Download or read book Unknowing Fanaticism written by Ross Lerner and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term fanatic, from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable one. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, turning to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasants’ Revolt to the English Civil War. The book traces two entangled approaches to fanaticism in this long Reformation moment: the targeting of it as an extreme political threat and the engagement with it as a deep epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke positioned themselves against fanaticism to pathologize rebellion and abet theological and political control. In the second, which arose alongside and often in response to the first, the poets of fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical self-annihilation—the process by which one could become a vessel for divine violence—and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic’s claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to know and depict the origins of fanaticism. Yet this crisis of unknowing was a productive one. It led these writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanaticism’s tendency to unsettle the boundaries between human and divine agency and between individual and collective bodies. These poets demand a new critical method, which this book attempts to model: a historically-minded and politicized formalism that can attend to the complexity of the poetic encounter with fanaticism.
Download or read book The Limits of Tolerance written by Denis Lacorne and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern notion of tolerance—the welcoming of diversity as a force for the common good—emerged in the Enlightenment in the wake of centuries of religious wars. First elaborated by philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire, religious tolerance gradually gained ground in Europe and North America. But with the resurgence of fanaticism and terrorism, religious tolerance is increasingly being challenged by frightened publics. In this book, Denis Lacorne traces the emergence of the modern notion of religious tolerance in order to rethink how we should respond to its contemporary tensions. In a wide-ranging argument that spans the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian republic, and recent controversies such as France’s burqa ban and the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, The Limits of Tolerance probes crucial questions: Should we impose limits on freedom of expression in the name of human dignity or decency? Should we accept religious symbols in the public square? Can we tolerate the intolerant? While acknowledging that tolerance can never be entirely without limits, Lacorne defends the Enlightenment concept against recent attempts to circumscribe it, arguing that without it a pluralistic society cannot survive. Awarded the Prix Montyon by the Académie Française, The Limits of Tolerance is a powerful reflection on twenty-first-century democracy’s most fundamental challenges.
Download or read book Evolutionary Processes in the Natural History of Religion written by Hansjörg Hemminger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2022-09-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of religion by the humanities and social sciences has become receptive for an evolutionary perspective. Some proposals model the evolution of religion in Darwinian terms, or construct a synergy between biological and non-Darwinian processes. The results, however, have not yet become truly interdisciplinary. The biological theory of evolution in form of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is only sparsely represented in theories published so far by scholars of religion. Therefore this book reverses the line of view and asks how their results assort with evolutionary biology: How can the subject area “religion” integrated into behavioral biology? How is theory building affected by the asymmetry between the scarce empirical knowledge of prehistoric religion, and the body of knowledge about extant and historic religions? How does hominin evolution in general relate to the evolution of religion? Are there evolutionary pre-adaptations? Subsequent versions of evolutionary biology from the original Darwinism to EES are used in interdisciplinary constructs. Can they be integrated into a comprehensive theory? The biological concept most often used is co-evolution, in form of a gene-culture co-evolution. However, the term denotes a process different from biological co-evolution. Important EES concepts do not appear in present models of religious evolution: e.g. neutral evolution, evolutionary drift, evolutionary constraints etc. How to include them into an interdisciplinary approach? Does the cognitive science of religion (CSR) harmonize with behavioral biology and the brain sciences? Religion as part of human culture is supported by a complex, multi-level behavioral system. How can it be modeled scientifically? The book addresses graduate students and researchers concerned about the scientific study of religion, and biologist interested in interdisciplinary theory building in the field.
