Download or read book Fictional Practices of Spirituality I written by Leonardo Marcato and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: »Fictional Practices of Spirituality« provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations.
Download or read book Religious Fictionalism written by Robin Le Poidevin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element is an introduction to contemporary religious fictionalism, its motivation and challenges. Among the issues raised are: can religion be viewed as a game of make-believe? In what ways does religious fictionalism parallel positions often labelled 'fictionalist' in ethics and metaphysics? Does religious fictionalism represent an advance over its rivals? Can fictionalism provide an adequate understanding of the characteristic features of the religious life, such as worship, prayer, moral commitment? Does fictionalism face its own version of the problem of evil? Is realism about theistic (God-centred) language less religiously serious than fictionalism?
Download or read book Fictional Practice Magic Narration and the Power of Imagination written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tying on case studies from late antiquity to the 21st century, this is the first volume that systematically explores the inter-relationship between fictional narratives about magic and the real-world ritual art of practicing magicians.
Download or read book Pagan Theology written by Michael York and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pagan Theology, Michael York situates Paganism—one of the fastest-growing spiritual orientations in the West—as a world religion. He provides an introduction to, and expansion of, the concept of Paganism and provides an overview of Paganism's theological perspective and practice. He demonstrates it to be a viable and distinguishable spiritual perspective found around the world today in such forms as Chinese folk religion, Shinto, tribal religions, and neo-Paganism in the West. While adherents to many of these traditions do not use the word “pagan” to describe their beliefs or practices, York contends that there is an identifiable position possessing characteristics and understandings in common for which the label “pagan” is appropriate. After outlining these characteristics, he examines many of the world's major religions to explore religious behaviors in other religions which are not themselves pagan, but which have pagan elements. In the course of examining such behavior, York provides rich and lively descriptions of religions in action, including Buddhism and Hinduism. Pagan Theology claims Paganism’s place as a world religion, situating it as a religion, a behavior, and a theology.
Download or read book Sensible Shoes written by Sharon Garlough Brown and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sharon Garlough Brown tells the moving story of four strangers as they reluctantly arrive at a retreat center and find themselves drawn out of their separate stories of isolation and struggle and into a collective journey of spiritual practice, mutual support and personal revelation.
Download or read book Invented Religions written by Professor Carole M Cusack and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilizing contemporary scholarship on secularization, individualism, and consumer capitalism, this book explores religious movements founded in the West which are intentionally fictional: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, and Jediism. Their continued appeal and success, principally in America but gaining wider audience through the 1980s and 1990s, is chiefly as a result of underground publishing and the internet. This book deals with immensely popular subject matter: Jediism developed from George Lucas' Star Wars films; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded by 26-year-old student Bobby Henderson in 2005 as a protest against the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools; Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius which retain strong followings and participation rates among college students. The Church of All Worlds' focus on Gaia theology and environmental issues makes it a popular focus of attention. The continued success of these groups of Invented Religions provide a unique opportunity to explore the nature of late/post-modern religious forms, including the use of fiction as part of a bricolage for spirituality, identity-formation, and personal orientation.
Download or read book Finding Holy in the Suburbs written by Ashley Hales and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than half of Americans live in the suburbs. Yet for many Christians, the suburbs are ignored, demeaned, or seen as a selfish cop-out from a faithful Christian life. What does it look like to live a full Christian life in the suburbs? Ashley Hales invites you to look deeply into your soul as a suburbanite and discover what it means to live holy there.
Download or read book The Rivan Codex written by David Eddings and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Join David and Leigh Eddings on a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the extensive background materials they compiled before beginning the masterpiece of epic fantasy unforgettably set down in The Belgariad and The Malloreon and their two companion volumes, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress. Our tour stretches from the wealthy Empire of Tolnedra to the remote Isle of the Winds, from the mysterious mountains of Ulgoland to the forbidding reaches of darkest Mallorea. Along the way, you will meet old friends and enemies alike. Rare volumes will be opened to your eyes. Sacred holy books in which you may read the secrets of the Gods themselves and of their prophets. Scholarly histories of the rise and fall of empires from the Imperial Library at Tol Honeth. The profound mysteries of the Malloreon Gospels. THE RIVAN CODEX will enrich your understanding of all that has gone before . . . and whet your appetite for more spectacular adventures from this talented team.
Download or read book A Spacious Life written by Ashley Hales and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society constantly tells us to follow our dreams and live our best lives. But contrary to what we've been told, the good life we crave is not accomplished through limitless possibilities or even hustle and hurry—it can only be found in the confines of God's loving limits. Inviting us to discover a better way, Ashley Hales shows us a spacious life filled with purpose, joy, and rest.
