Download or read book Martyrdom and Ecstasy written by Sylwia Surdykowska and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is concerned with one of the most important issues in Persian culture, that is to say a broadly conceived idea of sacrifice and martyrdom. At present, it is contained in the concept of shahadat, which arouses much controversy in the Western world today. In successive chapters, the author discusses the origin and evolution of this concept in Persian culture, the process of shaping attitudes conducive to the attainment of readiness for shahadat and the role of this concept in propaganda, as well as presenting its modern-day interpretation. The basic research material was provided by political and religious publications of contemporary Iranian authors, including Ali Shariâ ~ati, Morteza Motahhari, Ruhollah Khomeini and Abdolkarim Soroush, who have exerted a significant influence on the formation of the Iranian consciousness. The book is an interdisciplinary publication. The author refers to philology, literary studies, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and, interestingly, to the psychology of emotions in order to explicate the traditional Persian system of upbringing and shaping the readiness for martyrdom and sacrifice. The book shows the idea of shahadat as part of the Persian cultural paradigm, which, due to religious and literary tradition, has influenced the shaping of Iranian identity over the centuries and, as a result, it has affected social and political attitudes of the Iranian people. The book is mainly directed to Iranologists. Nevertheless, it will also be of interest to anthropologists, psychologists of culture, sociologists and philosophers due to its interdisciplinary character.
Download or read book Death Ecstasy and Other Worldly Journeys written by John J. Collins and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1995-03-09 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belief in a spirit world, and a blissful or agonizing afterlife, is one of the most pervasive and deeply-rooted characteristics of religion. This volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of this basic religious theme. Most of the case studies are drawn from Jewish and Christian tradition, providing in-depth coverage of Judaism and Christianity from late Antiquity through the Medieval period. There are also examples from Islamic, Japanese, and Chinese traditions for a comparative perspective with Western traditions. Several chapters deal with the formative period of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism, which is concerned not only with the end of the physical world but also with the eternal heavenly world. These chapters are also important for illustrating the development of mysticism in Western traditions. The most distinctive aspect of this book is that it does not deal with antiquity alone, but juxtaposes the historical essays with a survey of modern day, near-death experiences. It raises issues of fundamental importance for the psychology of religion as well as for its history The most distinctive aspect of this book is that it does not deal with antiquity alone, but juxtaposes the historical essays with a survey of modern day, near-death experiences. It raises issues of fundamental importance for the psychology of religion as well as for its history.
Download or read book The Art of Ecstasy written by Robert Torsten Petersson and published by Scribner Paper Fiction. This book was released on 1974 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Montanism written by Christine Trevett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Montanism is the first in English since 1878. It takes account of a great deal of scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and refers to the epigraphical evidence. Dr Trevett questions some of the most cherished assumptions about Montanism. She covers the origins, development and slow demise, using sources from Asia Minor, Rome, North Africa and elsewhere and pays particular attention to women within the movement. The rise of Montanism was important in the history of the early church. This prophetic movement survived for centuries after its beginnings in the second half of the second century and was a challenge to the developing catholic tradition. Christine Trevett looks at its teachings and the response of other Christians to it. To an unusual degree Montanism allowed public religious activity and church office to women.
Download or read book Holy War Martyrdom and Terror written by Philippe Buc and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror examines the ways that Christian theology has shaped centuries of conflict from the Jewish-Roman War of late antiquity through the First Crusade, the French Revolution, and up to the Iraq War. By isolating one factor among the many forces that converge in war—the essential tenets of Christian theology—Philippe Buc locates continuities in major episodes of violence perpetrated over the course of two millennia. Even in secularized or explicitly non-Christian societies, such as the Soviet Union of the Stalinist purges, social and political projects are tied to religious violence, and religious conceptual structures have influenced the ways violence is imagined, inhibited, perceived, and perpetrated. The patterns that emerge from this sweeping history upend commonplace assumptions about historical violence, while contextualizing and explaining some of its peculiarities. Buc addresses the culturally sanctioned logic that might lead a sane person to kill or die on principle, traces the circuitous reasoning that permits contradictory political actions, such as coercing freedom or pardoning war atrocities, and locates religious faith at the backbone of nationalist conflict. He reflects on the contemporary American ideology of war—one that wages violence in the name of abstract notions such as liberty and world peace and that he reveals to be deeply rooted in biblical notions. A work of extraordinary breadth, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror connects the ancient past to the troubled present, showing how religious ideals of sacrifice and purification made violence meaningful throughout history.