Download or read book A Study of Religious Fanaticism written by Naomi Marguerite Goldthwaite Ekdahl and published by . This book was released on 1929 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Adolescence written by Roger J.R. Levesque and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-09-05 with total page 3161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Adolescence breaks new ground as an important central resource for the study of adolescence. Comprehensive in breath and textbook in depth, the Encyclopedia of Adolescence – with entries presented in easy-to-access A to Z format – serves as a reference repository of knowledge in the field as well as a frequently updated conduit of new knowledge long before such information trickles down from research to standard textbooks. By making full use of Springer’s print and online flexibility, the Encyclopedia is at the forefront of efforts to advance the field by pushing and creating new boundaries and areas of study that further our understanding of adolescents and their place in society. Substantively, the Encyclopedia draws from four major areas of research relating to adolescence. The first broad area includes research relating to "Self, Identity and Development in Adolescence". This area covers research relating to identity, from early adolescence through emerging adulthood; basic aspects of development (e.g., biological, cognitive, social); and foundational developmental theories. In addition, this area focuses on various types of identity: gender, sexual, civic, moral, political, racial, spiritual, religious, and so forth. The second broad area centers on "Adolescents’ Social and Personal Relationships". This area of research examines the nature and influence of a variety of important relationships, including family, peer, friends, sexual and romantic as well as significant nonparental adults. The third area examines "Adolescents in Social Institutions". This area of research centers on the influence and nature of important institutions that serve as the socializing contexts for adolescents. These major institutions include schools, religious groups, justice systems, medical fields, cultural contexts, media, legal systems, economic structures, and youth organizations. "Adolescent Mental Health" constitutes the last major area of research. This broad area of research focuses on the wide variety of human thoughts, actions, and behaviors relating to mental health, from psychopathology to thriving. Major topic examples include deviance, violence, crime, pathology (DSM), normalcy, risk, victimization, disabilities, flow, and positive youth development.
Download or read book Dark Religion written by Vladislav Šolc and published by Chiron Publications. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jungian analysts Vlado Solc and George J. Didier set out to explore the psychological dynamics and causes of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism. The book offers an in-depth-psychological analysis of what happens when a person becomes possessed by the unconscious energies of the Self. Dark Religion also reveals that spirituality is an inherent dimension of human life and one of its most essential needs. It only becomes "dark" when it denies, ignores, or separates itself from its vital roots. The authors coin the term "dark religion" to describe all forms of fanatical, radical and extreme religions. Their study shows how dark religion leads to profound conflicts on both the personal and cultural level--including terrorism and wars. surveys the vast contemporary cultural and religious landscapes. All the while discovering the emergent forms of spiritual praxis in light of postmodernism and the rise of fundamentalism in the new millennium.
Download or read book Fanaticism written by Alberto Toscano and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A genealogy of fanaticism—unearthing its long history, before it became a tool in the Clash of Civilizations It is commonplace to hear fanaticism described as a deviant or extreme variant of an already irrational set of religious beliefs, an assertion that helps to demonize convictions outside political orthodoxy. Alberto Toscano’s compelling and erudite counter-history explodes this accepted convention by exploring the critical role fanaticism played in the formation of modern politics and the liberal state. Showing how fanaticism results from a failure to formulate an adequate emancipatory politics, this illuminating history sheds new light on an idea that continues to dominate debates about faith and secularism. This expanded edition includes new material that revisits the idea of fanaticism as it operates at the limits of the liberal political imaginary, highlighting its relation to fraternal violence, political purity and the refusal of compromise, as well as its centrality to times of social crisis and international conflict.
Download or read book Civil Society and Fanaticism written by Dominique Colas and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes bibliographical refeerences and index.
Download or read book Holy War Just War written by Lloyd H. Steffen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2007 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holy War, Just War explores the "dark side" in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism by examining how the concept of ultimate value contributes to religious violence. The book states that religion has within its own conceptual tools the resources to understand its own dark side and that religious people must subject their religion to a moral vision of goodness and constrain those parts that make for violence and hatred.
Download or read book You Don t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right written by Brad Hirschfield and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2009-03-10 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conflict is an opportunity to learn and grow–and often to grow closer to one another. Brad Hirschfield knows what it means to be a fanatic; he was one. A former activist in the West Bank, he was committed to reconstructing the Jewish state within its biblical borders. Now he is devoted to teaching inclusiveness, celebrating diversity, and delivering a message of acceptance. In You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right, Rabbi Hirschfield uses his own spiritual journey to help people of all faiths find acceptance and tolerance, as well as a path to peace, understanding, and hope that will appeal to the common wisdom of all religions.
