Download or read book Culture and Transcendence written by Wessel Stoker and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spectrum of religious experience and spirituality in contemporary postmodern, postsecular and religiously pluralized Western culture is extremely broad. Is it possible to trace the development, the shifts, breaches and patterns of religious and spiritual transcendence in this deeply diversified context? In this volume, a heuristic model of four types of transcendence is proposed and discussed. The four types are immanent transcendence, radical transcendence, radical immanence and transcendence as alterity. Of each type two examples from contemporary cultural discourses, ranging from theology and philosophy to popular culture are presented and the viability of the model as such is critically assessed. The pairs of examples show how different kinds of content are given to the same type. By illuminating this dialectic between formal categories of notions of transcendence and their specific content in various areas of culture, the book can aid further exploration of the preconditions, possibilities, difficulties and limitations of relating to and expressing (a) sense(s) of transcendence within a postmodern world.
Download or read book Crisis of Transcendence written by J. Sage Elwell and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-12-23 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Internet to the iPhone, digital technology is no mere cultural artifact. It affects how we experience and understand our world and ourselves at the deepest levels-it is a fundamental condition of living. The digitization of modern life constitutes an essential field of religious concern because it impacts our individual and cultural sensibilities so profoundly. Despite this, it has yet to be thematized as the subject of religious or theological reflection. The Crisis of Transcendence remedies this by asking a single significant question: How is digital technology impacting the moral and spiritual depth of culture? How can something as ineffable and nebulous as the depth of culture be known and articulated, let alone critiqued? Author J. Sage Elwell suggests that an answer lies in the arts. The arts have historically acted as a barometer of the depth of culture, reflecting the spiritual impulses and inclinations at the heart of society. He argues that if the arts matter at all, they will illuminate more than themselves. Through an experimental interpretation of digital art, Elwell offers a critical reflection on how digital technology is changing us and the world we live in at a level of religious significance. Employing a theological aesthetic of digital art, this book shows how the advent of digital technology as a revolutionary cultural medium is transforming the ways we think about God, the soul, and morality.
Download or read book Divine Transcendence and the Culture of Change written by David H. Hopper and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hopper's historical-theological study not only illuminates the past but also sheds light on the tumultuous present, revealing how a recaptured understanding of God's transcendence can confront the thoughtless tolerance and inward-facing spiritual consumerism of our own time and radically transform both theology and culture today. --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Transnational Transcendence written by Thomas J. Csordas and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection examines the transnational movements, effects, and transformations of religion in the contemporary world, offering a fresh perspective on the interrelation between globalization and religion. Transnational Transcendence challenges some widely accepted ideas about this relationship—in particular, that globalization can be understood solely as an economic phenomenon and that its religious manifestations are secondary. The book points out that religion's role remains understudied and undertheorized as an element in debates about globalization, and it raises questions about how and why certain forms of religious practice and intersubjectivity succeed as they cross national and cultural boundaries. Framed by Thomas J. Csordas's introduction, this timely volume both urges further development of a theory of religion and globalization and constitutes an important step toward that theory.
Download or read book Transcendence written by Gaia Vince and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, a winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books shows how four tools enabled has us humans to control the destiny of our species "A wondrous, visionary work." --Tim Flannery, scientist and author of the bestselling The Weather Makers What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Readers of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution -- a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones -- caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture that goes back into deep time. She explains how, through four key elements -- fire, language, beauty, and time -- our species diverged from the evolutionary path of all other animals, unleashing a compounding process that launched us into the Space Age and beyond. Provocative and poetic, Transcendence shows how a primate took dominion over nature and turned itself into something marvelous.
Download or read book The Turn to Transcendence written by Glenn W. Olsen and published by Catholic University of America Press + ORM . This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Phenomenal . . . A must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death and replace it with the only alternative” (The Imaginative Conservative). Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, historian Glenn W. Olsen—author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with American and Modernity—sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. The Turn to Transcendence traces both the loss of transcendence and attempts to recover it while making its own proposals. Neither reactionary nor modernist, it questions how—under conditions of modern life—some form of the sacred and some form of the secular might both flourish at the same time. But it also provides a warning that a religion unable to maintain itself with its own overt architecture, language, and calendars against an enveloping secular culture is destined for oblivion. “Glenn Olsen’s book could hardly be more pivotal or insightful. Confronting the growing amnesia regarding culture’s religious origin and transcendent purpose, Olsen proves both a masterful cartographer of modernity and a visionary of a culture that encourages and enables us to seek beyond ourselves.” —Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus “A brilliant book. It rests on an amazing amount of scholarship that is wide-ranging in history, literature, art, science, music, theology, and philosophy.” —James Hitchcock, professor of history, St. Louis University
Download or read book Thinking from the Han written by David L. Hall and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the issues of self (including gender), truth, and transcendence in classical Chinese and Western philosophy.
