Toward Global Cultural Renewal

Toward Global Cultural Renewal PDF Author: Mona Abul Fadl
Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
ISBN: 1565647874
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 47

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Book Description
Today’s quest for Islamization is here put into historical and ideational perspective. It traces the movement to a newfound awareness among Muslims, cognizant of the immense worth and potential of their heritage, yet clamoring to emerge from their actual debilitation, whether enforced or self-inflicted. The author considers and evaluates various contemporary approaches to truth and compares them to the Islamic “mode of knowing,” discovering it to be a superior and beneficent foil to the existing paradigms and epistemes of modern culture. This book offers a blueprint for a new kind of scholarship, one that invokes the “vocational ideal” and has the power and the vision to absorb intelligently cultural diversity and transmute it into an overarching and transcendent, but realistic and humane, critique. The credentials of Islam to buttress and enlighten such an endeavor are presented with clarity and conviction. And while the pervasive and protean malaise of contemporary civilization is attributed to the sense of vacuity and absence of higher purpose brought about by the renunciation of God, that of the Muslim Ummah is seen to be rooted in intellectual lethargy. However, and despite the colossal challenges which face the quest for renewal and reintegration, challenges that are unflinchingly tackled and delineated in this paper, the final view is one of hope and affirmation in both human recoverability and the latent power of Islam to lead man out of the present morass.

Toward Global Cultural Renewal

Toward Global Cultural Renewal PDF Author: Mona Abul Fadl
Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)
ISBN: 1565647874
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 47

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today’s quest for Islamization is here put into historical and ideational perspective. It traces the movement to a newfound awareness among Muslims, cognizant of the immense worth and potential of their heritage, yet clamoring to emerge from their actual debilitation, whether enforced or self-inflicted. The author considers and evaluates various contemporary approaches to truth and compares them to the Islamic “mode of knowing,” discovering it to be a superior and beneficent foil to the existing paradigms and epistemes of modern culture. This book offers a blueprint for a new kind of scholarship, one that invokes the “vocational ideal” and has the power and the vision to absorb intelligently cultural diversity and transmute it into an overarching and transcendent, but realistic and humane, critique. The credentials of Islam to buttress and enlighten such an endeavor are presented with clarity and conviction. And while the pervasive and protean malaise of contemporary civilization is attributed to the sense of vacuity and absence of higher purpose brought about by the renunciation of God, that of the Muslim Ummah is seen to be rooted in intellectual lethargy. However, and despite the colossal challenges which face the quest for renewal and reintegration, challenges that are unflinchingly tackled and delineated in this paper, the final view is one of hope and affirmation in both human recoverability and the latent power of Islam to lead man out of the present morass.

Cultural Renewal

Cultural Renewal PDF Author: Arthur Pontynen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138508859
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The decline of interest in the liberal and fine arts is widely lamented. At issue is why this decline happened and how we might restore qualitative standards by which to live. Arthur Pontynen argues that cultural decline is the consequence of a tragically anti-intellectual academic tradition�and its alternative is the cosmopolitan pursuit of wisdom and beauty. Pontynen writes that the liberal and fine arts are justified by their attempt to understand the material realization of wisdom, of that which is true and good in reality and life. The current decline marks a denial that such qualitative aspirations are realistic. Instead of understanding art as the intellectual pursuit of ontological perfection, perfection is subjectified as willful preference or experience. Consequently, the liberal and fine arts have been displaced by a naturalistic social science and a relational existentialism. This reduction denies qualitive thoughts, words, and deeds. Pontynen establishes that the arts are not obsolete, merely subjectivist, or limited to a brutal (de)constructivism. He argues for a renewed idealism that is neither reductionist, trivializing, or brutalized. Pontynen offers an alternative, global narrative that is both realistic and idealistic; one that permits us to distinguish between the trivial, the brutal, and the profound.