Download or read book The Woman on the Windowsill written by Sylvia Sellers-Garcia and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A true story of violence and punishment that illuminates a transformative moment in Guatemalan history On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Díaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order. Sylvia Sellers-García reveals how this bizarre and macabre event spurred an increased attention to crime that resulted in more forceful policing and reflected important policy decisions not only in Guatemala but across Latin America. This fascinating book is both an engaging criminal case study and a broader consideration of the forces shaping Guatemala City at the brink of the modern era.
Download or read book Between Worlds written by J. H. Chajes and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a nearly two-thousand-year interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as "The Age of the Demoniac," accounts of spirit possession began to proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society. Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology, Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of the cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders. Seeking to understand the phenomenon of spirit possession in its full complexity, Chajes delves into its ideational framework—chiefly the doctrine of reincarnation—while exploring its relation to contemporary Christian and Islamic analogues. Regarding spirit possession as a form of religious expression open to—and even dominated by—women, Chajes initiates a major reassessment of women in the history of Jewish mysticism. In a concluding section he examines the reception history of the great Hebrew accounts of spirit possession, focusing on the deployment of these "ghost stories" in the battle against incipient skepticism in the turbulent Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Exploring a phenomenon that bridged learned and ignorant, rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Between Worlds maps for the first time a prominent feature of the early modern Jewish religious landscape, as quotidian as it was portentous: the nexus of the living and the dead.
Download or read book Martyrs Mirror written by Adrian Chastain Weimer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martyrs' Mirror examines the folklore of martyrdom among seventeenth-century New England Protestants, exploring how they imagined themselves within biblical and historical narratives of persecution. Memories of martyrdom, especially stories of the Protestants killed during the reign of Queen Mary in the mid-sixteenth century, were central to a model of holiness and political legitimacy. The colonists of early New England drew on this historical imagination in order to strengthen their authority in matters of religion during times of distress. By examining how the notions of persecution and martyrdom move in and out of the writing of the period, Adrian Chastain Weimer finds that the idea of the true church as a persecuted church infused colonial identity. Though contested, the martyrs formed a shared heritage, and fear of being labeled a persecutor, or even admiration for a cheerful sufferer, could serve to inspire religious tolerance. The sense of being persecuted also allowed colonists to avoid responsibility for aggression against Algonquian tribes. Surprisingly, those wishing to defend maltreated Christian Algonquians wrote their history as a continuation of the persecutions of the true church. This examination of the historical imagination of martyrdom contributes to our understanding of the meaning of suffering and holiness in English Protestant culture, of the significance of religious models to debates over political legitimacy, and of the cultural history of persecution and tolerance.
Download or read book Saints A Very Short Introduction written by Simon Yarrow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of saints and sainthood are familiar to all, irrelevant of religious faith. In this Very Short Introduction, Simon Yarrow looks at the origins, ideas, and definitions of sainthood, sanctity, and saints in the early Church, tracing their development in history and explaining the social roles saints played in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. Along the way Yarrow considers the treatment of saints as objects of literary and artistic expression and interpretation, and as examples of idealised male and female heroism, and compares Christian saints and holy figures to venerated figures in other religious cultures, including Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. He concludes by considering the experiences of devotees to saints, and looking at how saints continue to be a powerful presence in our modern world. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book The Doctrine of Spiritual Perfection written by Anselm Stolz and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1938, this book made a significant contribution to the scholarship on mysticism by approaching the problems of mysticism from the theological angle adopted by the church fathers and medieval scholastics. Seeking to strike a balance with the psychological method, Stolz began his study with an examination not of John of the Cross or Teresa de Avila, but of St. Paul's account of his rapture. Stolz's analysis clarified the theological foundation of mysticism and its development in the ecclesiastical tradition, with his assertion that "mysticism is built on the sacramental and therefore the liturgical life, and is thus bound up intrinsically with Christian life, of which it is the conscious intensification and perfection."
Download or read book Edvard Munch and the Physiology of Symbolism written by Shelley Wood Cordulack and published by Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how and why the influential Norwegian artist Edvard Munch exploted late nineteenth-century physiology as a means to express the Symbolist soul. Munch's series of paintings through the 1890s, known collectively as the 'Frieze of Life', looked to the physiologically functioning (and malfunctioning) living organism for both its visual and organized metaphors.