Download or read book High Culture written by Christopher Hugh Partridge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Le site de l'éditeur indique : "Throughout history, humans have always been fascinated by drugs and altered states. Despite the risk of addiction, many have used drugs as technologies to induce moments of meaning-making transcendence. This book traces the quest for transcendence and meaning through drugs in the modern West. Starting with the Romantic fascination with opium, it goes on to chronicle the discovery of anesthetics, psychiatric and religious interest in hashish, the bewitching power of mescaline and hallucinogenic fungi, as well as the more recent uses of LSD. It fills a major gap in our understanding of contemporary alternative and in the study of countercultures and popular culture. Today we are seeing increased social and scientific attention to both the positive and the negative effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly following the legalization of marijuana for medicinal and/or recreational use in some US states, as well as court cases involving the sacramental use of drugs. This fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of the controversial relationship between drugs and spirituality could not be more timely."
Download or read book Looking Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is undergoing a transformation in current Western society. In addition to organized religions, there is a notable movement towards spirituality that is not associated with any institutions but in which experiences and notions of transcendence are still important. Transcendence can be described as God, the absolute, Mystery, the Other, the other as alterity, depending on one’s worldview. In this book, these shifts in the views of transcendence in various areas of culture such as philosophy, theology, art, and politics are explored on the basis of a fourfold heuristic model (proposed by Wessel Stoker). In conversation with this model, various authors, established scholars in their fields, explain the meaning and role, or the critique, of transcendence in the thought of contemporary thinkers, fields of discourse, or cultural domains. Looking Beyond? will stimulate further research on the theme of transcendence in contemporary culture, but can also serve as a textbook for courses in various disciplines, ranging from philosophy to theology, cultural studies, literature, art, and politics.
Download or read book An Anthropology of Absence written by Mikkel Bille and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-03-24 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In studying material culture, anthropologists and archaeologists use meaningful physical objects from a culture to help understand the less tangible aspects of that culture, such as societal structure, rituals, and values. What happens when these objects are destroyed, by war, natural disaster, or other historical events? Through detailed explanations of eleven international case studies, the contributions reveal that the absence of objects can be just as telling as their presence, while the objects created to memorialize a loss also have important cultural implications. Covering everything from organ donation, to funerary rituals, to prisoners of war, The Archaeology of Absence is written at an important intersection of archaeological and anthropological study. Divided into three sections, this volume uses the "presence" of absence to compare cultural perceptions of: material qualities and created memory, the mind/body connection, temporality, and death. This rich text provides a strong theoretical framework for anthropologists and archaeologists studying material culture.
Download or read book Digital Existence written by Amanda Lagerkvist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture advances debates on digital culture and digital religion in two complementary ways. First, by focalizing the themes ‘ontology,’ ‘ethics’ and ‘transcendence,’ it builds on insights from research on digital religion in order to reframe the field and pursue an existential media analysis that further pushes beyond the mandatory focus in mainstream media studies on the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of digitalization. Second, the collection also implies a broadening of the scope of the debate in the field of media, religion and culture – and digital religion in particular – beyond ‘religion,’ to include the wider existential dimensions of digital media. It is the first volume on our digital existence in the budding field of existential media studies.
Download or read book Local Transcendence written by Alan Liu and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today’s society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present—the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism—including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory—and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.
Download or read book At the Crossroads of Art and Religion written by Hetty Zock and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 'turn to the subject' in modernity, aesthetic experiences have become crucial in the creation of meaning. This explains why art and religion are becoming increasingly intermingled in late modern Western culture. The search for meaning is no longer confined to traditional religious settings and it is especially in art that people are looking for moral and spiritual significance. Religion is being aestheticised while art is being spiritualised. This volume contains studies on the interface between art and religion. Scholars from art studies, theology, philosophy and psychology of religion address the following questions: What psychological and religious functions does art fulfil? What are the similarities and differences between aesthetic and religious experiences? How does the aestheticising of religion affect theological thinking? How does the spiritualising of art affect artistic practices and theory? Case studies are taken from literature, visual art, film and opera, both from 'high' and popular culture. Among others, there are chapters on J.M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians, Richard Wagner's operas, the Harry Potter books and the concept of beauty from a theological perspective. The contributors all highlight the crucial role of human imaginative capabilities and the capacity of art to open up wider horizons of meaning.