Toward the Renewal of Civilization

Toward the Renewal of Civilization PDF Author: T. William Boxx
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
These twelve essays examine the origins and consequences of new ideologies that have challenged traditional understandings of human nature and society and which have contributed to disorder and social decline in today's world.e

Towards Social Renewal

Towards Social Renewal PDF Author: Rudolf Steiner
Publisher: Rudolf Steiner Press
ISBN: 9781855840720
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Although this book was first published in 1919, it remains highly relevant to social problems encountered today. Uniquely, Steiner's social thinking is not based on intellectual theory, but on a profound perception of the archetypal spiritual nature of social life. As he suggests in this classic work, society has three distinct realms--the economic, the political (individual human rights), and the cultural (spiritual). While social life as a whole is a unity, the autonomy of these three sectors should be respected if our increasing social problems are to be resolved. Steiner relates the ideals of "liberty, equality and fraternity" to modern society. Economics calls for fraternity, political rights require equality, while culture should be characterized by liberty. The slogans of the French Revolution, he suggests, can become truly manifest only when our social thinking is transformed to correspond to the spiritual reality. This volume is a translation from German of Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (GA 23).

Repetition, Recurrence, Returns

Repetition, Recurrence, Returns PDF Author: Joan Ramon Resina
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149859400X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Repetition is constitutive of human life. Both the species and the individual develop through repetition. Unlike simple recall, repetition is permeated by the past and the present and is oriented toward the future. Repetition of central actions and events plays an important role in the lives of individuals and the life of society. It helps to create meaning and memory. Because repetition is a central aspect of human life, it plays a role in all social and cultural spheres. It is important for several branches of the humanities and social studies. This book presents studies of an array of repetitive phenomena and to show that repetition analysis is opening up a new field of study within single disciplines and interdisciplinary research. Recommended for scholars of literature, music, culture, and communication.

Global Modernity, Development, and Contemporary Civilization

Global Modernity, Development, and Contemporary Civilization PDF Author: José Maurício Domingues
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136576940
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book investigates modern global civilization, offering an alternative to post-colonial theories and the "multiple modernities" approach (as well as the civilizational theory linked to it). It argues that modernity has become a global civilization that is heterogeneous and intertwined with other civilizations, and also aims at a renewal of critical theory that is not US-centric and Eurocentric, focusing instead on China, South Asia (India) and Latin America (Brazil). Dealing with the themes of centre-periphery relations, complexity (including culture and religion), democracy and emancipatory possibilities, this book is based on general theoretical ideas such as collective subjectivity, the interplay of memory and creativity, and the concept of "modernizing moves," so as to deal with historical contingency.

Down to Earth

Down to Earth PDF Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509530592
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

Rethinking education: towards a global common good?

Rethinking education: towards a global common good? PDF Author: UNESCO
Publisher: UNESCO Publishing
ISBN: 9231000888
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
Economic growth and the creation of wealth have cut global poverty rates, yet vulnerability, inequality, exclusion and violence have escalated within and across societies throughout the world. Unsustainable patterns of economic production and consumption promote global warming, environmental degradation and an upsurge in natural disasters. Moreover, while we have strengthened international human rights frameworks over the past several decades, implementing and protecting these norms remains a challenge.These changes signal the emergence of a new global context for learning that has vital implications for education. Rethinking the purpose of education and the organization of learning has never been more urgent. This book is inspired by a humanistic vision of education and development, based on respect for life and human dignity, equal rights, social justice, cultural diversity, international solidarity and shared responsibility for a sustainable future. It proposes that we consider education and knowledge as global common goods, in order to reconcile the purpose and organization of education as a collective societal endeavour in a complex world.

The End of Illusions

The End of Illusions PDF Author: Andreas Reckwitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509545719
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.

A Future That's Bigger Than The Past

A Future That's Bigger Than The Past PDF Author: Samuel Wells
Publisher: Canterbury Press
ISBN: 1786221772
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
A Future that’s Bigger than the Past sets out a vision for renewing the local church that is energising, realistic and practical for small and large congregations alike. In response to prevailing narratives of decline, it reimagines how the church can live its vocation of receiving the abundance God gives us, and sharing that abundance far and wide. It recognises the surprising, exuberant and plentiful things that the Holy Spirit is doing in the world and calls the church to celebrate creation, enjoy culture and share in their flourishing. With a rich theological foundation and borne out in the practical experience of a growing number of local church communities, this groundbreaking book will enable churches to discover fresh ways in which they can become a blessing to the communities they serve.