Re-imagining Religion and Belief

Re-imagining Religion and Belief PDF Author: Baker, Christopher
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447347102
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The need to reimagine religion and belief is precipitated by their greater visibility in public life. Meanwhile, social policy responses often see them from a problem-based, rather than an asset-based, approach. However, with growing diversity of religion and belief in every sector comes the potential for new dialogues across previously impermeable policy and disciplinary silos. This volume brings together leading international authors to critically consider these challenges within legal and policy frameworks, including security and cohesion, welfare, law, health and social care, inequality, cohesion, extremism, migration and abuse. It challenges policy makers to re-imagine religion and belief as an integral part of public life that contains resources, practices, forms of knowledge and experience that are essential to a coherent policy approach to diversity, enhanced democracy and participation.

Re-imagining Religion and Belief

Re-imagining Religion and Belief PDF Author: Baker, Christopher
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447347102
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
The need to reimagine religion and belief is precipitated by their greater visibility in public life. Meanwhile, social policy responses often see them from a problem-based, rather than an asset-based, approach. However, with growing diversity of religion and belief in every sector comes the potential for new dialogues across previously impermeable policy and disciplinary silos. This volume brings together leading international authors to critically consider these challenges within legal and policy frameworks, including security and cohesion, welfare, law, health and social care, inequality, cohesion, extremism, migration and abuse. It challenges policy makers to re-imagine religion and belief as an integral part of public life that contains resources, practices, forms of knowledge and experience that are essential to a coherent policy approach to diversity, enhanced democracy and participation.

Reimagining the Sacred

Reimagining the Sacred PDF Author: Richard Kearney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540884
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since? Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God's goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God's sovereignty with God's love.

Reimagining God and Religion

Reimagining God and Religion PDF Author: Jerry R. Wright
Publisher: Chiron Publications
ISBN: 1630514977
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
With the necessary demise and death of antique cosmologies and traditional religious paradigms dependent on external deities and devils, the modern religious challenge involves two simultaneous sacred endeavors: to eulogize, bury, and grieve the theistic and monotheistic god-images and the religions dependent on them; and, secondly, to bring fresh imagination to the meanings of god and religion, which will satisfy both the modern mind and ancient soul. Drawing on the insights of Jungian or analytical psychology, Dr. Wright offers depth psychological analysis of our contemporary religious and political dilemmas, as well as invites readers to be midwives for the emerging religious myth that many believe to be on our collective horizon -- a myth that will be more inclusive, intellectually and scientifically honest, and soul satisfying. The invitation is made urgent by his psychological conclusion: As long as our deities and devils are perceived to be beyond the physical domain and outside the human psyche, our species will continue to do great harm to each other and to our global nest. Combining personal testament and psychological commentary, the author explores heretofore taboo topics and reframes many traditional theological and Christological dogmas, making them more relevant to religious and non-religious alike. Jerry R. Wright, D.Min is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Flat Rock, North Carolina, and a training analyst with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. An experienced conference and retreat leader, he has led pilgrimages to sacred sites in Iona, Scotland, Ireland, Peru, and India. Reimagining God and Religion continues his primary interest in bringing the insights of Jungian or analytical psychology to experiences deemed religious or spiritual. This interest inspired Dr. Wright’s doctoral dissertation, Symbols for the Christ in the Gospel of John and the Archetypal Self in the Psychology of C.G. Jung, and his Jungian thesis, Archetypal Thin Places: Experiencing The Numinosum.

After Pluralism

After Pluralism PDF Author: Courtney Bender
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527268
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The contributors to this volume treat pluralism as a concept that is historically and ideologically produced or, put another way, as a doctrine that is embedded within a range of political, civic, and cultural institutions. Their critique considers how religious difference is framed as a problem that only pluralism can solve. Working comparatively across nations and disciplines, the essays in After Pluralism explore pluralism as a "term of art" that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter, and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism's ideals in diverse sites Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theories and demonstrate its shaping of political and social interaction in surprising and powerful ways. Throughout, they question assumptions underlying pluralism's discourse and its influence on the legal decisions that shape modern religious practice. Contributors do more than deconstruct this theory; they tackle what comes next. Having established the genealogy and effects of pluralism, they generate new questions for engaging the collective worlds and multiple registers in which religion operates.

Theology and Down Syndrome

Theology and Down Syndrome PDF Author: Amos Yong
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 1602580065
Category : Church work with people with disabilities
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
"While the struggle for disability rights has transformed secular ethics and public policy, traditional Christian teaching has been slow to account for disability in its theological imagination. Amos Yong crafts both a theology of disability and a theology informed by disability. The result is a Christian theology that not only connects with our present social, medical, and scientific understanding of disability but also one that empowers a set of best practices appropriate to our late modern context"--Publisher description.