Download or read book Dharma the Way of Transcendence written by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and published by The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word dharma, originally from the Sanskrit, refers to the inherent, unchanging nature of something – sugar’s dharma is to be sweet, water’s dharma is to be wet, and fire’s dharma is to emit heat and light. Dharma also refers to our natural duty. We humans have ordinary dharma and an ultimate dharma that relates to who we are at soul level. That dharma requires that we ask existential questions and then seek ultimate answers – questions such as Who am I? Why am I here? and What is my ultimate purpose? Dharma, the Way of Transcendence is a compilation of lectures on human dharma given by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in 1972 as he toured India. Here he teaches that the dharma of all humans and every other living embodied soul – is service. No one can exist for a moment without serving someone or something else, even if it’s only the mind and senses. So the question is, whom or what can we serve if we want to be truest to ourselves?
Download or read book Transcendence and History written by Glenn Hughes and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcendence and History is an analysis of what philosopher Eric Voegelin described as “the decisive problem of philosophy”: the dilemma of the discovery of transcendent meaning and the impact of this discovery on human self-understanding. The world’s major religious and wisdom traditions are built upon the recognition of transcendent meaning, and our own cultural and linguistic heritage has long since absorbed the postcosmological division of reality into the two dimensions of “transcendence” and “immanence.” But the last three centuries in the West have seen a growing resistance to the idea of transcendent meaning; contemporary and “postmodern” interpretations of the human situation—both popular and intellectual—indicate a widespread eclipse of confidence in the truth of transcendence. In Transcendence and History, Glenn Hughes contributes to the understanding of transcendent meaning and the problems associated with it, assisting in the philosophical recovery of the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence. Depending primarily on the treatments of transcendence found in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, Hughes explores the historical discovery of transcendent meaning and then examines what it indicates about the structure of history. Hughes’s main focus, however, is on clarifying the problem of transcendence in relation to historical existence. Addressing both layreaders and scholars, Hughes applies the insights and analyses of Voegelin and Lonergan to considerable advantage. Transcendence and History will be of particular value to those who have grappled with the notion of transcendence in the study of philosophy, comparative religion, political theory, history, philosophical anthropology, and art or poetry. By examining transcendent meaning as the key factor in the search for ultimate meaning from ancient societies to the present, the book demonstrates how “the decisive problem of philosophy” both illuminates and presents a vital challenge to contemporary intellectual discourse.
Download or read book Scoring Transcendence written by Kutter Callaway and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Films are the lingua franca of western culture; for decades they have provided viewers with a universal way of understanding the human experience. And film music, Kutter Callaway demonstrates, has such a profound effect on the human spirit that it demands theological reflection. By engaging scores from the last decade of popular cinema, Callaway reveals how a musically aware approach to film can yield novel insights into the presence and activity of God in contemporary culture. And, through conversations with these films and their filmmakers, viewers can gain a new understanding of how God may be speaking to modern society through film and its transcendent melodies.
Download or read book Cultural Software written by J. M. Balkin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book J. M. Balkin offers a strikingly original theory of cultural evolution, a theory that explains shared understandings, disagreement, and diversity within cultures. Drawing on many fields of study--including anthropology, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology, and law--the author explores how cultures grow and spread, how shared understandings arise, and how people of different cultures can understand and evaluate each other's views. Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural information and know-how--cultural software--in human minds, Balkin says. Individuals embody cultural software and spread it to others through communication and social learning. Ideology, the author contends, is neither a special nor a pathological form of thought but an ordinary product of the evolution of cultural software. Because cultural understanding is a patchwork of older imperfect tools that are continually adapted to solve new problems, human understanding is partly adequate and partly inadequate to the pursuit of justice. Balkin presents numerous examples that illuminate the sources of ideological effects and their contributions to injustice. He also enters the current debate over multiculturalism, applying his theory to problems of mutual understanding between people who hold different worldviews. He argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals and shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible.
