Download or read book Landscape Religion and the Supernatural written by Matthias Egeler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first study to tackle the relationship between landscape and religion in-depth. Author Matthias Egeler overviews previous theories of the relationship between landscape and religion and then pushes this theorizing further with a rich case study: the supernatural landscape of the Icelandic Westfjords. There, religion and the supernatural--from churches to elf hills--are ubiquitous in the landscape and, as Egeler shows, this example sheds entirely new light on core aspects of the relationship between landscape, religion, and the supernatural.

Download or read book Landscape Religion and the Supernatural written by Matthias Egeler and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of "time and memory", "repeating patterns", "identity formation", "morality", "labor", "playfulness and adventure", "power and subversion", "sound", "emotions", "coping with contingency", "home and unhomeliness", as well as "nature and environment", the book engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary field of landscape theory and the study of religions. It brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been collected since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this rich heritage with the insights of landscape theory both in and beyond the study of religions allows important new contributions to theorizing landscape and religion, especially when it comes to considering the perspectives on landscape held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have stood in the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities, and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the urban perspectives of literature and the arts"--

Download or read book The Paranormal and Popular Culture written by Darryl Caterine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-18 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in preternatural and supernatural themes has revitalized the Gothic tale, renewed explorations of psychic powers and given rise to a host of social and religious movements based upon claims of the fantastical. And yet, in spite of this widespread enthusiasm, the academic world has been slow to study this development. This volume rectifies this gap in current scholarship by serving as an interdisciplinary overview of the relationship of the paranormal to the artefacts of mass media (e.g. novels, comic books, and films) as well as the cultural practices they inspire. After an introduction analyzing the paranormal’s relationship to religion and entertainment, the book presents essays exploring its spiritual significance in a postmodern society; its (post)modern representation in literature and film; and its embodiment in a number of contemporary cultural practices. Contributors from a number of discplines and cultural contexts address issues such as the shamanistic aspects of Batman and lesbianism in vampire mythology. Covering many aspects of the paranormal and its effect on popular culture, this book is an important statement in the field. As such, it will be of utmost interest to scholars of religious studies as well as media, communication, and cultural studies.

Download or read book Supernatural Agents written by Iikka Pyysiainen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cognitive science of religion is a rapidly growing field whose practitioners apply insights from advances in cognitive science in order to provide a better understanding of religious impulses, beliefs, and behaviors. In this book Ilkka Pyysiäinen shows how this methodology can profitably be used in the comparative study of beliefs about superhuman agents. He begins by developing a theoretical outline of the basic, modular architecture of the human mind and especially the human capacity to understand agency. He then goes on to discuss examples of supernatural agency in detail, arguing that the human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others forms the basis of conceptions of supernatural agents and of such social cognition in which supernatural agents are postulated as interested parties in social life. Beliefs about supernatural agency are natural, says Pyysiäinen, in the sense that such concepts are used in an intuitive and automatic fashion. Two dots and a straight line below them automatically trigger the idea of a face, for example. Given that the mind consists of a host of such modular mechanisms, certain kinds of beliefs will always have a selective advantage over others. Abstract theological concepts are usually elaborate versions of such simpler and more contagious folk conceptions. Pyysiäinen uses ethnographical and survey materials as well as doctrinal treatises to show that there are certain recurrent patterns in beliefs about supernatural agents both at the level of folk-religion and of formal theology.

Download or read book In Gods We Trust written by Scott Atran and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-09 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

Download or read book The Natural and the Supernatural written by John Oman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive discussion regarding the sacred aspects of human existence in their relationship with the material world.

Download or read book The Rise of Network Christianity written by Brad Christerson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, when traditionally organized religious groups are seeing declining membership and participation, are networks of independent churches growing so explosively? Drawing on in-depth interviews with leaders and participants, The Rise of Network Christianity explains the social forces behind the fastest-growing form of Christianity in the U.S., which Brad Christerson and Richard Flory have labeled "Independent Network Charismatic." This form of Christianity emphasizes aggressive engagement with the supernatural-including healing, direct prophecies from God, engaging in "spiritual warfare" against demonic spirits--and social transformation. Christerson and Flory argue that macro-level social changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital revolution, have given competitive advantages to religious groups organized as networks rather than traditionally organized congregations and denominations. Network forms of governance allow for experimentation with controversial supernatural practices, innovative finances and marketing, and a highly participatory, unorthodox, and experiential faith, which is attractive in today's unstable religious marketplace. Christerson and Flory hypothesize that as more religious groups imitate this type of governance, religious belief and practice will become more experimental, more orientated around practice than theology, more shaped by the individual religious "consumer," and authority will become more highly concentrated in the hands of individuals rather than institutions. Network Christianity, they argue, is the future of Christianity in America.

Download or read book Supernatural Religion written by Walter Richard Cassels and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book History and the Supernatural in Medieval England written by C. S. Watkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a fascinating study of religious culture in England from 1050 to 1250. Drawing on the wealth of material about religious belief and practice that survives in the chronicles, Carl Watkins explores the accounts of signs, prophecies, astrology, magic, beliefs about death, and the miraculous and demonic. He challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about religious belief, questioning in particular the attachment of many historians to terms such as 'clerical' and 'lay', 'popular' and 'elite', 'Christian' and 'pagan' as explanatory categories. The evidence of the chronicles is also set in its broader context through explorations of miracle collections, penitential manuals, exempla and sermons. The book traces shifts in the way the supernatural was conceptualized by learned writers and the ways in which broader patterns of belief evolved during this period. This original account sheds important light on belief during a period in which the religious landscape was transformed.

