemplative faith that leads to greater spiritual discernment. Discernment of the Spirits is more important than ever to overcome an imbalance between specialized human activity and a comprehensive view of reality that directs the mind to solutions which are fully human. This was the mind of Christ. In summary, small church faith communities and Bible study groups are encouraged to consider scrutinizing the signs of the time by way of critical social analysis, spiritual discernment, and the work of the Holy Spirit. We the faithful are Cathedral Builders, never to see the end of our work. This is an evolutionary movement. As followers of Christ, we can learn to see ourselves as ongoing co-creators with God for the goodness of the entire human race.

Religion, Politics, and the Earth

Religion, Politics, and the Earth PDF Author: C. Crockett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113726893X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book

Book Description
"Following Vattimo's postmodern philosophy, Badiou's postmetaphysical ontology, and i ek's revolutionary style, the authors of this marvelous book invites us to reactivate our politics of resistance against our greatest enemy: corporate capitalism. The best solution to the ecological, energy, and financial crisis corporate capitalism has created, as Crockett Clayton and Jeffrey Robbins suggest, is a new theological materialism where Being is conceived as energy both subjectively and objectively. All my graduate students will have to read this book carefully if they want to become philosophers." - Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona "This is a book of an extraordinary timeliness, written in an accessible and strikingly informative way. It is excellently poised to become a synthetic and agenda setting statement about the implications of a new materialism for the founding of a new radical theology, a new kind of spirituality. I consider this therefore quite a remarkable book which will be influential in ongoing discussions of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology. Moreover, it will be, quite simply, the best book about spirituality and the new materialism on the market today. While all of the work of the new materialists engage at one level or another the question of a new spirituality, I do not think there is anything comparable in significance to what Crockett and Robbins have provided here." - Ward Blanton, University of Kent "This book will perhaps be most appreciated by the reader with an intuitive cast of mind, able to recognize the force of an argument in its imaginative suggestiveness . . . New Materialism is about energy transformation, we are told, energy which cannot be reduced to matter because it resonates with spirit and life . . . Yet the book strikes a fundamental note of hard reality: 'if we want our civilization to live on earth a little longer we will have to recognize our coexistence with and in earth'." - Christian Ecology Link

Rethinking Materialism

Rethinking Materialism PDF Author: Robert Wuthnow
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802807892
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of essays by ten of the nation's prominent social scientists and theologians offers serious commentary on our culture's obsession with material goods and examines the uneasy relation of materialism to religion. The contributors assess the ways in which materialism has been understood in recent analyses of American character, how the economy shapes our understandings of ourselves, the ways in which religious thought is being reshaped by economic circumstances, and the nature of consumerism. The complement to Wuthnow's God and Mammon in America, this volume challenges us all to look at materialism in new ways and suggests viable means for reversing our country's prevailing material fixation and its destructive effects on our spiritual lives.

Derrida after the End of Writing

Derrida after the End of Writing PDF Author: Clayton Crockett
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823277852
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Get Book

Book Description
What are we to make of Jacques Derrida’s famous claim that “every other is every other,” if the other could also be an object, a stone or an elementary particle? Derrida’s philosophy is relevant not just for human ethical language and animality, but to profound developments in the physical and natural sciences, as well as ecology. Derrida After the End of Writing argues for the importance of reading Derrida’s later work from a new materialist perspective. In conversation with Heidegger, Lacan, and Deleuze, and critically engaging newer philosophies of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, Crockett claims that Derrida was never a linguistic idealist. Furthermore, something changes in his later philosophy something that cannot be simply described as a “turn.” In Catherine Malabou’s terms, there is a shift from a motor scheme of writing to a motor scheme of plasticity. Crockett explores some of the implications of interpreting Derrida through the new materialist lens of technicity or plasticity, attending to the significance of ethics, religion, and politics in his later work. By reading Derrida from a new materialist perspective, Crockett provides fresh readings of his ideas of sovereignty, religion, responsibility, and mourning. These new readings produce fruitful engagements with the thinkers who have followed Derrida, including Malabou, Timothy Morton, John D. Caputo, and Karen Barad. Here is a new reading of Derrida that moves beyond conventional understandings of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a reading that is responsive to and critical of some of the crucial developments shaping the humanities today.