Recognizing the Non-religious

Recognizing the Non-religious PDF Author: Lois Lee
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191056650
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In recent years, the extent to which contemporary societies are secular has come under scrutiny. At the same time, many countries, especially in Europe, have increasingly large nonaffiliate, 'subjectively secular' populations, whilst nonreligious cultural movements like the New Atheism and the Sunday Assembly have come to prominence. Making sense of secularity, irreligion, and the relationship between them has therefore emerged as a crucial task for those seeking to understand contemporary societies and the nature of modern life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in southeast England, Recognizing the Non-religious develops a new vocabulary, theory and methodology for thinking about the secular. It distinguishes between separate and incommensurable aspects of so-called secularity as insubstantial—involving merely the absence of religion—and substantial—involving beliefs, ritual practice, and identities that are alternative to religious ones. Recognizing the cultural forms that present themselves as non-religious therefore opens up new, more egalitarian and more theoretically coherent ways of thinking about people who are 'not religious'. It is also argued that recognizing the nonreligious allows us to reimagine the secular itself in new and productive ways. This book is part of a fast-growing area of research that builds upon and contributes to theoretical debates concerning secularization, 'desecularization', religious change, postsecularity and postcolonial approaches to religion and secularism. As well as presenting new research, this book gathers insights from the wider studies of nonreligion, atheism, and secularism in order to consolidate a theoretical framework, conceptual foundation and agenda for future research.

Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa

Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa PDF Author: Adriaan van Klinken
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197644155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Religion is often seen as a conservative force in contemporary Africa. In particular, Christian beliefs and actors are usually depicted as driving the opposition to homosexuality and LGBTI rights in African societies. This book nuances that picture, by drawing attention to discourses emerging in Africa itself that engage with religion, specifically Christianity, in progressive and innovative ways--in support of sexual diversity and the quest for justice for LGBTI people. The authors show not only that African Christian traditions harbor strong potential for countering conservative anti-LGBTI dynamics; but also that this potential has already begun to be realized, by various thinkers, activists and movements across the continent. Their ten case studies document how leading African writers are reimagining Christian thought; how several Christian-inspired groups are transforming religious practice; and how African cultural production creatively appropriates Christian beliefs and symbols. In short, the book explores Christianity as a major resource for a liberating imagination and politics of sexuality and social justice in Africa today. Foregrounding African agency and progressive religious thought, this highly original intervention counterbalances our knowledge of secular approaches to LGBTI rights in Africa, and powerfully decolonizes queer theory, theology and politics.

Imagining Judeo-Christian America

Imagining Judeo-Christian America PDF Author: K. Healan Gaston
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022666385X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.

Making African Christianity

Making African Christianity PDF Author: Robert J. Houle
Publisher: Lehigh University Press
ISBN: 1611460824
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Making African Christianity argues that Africans successfully naturalized Christianity. It examines the long history of the faith among colonial Zulu Christians (known as amaKholwa) in what would become South Africa. As it has become clear that Africans are not discarding Christianity, a number of scholars have taken up the challenge of understanding why this is the case and how we got to this point. While functionalist arguments have their place, this book argues that we need to understand what is imbedded within the faith that many find so appealing. Houle argues that other aspects of the faith also needed to be 'translated,'particularly the theology of Christianity. For Zulu, the religion would never be a good fit unless converts could fill critical gaps such as how Christianity could account for the active and everyday presence of the amadhlozi ancestral spirits - a problem that was true for African converts across the continent in slightly different ways. Accomplishing this translation took years and a number of false-starts. Coming to this understanding is one of the particularly important contributions of this work, for like Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities,' the early African Christian communities were entirely constructed ones. Here was a group struggling to understand what it meant to be both African and Christian. For much of their history this dual identity was difficult to reconcile, but through constant struggle to do so they transformed both themselves and their adopted faith. This manuscript goes far in filling a critical gap in how we have gotten to this point and will be welcomed by African historians, those interested in the history of colonialism, missions, southern African, and in particular Christianity.

Futureville

Futureville PDF Author: Skye Jethani
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 1595554629
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Want to see the future? It is brighter than you think. What we believe about tomorrow determines how we live today. As Christians debate how to faithfully engage with our rapidly changing world, our vision of the future has never been more important. But rather than providing a clear sense of purpose for our lives, popular Christian ideas about the future steal it from us by saying our work in the world, apart from ministry, has no eternal value. Is it any wonder why young adults are less interested in church, or why a culture desperate for meaning and hope dismisses our message? In Futureville, Skye Jethani offers us a vision-shifting glimpse of the world of tomorrow described in Scripture. He reveals how a biblical vision of the future can transform every person’s work with a sense of purpose and dignity today. Futureville is a smart, inspiring call to cultivate the order, beauty, and abundance that reflects the heart and vision of God for our world.