Download or read book Space Place and Religious Landscapes written by Darrelyn Gunzburg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

Download or read book Landscapes of Power Landscapes of Conflict written by Tina L. Thurston and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-12-11 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tina Thurston’s Landscapes of Power; Landscapes of Conflict is a thi- generation processual analysis of sociopolitical evolution during the Iron Age in southern Scandinavia. Several red flags seem to be raised at once. Are not archaeologists now postprocessual, using new interpretive approaches to - derstand human history? Is not evolution a discredited concept in which - cieties are arbitrarily arranged along a unilinear scheme? Should not modern approaches be profoundly historical and agent-centered? In any event, were not Scandinavians the ultimate barbarian Vikings parasitizing the complex civilized world of southern and central Europe? Tina Thurston’s book focuses our attention on the significant innovations of anthropological archaeology at the end of the twentieth century. A brief overview of processual archaeology can set the context for - preciating Landscapes ofPower; Landscapes of Conflict. During the 1960s the emergent processual archaeology (a. k. a. the New Archaeology) cryst- lized an evolutionary paradigm that framed research with the comparative ethnography of Service and Fried. It was thought that human societies p- gressed through stages of social development and that the goal was to d- cover the evolutionary prime movers (such as irrigation, warfare, trade, and population) that drove social and cultural change. By the 1970s prime movers had fallen from favor and social evolution was conceived as complicated flows of causation involving many variables.

Download or read book The Buddha Side written by Alexander Soucy and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most common description of the supernatural landscape in Vietnam makes a distinction between Buddhist and non-Buddhist “sides.” The “Buddha side” (ben phat) is the focus of this investigation into the intersection of gender, power, and religious praxis. Employing an anthropological approach to Buddhist practice that takes into account modes of action that are not only socially constructed and contextual, but also negotiated by the actors, The Buddha Side uniquely explores how gender and age affect understandings of what it means to be a Buddhist. In seeking to map out the ways and meanings of Buddhist engagement, Alexander Soucy examines everything from the skeptical statements of young men and devotional performances of young women to the pilgrimages of older women and performances of orthodoxy used by older men to assert their position within the pagoda space. Soucy draws on more than four years’ experience conducting ethnographic research in Hanoi to investigate how religious practice is grounded in the constitution and marking of social identity. From this in-depth view, he describes the critical role of religion in shaping social contexts and inserting selves into them. Religion can thus be described as a form of theatre—one in which social identities (youth, old age, masculinity, femininity, authority) are constructed and displayed via religious practice. A compelling look at the performative aspect of Buddhism in contemporary Vietnam, The Buddha Side will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in Buddhism as it is practiced on the ground.

Download or read book More Than a Scenic Mountain Landscape written by Kurt Frederick Anschuetz and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study focuses on the cultural-historical environment of the 88,900-acre (35,560-ha) Valles Caldera National Preserve (VCNP) over the past four centuries of Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. governance. It includes a review and synthesis of available published and unpublished historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic literature about the human occupation of the area now contained within the VCNP. Documents include historical maps, texts, letters, diaries, business records, photographs, land and mineral patents, and court testimony.‍?‍?This study presents a cultural-historical framework of VCNP land use that will be useful to land managers and researchers in assessing the historical ecology of the property. It provides VCNP administrators and agents the cultural-historical background needed to develop management plans that acknowledge traditional associations with the Preserve, and offers managers additional background for structuring and acting on consultations with affiliated communities.

Download or read book The Proper Study of Religion After Jonathan Z Smith written by Sam D. Gill and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021-02-24 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Proper Study of Religion, Sam Gill charts an innovative course of development for the academic study of religion by engaging the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith, Gill's teacher and mentor for fifty years. Building on Smith's foundational legacy through creative encounters, Gill explores an extensive range of absorbing topics including: comparison as essential to academic technique and to human knowledge itself; play, philosophically understood, as a coredynamic of Smith's entire program; the relationship of academic document-based studies to the sensory-rich real world of religions; and self-moving as providing a biological and philosophical foundation on which to develop and expand upon a proper academic study of religion.

Download or read book Blood from the Sky written by Adam Jortner and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape—fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers and American founders explicitly denied the possibility of supernatural events, dismissing them as deliberate falsehoods—and, therefore, efforts to suborn the state. Many feared that belief in the supernatural itself was a danger to democracy. In this way, miracles became a political problem and prompted violent responses in the religious communities of Prophetstown, Turtle Creek, and Nauvoo. In Blood from the Sky, Adam Jortner argues that the astonishing breadth and extent of American miracles and supernaturalism following independence derived from Enlightenment ideas about proof and sensory evidence, offering a chance at certain belief in an uncertain religious climate. Jortner breaks new ground in explaining the rise of radical religion in antebellum America, revisiting questions of disenchantment, modernity, and religious belief in a history of astounding events that—as early Americans would have said—needed to be seen to be believed.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Global Religion written by Mark Juergensmeyer and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012 with total page 1529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents entries A to L of a two-volume encyclopedia discussing religion around the globe, including biographies, concepts and theories, places, social issues, movements, texts, and traditions.

Download or read book Late Roman Towns in Britain written by Adam Rogers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Adam Rogers examines the late Roman phases of towns in Britain. Critically analysing the archaeological notion of decline, he focuses on public buildings, which played an important role, administrative and symbolic, within urban complexes. Arguing against the interpretation that many of these monumental civic buildings were in decline or abandoned in the later Roman period, he demonstrates that they remained purposeful spaces and important centres of urban life. Through a detailed assessment of the archaeology of late Roman towns, this book argues that the archaeological framework of decline does not permit an adequate and comprehensive understanding of the towns during this period. Moving beyond the idea of decline, this book emphasises a longer-term perspective for understanding the importance of towns in the later Roman period.