Biosophy and Spiritual Democracy

Biosophy and Spiritual Democracy PDF Author: Frederick Kettner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258068523
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book

Book Description


Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion

Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion PDF Author: Alan S. Kahan
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191503142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
The relationship between democracy and religion is as important today as it was in Alexis de Tocqueville's time. Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion is a ground-breaking study of the views of the greatest theorist of democracy writing about one of today's most crucial problems. Alan S. Kahan, one of today's foremost Tocqueville scholars, shows how Tocqueville's analysis of religion is simultaneously deeply rooted in his thoughts on nineteenth-century France and America and pertinent to us today. Tocqueville thought that the role of religion was to provide checks and balances for democracy in the spiritual realm, just as secular forces should provide them in the political realm. He believed that in the long run secular checks and balances were dependent on the success of spiritual ones. Kahan examines how Tocqueville thought religion had succeeded in checking and balancing democracy in America, and failed in France, as well as observing Tocqueville's less well-known analyses of religion in Ireland and England, and his perspective on Islam and Hinduism. He shows how Tocqueville's 'post-secular' account of religion can help us come to terms with religion today. More than a study of Tocqueville on religion in democratic society, this volume offers us a re-interpretation of Tocqueville as a moralist and a student of human nature in democratic society; a thinker whose new political science was in the service of a new moral science aimed at encouraging democratic people to attain greatness as human beings. Tocqueville, Democracy, and Religion gives us a new Tocqueville for the twenty-first century.

Why Do Religious Forms Matter?

Why Do Religious Forms Matter? PDF Author: Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783030957803
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

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.

The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies

The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies PDF Author: Robert Edwards Lane
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300091069
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 486

Get Book

Book Description
Despite the fact that citizens of advanced market democracies are satisfied with their material progress, many are haunted by a spirit of unhappiness. There is evidence of a rising tide of clinical depression in most advanced societies, and in the United States studies have documented a decline in the number of people who regard themselves as happy. Although our political and economic systems are based on the utilitarian philosophy of happiness--the greatest good for the greatest number--they seem to have contributed to our dissatisfaction with life. This book investigates why this is so. Drawing on extensive research in such fields as quality of life, economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and biology, Robert E. Lane presents a challenging thesis. He shows that the main sources of well-being in advanced economies are friendships and a good family life and that, once one is beyond the poverty level, a larger income contributes almost nothing to happiness. In fact, as prosperity increases, there is a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration, and individuals become more and more distrustful of each other and their political institutions. Lane urges that we alter our priorities so that we increase our levels of companionship even at the risk of reducing our income.

Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy

Tocqueville and the Frontiers of Democracy PDF Author: Richard Boyd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107009634
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of essays uses Alexis de Tocqueville's writings to explore the dilemmas of democratization in the twenty-first century.

What is Christian Democracy?

What is Christian Democracy? PDF Author: Carlo Invernizzi Accetti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108386156
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book

Book Description
Christian Democratic actors and thinkers have been at the forefront of many of the twentieth century's key political battles - from the construction of the international human rights regime, through the process of European integration and the creation of postwar welfare regimes, to Latin American development policies during the Cold War. Yet their core ideas remain largely unknown, especially in the English-speaking world. Combining conceptual and historical approaches, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti traces the development of this ideology in the thought and writings of some of its key intellectual and political exponents, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. In so doing he sheds light on a number of important contemporary issues, from the question of the appropriate place of religion in presumptively 'secular' liberal-democratic regimes, to the normative resources available for building a political response to the recent rise of far-right populism.