Download or read book Romancing God written by Lynn S. Neal and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006-12-08 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the world of the evangelical romance novel, sex and desire are mitigated by an omnipresent third party--the divine. Thus romance is not just an encounter between lovers, but a triangle of affection: man, woman, and God. Although this literature is often disparaged by scholars and pastors alike, inspirational fiction plays a unique and important role in the religious lives of many evangelical women. In an engaging study of why women read evangelical romance novels, Lynn S. Neal interviews writers and readers of the genre and finds a complex religious piety among ordinary people. In evangelical love stories, the success of the hero and heroine's romance rests upon their religious choices. These fictional religious choices, readers report, often inspire real spiritual change in their own lives. Amidst the demands of daily life or during a challenge to one's faith, these books offer a respite from problems and a time for fun, but they also provide a means to cultivate piety and to appreciate the unconditional power of God's love. The reading of inspirational fiction emerges from and reinforces an evangelical lifestyle, Neal argues, but women's interpretations of the stories demonstrate the constant negotiations that characterize evangelical living. Neal's study of religion in practice highlights evangelicalism's aesthetic sensibility and helps to alter conventional understandings--both secular and religious--of this prominent subculture.
Download or read book Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction written by Ann Genzale and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nationhood and Improvised Belief in American Fiction highlights the ways religious belief and practice intersect with questions of national belonging in the work of major contemporary writers. Through readings of novels by Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Cristina García, and others, this book argues that the representations of syncretic, culturally hybrid, and improvised forms of religious practice operate in these novels as critiques of exclusionary constructions of national identity, providing models for alternate ways of belonging based on shared religious beliefs and practices. Rather than treating the religious history of the U.S. as one of increasing secularization, this book instead calls for greater attention to the diversity of religious experience in the U.S., as well as a deeper understanding of the ways in which these experiences can inform relationships to the national community.
Download or read book Spiritual Blues and Jazz People in African American Fiction written by A. Yemisi Jimoh and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jimoh (English, U. of Arkansas-Fayetteville) investigates African American intracultural issues that inform a more broadly intertextual use of music in creating characters and themes in fiction by US black writers. Conventional close readings of texts, she argues, often miss historical-sociopolitical discourses that can illuminate African American narratives. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Other Worlds written by Christopher G. White and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher White points to ways that both spiritual practices and scientific speculation about multiverses and invisible dimensions are efforts to peer into the hidden elements and even existential meaning of the universe. Creatively appropriated, these ideas can restore a spiritual sense that the world is greater than anything our eyes can see.
Download or read book TechGnosis written by Erik Davis and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TechGnosis is a cult classic of media studies that straddles the line between academic discourse and popular culture; it appeals to both those secular and spiritual, to fans of cyberpunk and hacker literature and culture as much as new-thought adherents and spiritual seekers How does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? In TechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword—Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah. The final chapters address the apocalyptic dreams that haunt technology, providing vital historical context as well as new ways to think about a future defined by the mutant intermingling of mind and machine, nightmare and fantasy.
Download or read book African Spirituality in Black Women s Fiction written by Elizabeth J. West and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-12 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers. Beginning with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, African Spirituality in Black Women's Fiction traces applications and transformations of African spirituality in black women's writings that culminate in the conscious and deliberate celebration of Africanity in Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The journey from Wheatley's veiled remembrances to Hurston's explicit gaze of continental Africa represents the literary journey of black women writers to represent Africa as not only a very real creative resource but also a liberating one. Hurston's icon of black female autonomy and self realization is woven from the thread work of African spiritual principles that date back to early black women's writings.
Download or read book War over Lemuria written by Richard Toronto and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life magazine described the Shaver Mystery as "the most celebrated rumpus that rocked the science fiction world." Its creators said it was a "new wave in science fiction." Critics called it "dangerous nonsense" and labeled its fans the lunatic fringe. Whatever else the Shaver Mystery was, it became a worldwide sensation between 1945 and 1948, one of the greatest controversies to hit the science fiction genre. Today these stories of the remnants of a sinister ancient civilization living in caverns under the Earth are an all but forgotten sidebar to the historical record. The Shaver Mystery began as a series of science fiction yarns in Amazing Stories nearly 70 years ago. The men behind it, Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver, were derided and seldom understood by a fandom that did its best to sweep them under the carpet of history. Though Ray Palmer was one of the earliest and biggest names in SF fandom, credited with many firsts in his field, his fannish brethren have roundly ignored him, thanks to the Shaver Mystery. What is the truth behind these men and their "mystery"? This is the question writers and editors that promoted the Shaver Mystery try to answer as they reveal the behind-the-scenes story of the phenomenon known as "Shaverism."
Download or read book Black Iron written by Franklin Veaux and published by Impious Empires. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1855, but not as we know it. The schism between the One True French Catholic Church and the heretical Italian Catholic Church has stoked three centuries of conflict, imploding the dream of European ascendancy. Thousands flee the Spanish Inquisition for havens in Germany, France, Britain and the colonies of the New World. The face and character of London has been indelibly altered by generations of refugees. Tasked with keeping order and preserving the ecumenical vision of the Holy French Catholic Church in the face of throngs clamoring for traditional British values, the London police find themselves in an awkward position. And nobody is quite sure how to deal with the technological innovation of animates: mindless laborers crafted from the body parts of the dead. A murderous plot with far-reaching implications casts a city torn between renaissance and tyranny as the unwitting catalyst for unspeakable global calamity. The fate of this world lies, as it often does, in the hands of a motley and disparate crew brought together by inglorious serendipity. Ironworks and iron fists will take London, and the Old World with it, to the cutting edge of a treacherous new century.
