Download or read book Foucault s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs written by E. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The catacombs of Rome have captured imaginations for centuries. This innovative study takes a fresh look at these underground spaces, and considers how art, space, texts, and practices can tell us more about the catacombs and the people who dug and decorated them.

Download or read book History Space and Place written by Susanne Rau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spaces, too, have a history. And history always takes place in spaces. But what do historians mean when they use the word "spaces"? And how can spaces be historically investigated? Susanne Rau provides a survey of the history of Western concepts of space, opens up interdisciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of space in fields ranging from physics and geography to philosophy and sociology, and explains how historical spatial analysis can be methodologically and conceptually conceived and carried out in practice. The case studies presented in the book come from the fields of urban history, the history of trade, and global history including the history of cartography, but its analysis is equally relevant to other fields of inquiry. This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to the theory and methodology of historical spatial analysis. Supported by Open Access funds of the University of Erfurt

Download or read book Utopianism for a Dying Planet written by Gregory Claeys and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-12-10 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

Download or read book Ritual Servitudes and Christian Social Practices in Ghana written by David Stiles-Ocran and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-21 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the kinds of Christian service or diaconia that develop in non-institutionalized practices for supporting survivors of indigenous ritual servitude or Trokosi in Africa. Drawing on empirical research from Ghana, it examines the possibilities of freedom, equality, and dignity for liberated Trokosi and the manner in which these women’s experiences constitute a repudiation of dominant patriarchal family systems. With close attention to the work of indigenous parachurches – which function outside of institutionalized churches – in challenging the contemporary practice of ritual slavery and offering its survivors a lived space in which they need not remain “hidden” as they seek restoration and integration into wider society, Ritual Servitudes and Christian Social Practices in Ghana will appeal to scholars of sociology, theology, and religion with interests in gender, contemporary ministries and African religion.

Download or read book The Place of God at the Bookends of the Bible written by David W. Larsen and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-10-09 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if everything in the Bible has a larger outer context than is usually accounted for? Missional and biblical theologies suggest that the Bible presents a grand story like a play with multiple acts. The acts typically include creation, fall, redemption, and finally restoration. But what if the whole story itself occurs in another larger setting, occurring within a mission running in the background throughout the whole Bible? How might this aid our research, reading, and application? And why is this being proposed now? This book explores these questions. The larger context is the production of the place of God—a home and homeland wherein God, with his people, dwell on earth. Since place is underdeveloped in biblical studies, the book presents a new method for interpreting place. Then the book lays out the case that a grand mission to produce the place of God becomes the outer context for the whole Bible. Finally, the book defends this proposal with an in-depth placial commentary of the bookends of the Bible, since these bookends provide keys to unlock this message, thereby inviting further study on the rest of the Bible and on the implications for this transformative perspective.

Download or read book Jewish Glass and Christian Stone written by Eric C. Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years scholars have re-evaluated the "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity, reaching new understandings of the ways shared origins gave way to two distinct and sometimes inimical religious traditions. But this has been a profoundly textual task, relying on the writings of rabbis, bishops, and other text-producing elites to map the terrain of the "parting." This book takes up the question of the divergence of Judaism and Christianity in terms of material--the stuff made, used, and left behind by the persons that lived in and between these religions as they were developing. Considering the glass, clay, stone, paint, vellum, and papyrus of ancient Jews and Christians, this book maps the "parting" in new ways, and argues for a greater role for material and materialism in our reconstructions of the past.

Download or read book The Bioarchaeology of Structural Violence written by Lori A. Tremblay and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a resource for bioarchaeologists interested in using a structural violence framework to better understand and contextualize the lived experiences of past populations. One of the most important elements of bioarchaeological research is the study of health disparities in past populations. This book offers an analysis of such work, but with the benefit of an overarching theoretical framework. It examines the theoretical framework used by scholars in cultural and medical anthropology to explore how social, political, and/or socioeconomic structures and institutions create inequalities resulting in health disparities for the most vulnerable or marginalized segments of contemporary populations. It then takes this framework and shows how it can allow researchers in bioarchaeology to interpret such socio-cultural factors through analyzing human skeletal remains of past populations. The book discusses the framework and its applications based on two main themes: the structural violence of gender inequality and the structural violence of social and socioeconomic inequalities.

