Download or read book Levinas Messianism and Parody written by Terence Holden and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of 'messianism' in Continental philosophy, using a case study of Levinas to uncover its underlying philosophical intelligibility.
Download or read book Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy written by Martin Kavka and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-05-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy contests the ancient opposition between Athens and Jerusalem by retrieving the concept of meontology - the doctrine of nonbeing - from the Jewish philosophical and theological tradition. For Emmanuel Levinas, as well as for Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen and Moses Maimonides, the Greek concept of nonbeing (understood as both lack and possibility) clarifies the meaning of Jewish life. These thinkers of 'Jerusalem' use 'Athens' for Jewish ends, justifying Jewish anticipation of a future messianic era as well as portraying the subjects intellectual and ethical acts as central in accomplishing redemption. This book envisions Jewish thought as an expression of the intimate relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. It also offers new readings of important figures in contemporary Continental philosophy, critiquing previous arguments about the role of lived religion in the thought of Jacques Derrida, the role of Plato in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the centrality of ethics in the thought of Franz Rosenzweig.
Download or read book Negotiating the Boundaries Between Religion and Philosophy written by Joshua Phillip Peskin and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana written by Abamfo Ofori Atiemo and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been maintained that the secular nature of modern human rights makes them incompatible with the religious orientation of African and non-Western societies. However, in view of the resilience of religion in the global and local public sphere, it is important to explore how religion can contribute to the promotion and enjoyment of human rights. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ghana, Abamfo Ofori Atiemo here establishes a convergence between human rights and local religious and cultural values in African societies. He argues that human rights represent universal 'dream values'. This allows for a cultural embedding of human rights in Ghana and other non-Western societies. He argues that 'dream values' are usually presented in religious language and proclaimed, for example, by prophets and seers or expressed in certain forms of taboo, proverbs or legal norms. He employs the concept of inculturation, adaptation of the way Church teachings are presented to non-Christian cultures, as a hermeneutical tool for developing a model to understand the encounter between universal human rights and local cultures. Offering a new model for explaining the relation between religion and human rights, Religion and the Inculturation of Human Rights in Ghana offers a novel perspective on the links between global trends and local cultures underpinned by strong currents of religious ideas.
Download or read book Free Zone Scientology written by Aled Thomas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this novel academic study, Aled Thomas analyses modern issues surrounding boundaries and fluidity in contemporary Scientology. By using the Scientologist practice of 'auditing' as a case study, this book explores the ways in which new types of 'Scientologies' can emerge. The notion of Free Zone Scientology is characterised by its horizontal structure, in contrast to the vertical-hierarchy of the institutional Church of Scientology. With this in mind, Thomas explores the Free Zone as an example of a developing and fluid religion, directly addressing questions concerning authority, leadership and material objects. This book, by maintaining a double-focus on the top-down hierarchy of the Church of Scientology and the horizontal-fluid nature of the Free Zone, breaks away from previous research on new religions, with have tended to focus either on new religions as indices of broad social processes, such as secularization or globalization, or as exemplars of exotic processes, such as charismatic authority and brainwashing. Instead, Thomas adopts auditing as a method of providing an in-depth case study of a new religion in transition and transformation in the 21st century. This opens the study of contemporary and new religions to a series of new questions around hybrid religions (sacred and secular), and acts as a framework for the study of similar movements formed in recent decades.
Download or read book Neo Spiritual Aesthetics written by Lina Aschenbrenner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing embodied transformation in the context of Gaga, the Israeli dance improvisation practice, this book demystifies what Lina Aschenbrenner coins as “neo-spiritual aesthetics.” This book takes the reader on an analytical journey through a Gaga class, outlining the effective aesthetics of Gaga as an example for the broader field of neo-spiritualities. It distinguishes a threefold effect of Gaga practice-from a momentary extraordinary experience, to a lasting therapeutic effect, and finally Gaga's worldview potential. It situates the effect in an assemblage of interrelating aesthetics of environment, movement, and bodies. The book shows why seemingly leisure time activities such as Gaga form fruitful research objects to an academic study of religion and opens up research on neo-spiritual practices. In understanding the sensory effect of practice and its cultural and social implications, the book follows an Aesthetics of Religion approach. It departs from the idea that cognition is embodied and that the body is thus central to understanding cultural and social phenomena. Drawing upon a wide array of data gathered in the context of Gaga at the Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, the book weaves together different methods of discourse, ritual, movement, body knowledge, and narrative analysis, while acknowledging insights from neuroscience and cognitive science.
Download or read book UFOs Conspiracy Theories and the New Age written by David G. Robertson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How-and why- were UFOs so prevalent in both conspiracy theories and the New Age milieu in the post-Cold War period? In this ground-breaking book, David G. Robertson argues that UFOs symbolized an uncertainty about the boundaries between scientific knowledge and other ways of validating knowledge, and thus became part of a shared vocabulary. Through historical and ethnographic case studies of three prominent figures-novelist and abductee Whitley Strieber; environmentalist and reptilian proponent David Icke; and David Wilcock, alleged reincarnation of Edgar Cayce-the investigation reveals that millennial conspiracism offers an explanation as to why the prophesied New Age failed to arrive-it was prevented from arriving by malevolent, hidden others. Yet millennial conspiracism constructs a counter-elite, a gnostic third party defined by their special knowledge. An overview of the development of UFO subcultures from the perspective of religious studies, UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age is an innovative application of discourse analysis to the study of present day alternative religion.