Download or read book Constructing Religious Martyrdom written by John Soboslai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martyrdom is a phenomenon common to many of the world's religious traditions. But why? In this study, John Soboslai offers insights into the practices of self-sacrifice within specific sociopolitical contexts. Providing a new understanding of martyrdom through the lens of political theology, he analyzes discourses and performances in four religious traditions during social and political crises, beginning with second-century Christianity in Asia Minor, where the term 'martyr' first took its meaning. He also analyzes Shi'a Islam in the 1980s, when 'suicide bombing' first appeared as a strategy in West Asia; global Sikhism during World War I, where martyrs stood for and against the British Raj; and twenty-first-century Tibetan Buddhism, where self-immolators used their bodies in opposition to the programs of the People's Republic of China. Presenting a new theory of martyrdom linked to constructions of sovereign authority, Soboslai reveals common features of self-sacrifice and demonstrates how bodily performances buttress conceptions of authority.
Download or read book Martyrdom A Guide for the Perplexed written by Paul Middleton and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It can be said, almost without exaggeration, that martyrdom has become one of the most pressing theological issues facing the contemporary world. Since the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the world has had to face up to an Islamic manifestation of martyrdom. Martyrdom has a long history; as long as individuals have been dying for their faith or cause, others have been telling and more importantly, interpreting their stories. These martyrologies are essentially conflict stories. Whether a Christian confessing her faith before a bemused Roman governor, or a suicide bomber blowing himself up in a crowed cafe in Jerusalem, the way these stories are recounted - positively or negatively - reflect a wider conflict in which the narrator and his community find themselves. Martyr narratives, whether textual, oral, or even a CNN news report, do more than simply report a death; they also contain the interpretative framework by which that death is understood - again positively or negatively. When the death of a martyr is reported, the way in which that story is told places that death within a larger narrative of conflict, which may be regional, global, or even cosmic. The martyr becomes a symbol of the community's desires and hopes, or for that matter, their terrors and fears, but in either case, the martyr is representative of a larger struggle, and often martyrology contains the vision of how the community envisages final victory over their enemy. This book aims to illuminate the way these conflict stories have been told and function (principally, though not exclusively) within Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities. Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.
Download or read book Ecstasy and Understanding written by Adrian Grafe and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so. The religious and mystical dimension of.
Download or read book Spirit Possession in Judaism written by Matt Goldish and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extraordinary collection of essays is the first to approach the phenomenon of spirit possession among Jews from a multidisciplinary perspective. What beliefs have Jews held about spirit possession? Have Jewish people believed themselves to be possessed by spirits? If so, what sorts of spirits were they? Have Jews' conceptions of possession been the same as those of their Christian and Muslim neighbors? These are some of the questions addressed in these thirteen essays, which together explore spirit possession in a wide range of temporal and geographic contexts. The phenomena known as spirit possession are both very widespread and very difficult to explain. The late Raphael Patai initiated study of spirit possession as found in the Jewish world in the post-Talmudic period by taking a folkloric and anthropological approach to the subject. Other scholars have opened up new avenues of inquiry through discussions of the topic in connection with Jewish mystical and magical traditions. The essays in this collection expand the variety of approaches to the subject, addressing Jewish possession phenomena from the points of view of religion, mysticism, literature, anthropology, psychology, history, and folklore. Scholarly views and popular traditions, benevolent spirits and malevolent shades, exorcism, social control, messianic implications, madness, literary structure, and a host of other topics are brought into the discussion of spirit possession in Jewish culture. This juxtaposition of approaches among the essays in this volume, some of which analyze the same texts in different ways, creates a broad foundation on which to contemplate the meaning of spirit possession.
Download or read book Enduring Creation written by Nigel Jonathan Spivey and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-06 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sebastians pierced with arrows, self-portraits of the aging Rembrandt, and the tortured art of Vincent van Gogh. Exploring the tender, complex rapport between art and pain, Spivey guides us through the twentieth-century photographs of casualties of war, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and back to the recorded horrors of the Holocaust.".
Download or read book Follow the Ecstasy written by John Howard Griffin and published by Wings Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1969, one year after Thomas Merton's tragic (and suspicious) death, John Howard Griffin was invited to write a biography of America's most famous monk, a monk who strangely had become a best-selling theologian. The result was Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton (1983). Both Merton and Griffin were converts to Catholicism, and they had become fast friends during Griffin's occasional retreats to the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani where Merton was cloistered. As Robert Bonazzi writes in his Foreword, "With natural humility and intense spirituality, they taught each other by example and silence." Merton and Griffin were both photographers as well as writers. Griffin wrote about Merton's painting and photography in A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton (1970). They also shared a fascination with the French theologian Jacques Maritain, as well as French modernists Pierre Reverdy, George Braque, and Albert Camus. Griffin fell ill before he could finish his biography of Merton, and the mantle of official biographer passed to Michael Mott, author of The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, an essential compendium of the monk's life. Yet Follow the Ecstasy gets closer to the man--a portrait made by one who shared not only personal histories and interests with Merton, but an "intuitive perspective of solitude."