Download or read book The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata written by Robert D. Heaton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-04-24 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composed within the first Christian century by a Roman named Hermas, the Shepherd remains a mysterious and underestimated book to scholars and laypeople alike. Robert D. Heaton argues that early Christians mainly received the Shepherd positively and accepted it unproblematically alongside texts that would ultimately be canonized, requiring decisive actions to exclude it from the late-emerging collection of texts now known as the New Testament. Freshly evaluating the evidence for its popularity in patristic treatises, manuscript recoveries, and Christian material culture, Heaton propounds an interpretation of the Shepherd of Hermas as a book meant to guide his readers toward salvation. Ultimately, Heaton depicts the loss of the Shepherd from the closed catalogue of Christian scriptures as a deliberate constrictive move by the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, who found it useless for his political, theological, and ecclesiological objectives and instead characterized it as a book favored by his heretical enemies. While the book’s detractors succeeded in derailing its diffusion for centuries, the survival of the Shepherd today attests that many dissented from the church’s final judgment about Hermas’s text, which portends a version of early Christianity that was definitively overridden by devotion to Christ himself, rather than principally to his virtues.

Download or read book Desiring Martyrs written by Harry O. Maier and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-16 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martyrs create space and time through the actions they take, the fate they suffer, the stories they prompt, the cultural narratives against which they take place and the retelling of their tales in different places and contexts. The title "Desiring Martyrs" is meant in two senses. First, it refers to protagonists and antagonists of the martyrdom narratives who as literary characters seek martyrs and the way they inscribe certain kinds of cultural and social desire. Second, it describes the later celebration of martyrs via narrative, martyrdom acts, monuments, inscriptions, martyria, liturgical commemoration, pilgrimage, etc. Here there is a cultural desire to tell or remember a particular kind of story about the past that serves particular communal interests and goals. By applying the spatial turn to these ancient texts the volume seeks to advance a still nascent social geographical understanding of emergent Christian and Jewish martyrdom. It explores how martyr narratives engage pre-existing time-space configurations to result in new appropriations of earlier traditions.

Download or read book European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro Theatrical Sites written by Mark Pizzato and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2024-04-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compares monumental designs and performance spaces of Christian, Buddhist, and related sanctuaries, exploring how brain networks, animal-human emotions, and cultural ideals are reflected historically and affected today as "inner theatre" elements. Integrating research across the humanities and sciences, this book explores how traditional designs of outer theatrical spaces left cultural imprints for the inner staging of Self and Other consciousness, which each of us performs daily based on how we think others view us. But believers also perform in a cosmic theatre. Ancestral spirits and gods (or God) watch and interact with them in awe-inspiring spaces, grooming affects toward in-group identification and sacrifice, or out-group rivalry and scapegoating. In a study of over 80 buildings – shown by 40 images in the book, plus thousands of photos and videos online – Pizzato demonstrates how they reflect meta-theatrical projections from prior generations. They also affect the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (4E) cognition of current visitors, who bring performance frameworks of belief, hope, and doubt to the sacred site. This involves neuro-social, inner/outer theatre networks with patriarchal, maternal, and trickster paradigms. European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites investigates performative material cultures, creating dialogs between theatre, philosophy, history, and various (cognitive, affective, social, biological) sciences. It applies them to the architecture of religious buildings: from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant in Europe, plus key sites in Jerusalem and prior “pagan” temples, to Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and imperial in China. It thus reveals individualist/collectivist, focal/holistic, analytical/dialectical, and melodramatic/tragicomic trajectories, with cathartic poetics for the future.

Download or read book Religious Representation in Place written by M. George and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Representation in Place brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the Humanities and Sciences to broaden the understanding of how religious symbols and spatial studies interact. The essays consider the relevance of religion in the experience of space, a fundamental dimension of culture and human life.