Download or read book Secular Assemblages written by Marek Sullivan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Âme (1649) to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and 'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.
Download or read book Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa written by Sandra Fancello and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic studies conducted in several African countries, this volume analyses the phenomenon of deliverance – which is promoted both in charismatic churches and in Islam as a weapon against witchcraft – in order to clarify the political dimensions of spiritual warfare in contemporary African societies. Deliverance from evil is part and parcel of the contemporary discourse on the struggle against witchcraft in most African contexts. However, contributors show how its importance extends beyond this, highlighting a pluralism of approaches to deliverance in geographically distant religious movements, which coexist in Africa. Against this background, the book reflects on the responsibilities of Pentecostal deliverance politics within the condition of 'epistemic anxiety' of contemporary African societies – to shed light on complex relational dimensions in which individual deliverance is part of a wider social and spiritual struggle. Spanning across the study of religion, healing and politics, this book contributes to ongoing debates about witchcraft and deliverance in Africa.
Download or read book Rethinking Classical Yoga and Buddhism written by Karen O'Brien-Kop and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called 'yoga' in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen O'Brien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st – 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from South Asian intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. By exploring the intertextuality of the Patanjalayogasastra with texts such as Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosabhasya and Asanga's Yogacarabhumisastra, this book highlights and clarifies many ideologically Buddhist concepts and practices in Patanjala yoga. Karen O'Brien-Kop demonstrates that 'classical yoga' was co-constructed systemically by both Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who were drawing on the same conceptual metaphors of the period. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless 'classical' practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies.
Download or read book Spiritual Tourism written by Alex Norman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates spiritual tourism - tourism characterised by an intentional search for spiritual benefit - from a contemporary religious studies perspective. Using field research gathered from spiritual tourism locations in Asia and Europe, and utilizing contemporary scholarship on practices concerned with meaning and identity, it explores the phenomena of journeys that are taken for self transformation, tracing the history of transformative ideas in Western cultures of travel, and including the modes in which the travel experience has been communicated. Spiritual Tourism provides an important opportunity to comment on the role of tourism in contemporary conceptions of spirituality and spiritual practice in Western society.
Download or read book The Responsibility to Provide in Southeast Asia written by Tan, See Seng and published by Bristol University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the long-held and jealously guarded ASEAN principle of non-intervention, this book argues that states in Southeast Asia have begun to display an increasing readiness to think about sovereignty in terms not only of state responsibility to their own populations but also towards neighbouring countries as well. Taking account of the realities of interstate cooperation in the region, and drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the author develops a new theoretical framework reflecting an evolution of attitudes about state sovereignty to explain this emerging ethic of regional responsibility.
Download or read book On the Outlook written by Thomas Crombez and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the traditional and contemporary modes and stakes of messianic thinking in its close interaction with both previous and actual political contexts and theoretical discourses. In the past decades, philosophers and political thinkers repeatedly drew upon the millennial tradition of messianic thinking in their efforts to come to terms with the injustices of the present. Their conceptions of messianism build upon and revise, modify or radicalize politico-theological theories developed in the period between the two world wars by thinkers who, in the face of doom and destruction, reverted to ancient Judeo-Christian visions of redemption. The essays address the ways in which today’s messianic thinking relates to its historical Jewish and Christian origins, and how it deals with the legacy of its early twentieth century precursors, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Bloch, Gerschom Scholem, and Theodor W. Adorno. Historically, attitudes toward messianism interact with the political and historical conditions as well as with the prevailing theoretical and philosophical discourses of their times. Cross-fertilization between messianism, politics and philosophy also inform recent conceptualizations of history and time, language and the law in the writings of Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben. The analysis of messianism in contemporary discourse encourages reflections on the following core questions: How does messianism figure in modern and contemporary philosophy? How does it relate to today’s state of affairs in the juridical, political, and social realm? Is it still primarily a Jewish concern, and how has it interacted with other religious and political traditions? How does the impact of Jewish messianism on modern philosophy compare with and relate to other influences of Jewish thought, such as the legalistic tradition? The contributors to this volume shed light on as divergent aspects of messianism as its socio-historical embeddedness, its discontinuous historiography, its manifestations in literature and the arts and its complex relation to human agency.
Download or read book Emmanuel Levinas Levinas and the question of religion written by Claire Elise Katz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. His work influencing a wide range of intellectuals such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Marion.
Download or read book Emmanuel Levinas written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Emmanuel Levinas Beyond Levinas written by Claire Elise Katz and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2005 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995) was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. His work influencing a wide range of intellectuals such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Marion.
Download or read book Levinas in Jerusalem Phenomenology Ethics Politics Aesthetics written by Joelle Hansel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-10-14 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of papers given at the International Conference "Levinas in Jerusalem" held at the Hebrew University in May 2002. It gives an overview of the most fecund areas of research in Levinas scholarship. The authors, world renowned scholars and young promising ones, investigate Levinas’s relationship to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger; his conception of Justice and the State; and his view of Aesthetics, Eros and the Feminine.