Download or read book The Root Causes of Terrorism written by Mahmoud Masaeli and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen years after the tragic events of 9/11, bombs are still exploding and innocent people are being killed by terrorist groups in both western and Islamic societies. Most of these sinisterly threatening events are motivated by religious claims, or are taking place in religiously affected places. Is religion the main cause of terrorism, or does terrorism still arise because of leaders who brainwash and coach future terrorists so that they kill under the banner of religion? The religious imagination seems to hold here an influential power in the creation of ‘delusion’ to orient the ‘bigot’ believers toward fulfilling their religious duty against those who are religious in a different way or are not religious at all. Religion, in this sense, is tightly allied with political aspirations. In spite of the religious justification of the act of killing, ‘enlightened’ religious leaders and religious-minded people believe and argue that religion is a source of love and affection. Therefore, the sacred texts of religious tradition must be read from a ‘humanist’ perspective because the ultimate message of religion is about the appreciation of the principle of humanity. This is a growing attitude among many religious people today who believe that God is merciful and compassionate, and never orders resentment, violence, and killing of innocent people. In addition, no true religious tradition appreciates self-serving interpretations promoting violence against others. If religion disregards love, affection, and compassion as its essence, it drops into the dire vortex of ideological dogma, as it is in the case for the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, and Al-Shabab. Therefore, any interpretation that admits violence and killing would be a mere provincial reading of the religious texts agitated by purposeful intentions aimed at political goals. This book investigates and addresses the root causes of terrorism from a religious studies perspective. The themes analysed and discussed here mainly include a range of religious and philosophical issues such as religious violence in scriptural monotheism, radical interpretations of religious texts, militancy and sacrifice, apocalypticism and terrorism, and religious terrorism today. The book brings together new approaches adopted by the authors to not only trace the causes of terrorism in various religious interpretations and realms, but also reach a common definition of the main religious causes beyond diverse perspectives, and advance solutions against religious-inspired terrorism.
Download or read book Force and Fanaticism written by Simon Ross Valentine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wahhabism is an Islamic reform movement found mainly in Saudi Arabia. Closely linked to the Saudi monarchy, it enforces a strict code of morality and conduct monitored by mutawa (religious police), and governs every facet of Saudi life according to its own strict interpretation of Shariah, including gender segregation. Wahhabism also prohibits the practice of any other faith (even other forms of Islam) in Saudi Arabia, which is also the only country that forbids women from driving. But what exactly is Wahhabism? This question had long occupied Valentine, so he lived in the Kingdom for three years, familiarizing himself with its distinct interpretation of Islam. His book defines Wahhabism and Wahhabi beliefs and considers the life and teaching of Muham-mad ibn Abd'al Wahhab and the later expansion of his sect. Also discussed are the rejection of later developments in Islam such as bid'ah; harmful innovations, among them celebrating the prophet's birthday and visiting the tombs of saints; the destruction of holy sites due to the fear of idolatry; Wahhabi law, which imposes the death sentence for crimes as archaic as witch- craft and sorcery, and the connection of Wahhabism with militant Islam globally. Drawing on interviews with Saudis from all walks of life, including members of the feared mutawa, this book appraises of one of the most significant movements in contemporary Islam.
Download or read book The End of Faith Religion Terror and the Future of Reason written by Sam Harris and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-09-17 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated....Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say."—Natalie Angier, New York Times In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs—even when these beliefs inspire the worst human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic. Winner of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.
Download or read book The Ordeal of Change written by Eric Hoffer and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Varieties of Religious Experience written by William James and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."
Download or read book The Thirty Year Genocide written by Benny Morris and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Cultish written by Amanda Montell and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of those life-changing reads that makes you see—or, in this case, hear—the whole world differently.” —Megan Angelo, author of Followers “At times chilling, often funny, and always perceptive and cogent, Cultish is a bracing reminder that the scariest thing about cults is that you don't realize you're in one till it's too late.”—Refinery29.com The New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how “cultish” groups, from Jonestown and Scientologists to SoulCycle and social media gurus, use language as the ultimate form of power. What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.
