Download or read book If God Meant to Interfere written by Christopher Douglas and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
Download or read book Contemporary American Literature and Religion written by Halford E. Luccock and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contemporary American Literature and Religion written by Halford Edward Luccock and published by . This book was released on 1934 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Postmodern Belief written by Amy Hungerford and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
Download or read book In Search of the Sacred Book written by Aníbal González and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Search of the Sacred Book studies the artistic incorporation of religious concepts such as prophecy, eternity, and the afterlife in the contemporary Latin American novel. It departs from sociopolitical readings by noting the continued relevance of religion in Latin American life and culture, despite modernity's powerful secularizing influence. Analyzing Jorge Luis Borges's secularized "narrative theology" in his essays and short stories, the book follows the development of the Latin American novel from the early twentieth century until today by examining the attempts of major novelists, from María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo, to Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Lezama Lima, to "sacralize" the novel by incorporating traits present in the sacred texts of many religions. It concludes with a view of the "desacralization" of the novel by more recent authors, from Elena Poniatowska and Fernando Vallejo to Roberto Bolaño.
Download or read book Protestantism in America written by Randall Balmer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-18 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As America has become more pluralistic, Protestantism, with its long roots in American history and culture, has hardly remained static. This finely crafted portrait of a remarkably complex group of Christian denominations describes Protestantism's history, constituent subgroups and their activities, and the way in which its dialectic with American culture has shaped such facets of the wider society as healthcare, welfare, labor relations, gender roles, and political discourse. Part I provides an introduction to the religion's essential beliefs, a brief history, and a taxonomy of its primary American varieties. Part II shows the diversity of the tradition with vivid accounts of life and worship in a variety of mainline and evangelical churches. Part III explores the vexed relationship Protestantism maintains with critical social issues, including homosexuality, feminism, and social justice. The appendices include biographical sketches of notable Protestant leaders, a chronology, a glossary, and an annotated list of resources for further study.
Download or read book Culture and Redemption written by Tracy Fessenden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.
Download or read book Judaism in America written by Marc Lee Raphael and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews have been a religious and cultural presence in America since the colonial era, and the community of Jews in the United States today—some six million people—continues to make a significant contribution to the American religious landscape. Emphasizing developments in American Judaism in the last quarter century among active participants in Jewish worship, this book provides both a look back into the 350-year history of Judaic life and a well-crafted portrait of a multifaceted tradition today. Combining extensive research into synagogue archival records and secondary sources as well as interviews and observations of worship services at more than a hundred Jewish congregations across the country, Raphael's study distinguishes itself as both a history of the Judaic tradition and a witness to the vitality and variety of contemporary American Judaic life. Beginning with a chapter on beliefs, festivals, and life-cycle events, both traditional and non-traditional, and an explanation of the enormous variation in practice, Raphael then explores Jewish history in America, from the arrival of the first Jews to the present, highlighting the emergence and development of the four branches: Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform. After documenting the considerable variety among the branches, the book addresses issues of some controversy, notably spirituality, conversion, homosexuality, Jewish education, synagogue architecture, and the relationship to Israel. Raphael turns next to a discussion of eight American Jews whose thoughts and/or activities made a huge impact on American Judaism. The final chapter focuses on the return to tradition in every branch of Judaism and examines prospects for the future.
Download or read book American Exceptionalism as Religion written by Jordan Carson and published by . This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identifies American exceptionalism as an emerging form of religion while exploring alternatives through works by Don DeLillo, Ana Castillo, Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, and Marilynne Robinson.
Download or read book Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America written by Charles L. Cohen and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2008-07-09 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how a variety of print media—religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary “Bible-zines”—have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War
Download or read book Religion and American Literature Since 1950 written by Mark Eaton and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Flannery O'Connor and James Baldwin to the post-9/11 writings of Don DeLillo, imaginative writers have often been the most insightful chroniclers of the USA's changing religious life since the end of World War II. Exploring a wide range of writers from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and secular faiths, this book is an in-depth study of contemporary fiction's engagement with religious belief, identity and practice. Through readings of major writers of our time like Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson and John Updike, Mark Eaton discovers a more nuanced picture of the varieties of American religious experience: that they are more commonplace than cultural ideas of progressive secularisation or faith-based polarization might suggest.
Download or read book New Age and Neopagan Religions in America written by Sarah M. Pike and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Pike traces the history of New Age and Neopagan religions in the United States from their origins in the nineteenth century to their reemergence in the 1960s counterculture. She also considers the differences and similarities between the New Age and Neopagan movements as well as the antagonistic relationship between these two practices and other religions in America, particularly Christianity. Covering such topics as healing, gender and sexuality, millennialism, and ritual experience, she offers a sympathetic yet critical treatment of religious practices often marginalized yet soaring in popularity. Her book is a rich analysis of these spiritual worlds and social networks and questions why these faiths are flourishing at this point in American history.
Download or read book Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States written by R. Marie Griffith and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-06-09 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays from a special issue of American Quarterly explores the complex and sometimes contradictory ways that religion matters in contemporary public life. Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States offers a groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary conversation between scholars in American studies and religious studies. The contributors explore numerous modes through which religious faith has mobilized political action. They utilize a variety of definitions of politics, ranging from lobbying by religious leaders to the political impact of popular culture. Their work includes the political activities of a very diverse group of religious believers: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. In addition, the book explores the meanings of religion for people who might contest the term—those who are spiritual but not religious, for example, as well as activists who engage symbols of faith and community but who may not necessarily consider themselves members of a specific religion. Several essays also examine the meanings of secular identity, humanist politics, and the complex evocations of civil religion in American life. No other book on religion and politics includes anything like the diversity of religions, ethnicities, and topics that this one does—from Mormon political mobilization to attempts at Americanizing Muslims in the post-9/11 United States, from César Chávez to James Dobson, from interreligious cooperation and conflict over Darfur to the global politics surrounding the category of Hindus and South Asians in the United States.
Download or read book Religion and Literature written by Robert Detweiler and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring a selection from over 80 key texts, this anthology aims to help the reader to understand the common origins of religious expression and of literature. The texts included cover classical literature, the Bible, English and European classics and contemporary works.
Download or read book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-09-24 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence. Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises. Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person,' a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World,' which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,' a dark, hilarious series of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women. Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the absurd, the surprising, and the illuminating from every situation. This collection will enthrall DFW fans, and provides a perfect introduction for new readers.
Download or read book America and Other Fictions written by Ed Simon and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches. 'Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told.' Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture
Download or read book The New Holy Wars written by Robert Henry Nelson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines economics and environmentalism as competing public religions that derive from, and continue, a Christian worldview; argues that debates over global warming and other environmental issues are ultimately based on theological differences between their respective adherents"--Provided by publisher.