Download or read book Saving Images written by Gordon W. Lathrop and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gordon W. Lathrop explores the place of the Bible as the subject of critical exegesis in contemporary liturgy. The text is grounded in the life of the assembly and the role of intertextuality in its creation. Lathrop finds patterns in biblical narratives that suggest revising our models of the "shape" of liturgy (Dix, Schmemann) and our understanding of baptism, preaching, Eucharist, and congregational prayer.Saving Images calls for a new, reconceived biblical-liturgical movement that takes seriously both biblical scholarship and the mystery at the heart of worship.

Download or read book Jonah written by Amy Erickson and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dominant reading of the book of Jonah—that the hapless prophet Jonah is a lesson in not trying to run away from God—oversimplifies a profoundly literary biblical text, argues Amy Erickson. Likewise, the more recent understanding of Jonah as satire is problematic in its own right, laden as it is with anti-Jewish undertones and the superimposition of a Christian worldview onto a Jewish text. How can we move away from these stale interpretations to recover the richness of meaning that belongs to this short but noteworthy book of the Bible? This Illuminations commentary delves into Jonah’s reception history in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts while also exploring its representations in visual arts, music, literature, and pop culture. After this thorough contextualization, Erickson provides a fresh translation and exegesis, paving the way for pastors and scholars to read and utilize the book of Jonah as the provocative, richly allusive, and theologically robust text that it is.

Download or read book Michel Foucault and Theology written by James Bernauer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whilst Foucault's work has become a major strand of postmodern theology, the wider relevance of his work for theology still remains largely unexamined. Foucault both engages the Christian tradition and critically challenges its disciplinary regime. Michel Foucault and Theology brings together a selection of essays by leading Foucault scholars on a variety of themes within the history, thought and practice of theology. Revealing the diverse ways that the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) has been employed to rethink theology in terms of power, discourse, sexuality and the politics of knowledge, the authors examine power and sexuality in the church in late antiquity, (Castelli, Clark, Schuld), raise questions about the relationship between theology and politics (Bernauer, Leezenberg, Caputo), consider new challenges to the nature of theological knowledge in terms of Foucault's critical project (Flynn, Cutrofello, Beadoin, Pinto) and rethink theology in terms of Foucault's work on the history of sexuality (Carrette, Jordan, Mahon). This book demonstrates, for the first time, the influence and growing importance of Foucault's work for contemporary theology.

Download or read book Confessions of the Flesh written by Michel Foucault and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Brought to light at last--the fourth volume in the famous History of Sexuality series by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, his final work, which he had completed, but not yet published, upon his death in 1984 Michel Foucault's philosophy has made an indelible impact on Western thought, and his History of Sexuality series--which traces cultural and intellectual notions of sexuality, arguing that it is profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it--is one of his most influential works. At the time of his death in 1984, he had completed--but not yet edited or published--the fourth volume, which posits that the origins of totalitarian self-surveillance began with the Christian practice of confession. This is a text both sweeping and deeply personal, as Foucault--born into a French Catholic family--undoubtedly wrestled with these issues himself. Since he had stipulated "Pas de publication posthume," this text has long been secreted away. However, the sale of the Foucault archives in 2013--which made this text available to scholars--prompted his nephew to seek wider publication. This attitude was shared by Foucault's longtime partner, Daniel Defert, who said, "What is this privilege given to Ph.D students? I have adopted this principle: It is either everybody or nobody.""--

Download or read book The Mystery of Things written by Petra Carlsson Redell and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Religion and Culture written by Michel Foucault and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Michel Foucault (1926-84) has affected almost every discipline in the humanities, but few have appreciated how his work engaged with theological and religious themes. This reader brings together a selection of Foucault's essays, lectures and interviews with religion and theology from his earliest studies of madness to the final Confessions of the Flesh - the unpublished fourth volume brings together work by Foucault on avant-garde religious themes, such as the death of God and the religous space of literatures, Foucault's brief encounter with Japanese culture, Zen Buddhism and the political spirituality of Iran. It also includes a collection of studies on Foucault's work on Christianity. These essays and lectures provide a background to Foucault's enigmatic work on Christian confession, Augustine and the early Church fathers which to this day remains unpublished in accordance with an interpretation of Foucault's final request.