Secular Assemblages

Secular Assemblages PDF Author: Marek Sullivan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350123684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Âme (1649) to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and 'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.

Secular Assemblages

Secular Assemblages PDF Author: Marek Sullivan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350123684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Âme (1649) to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and 'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.

Secular Assemblages

Secular Assemblages PDF Author: Marek Sullivan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350123692
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Âme (1649) to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and 'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.

Secularism in Antebellum America

Secularism in Antebellum America PDF Author: John Lardas Modern
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226533255
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.

The Politics of Religious Literacy

The Politics of Religious Literacy PDF Author: Justine Ellis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004523901
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The Politics of Religious Literacy challenges popular understandings of religious literacy as an inclusive framework for navigating religious diversity in the public sphere. Offering a new model, this book provides insights into the often-overlooked feelings and practices informing our questionably secular age.

Post-Secular Society

Post-Secular Society PDF Author: Gustaaf Geeraerts
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351497618
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Post-Secular Society argues for several characteristics of the secular: the experience of living in a secular age and the experience of living without religion as a normal condition. Religion in the West is often seen as marked by both innovation and disarray. In spite of differing approaches and perspectives of secularization, rational choice and de-secularization, many scholars agree that the West is experiencing a general "resurgence" of religion across most Western societies. Post-Secular Society discusses the changes in religion related to globalization and New Age forms of popular religion. The contributors review religion that is rooted in the globalized political economy and the relationship of post-secularism to popular consumer culture. Also reviewed is innovative discourse as a religious belief system, theories of the post-secular, religious, and spiritual well-being, and healing practices in Finland and environmentalism. This paperback edition includes a new preface by Peter Nynas.

Modern Enchantments

Modern Enchantments PDF Author: Simon During
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674013711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Magic, During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's work gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by “magic,” During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people?

Arts of Wonder

Arts of Wonder PDF Author: Jeffrey L. Kosky
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226451062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Kosky focuses on a handful of artists - Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy - to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation.

Heritage That Hurts

Heritage That Hurts PDF Author: Joy Sather-Wagstaff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315427524
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Using the locale of the 9/11 tragedy, Joy Sather-Wagstaff explores the constructive role played by tourists in understanding social, political, and emotional impacts of violent events.

Assemblages

Assemblages PDF Author: Clark Winter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Acute Religious Experiences

Acute Religious Experiences PDF Author: Richard Saville-Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350272922
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book engages the problem of how, in the 21st century, we are to speak about experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme which occur on a transhistorical and transcultural basis. Critical re-readings of seminal texts show how 20th-century theoreticians in the humanities sought to erase madness from their irrational subjects. This propensity to sanitize madness in the study of religions was mirrored by the instinct of psychiatrists to degrade religious experiences by reducing mad consciousness to psychosis or dissociation. Richard Saville-Smith introduces explanatory pluralism as a way of recognizing these disciplinary biases and mad studies as a way of negotiating this understanding. The disproportionate significance of madness in shaping the fabric of the human story can then be recovered from both erasure and dismissal to be given the recognition previously denied - as acute religious experiences. Acute Religious Experiences divides into three sections, beginning with re-readings of William James's pathological programme, Rudolf Otto's numinous, T. K. Oesterreich's possession, Mircea Eliade's shamanism, Walter Stace's mysticism, Walter Pahnke's psychedelic experience, and Abraham Maslow's peak experiences. These ideas are shown to constitute the beginnings of a fractured discourse on the irrational. In part two, contemporary psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and Foucault's History of Madness are re-read to reposition madness as not necessarily pathological. This opens the way for the identification of acute religious experiences as a new holistic and post-colonial approach through which religious data can be organized and addressed on a comparative basis. In part three, The Gospel of Mark is re-read as a case study to demonstrate the novel insights which flow from the identification of acute religious experiences. Richard Saville-Smith draws on his own experiences of madness and his PhD from the School of Divinity at The University of Edinburgh to elucidate his research.