Download or read book Religion and Cultural Memory written by Jan Assmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ten brilliant essays, Jan Assmann explores the connections between religion, culture, and memory. Building on Maurice Halbwachs's idea that memory, like language, is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one, he argues that memory has a cultural dimension too. He develops a persuasive view of the life of the past in such surface phenomena as codes, religious rites and festivals, and canonical texts on the one hand, and in the Freudian psychodrama of repressing and resurrecting the past on the other. Whereas the current fad for oral history inevitably focuses on the actual memories of the last century or so, Assmann presents a commanding view of culture extending over five thousand years. He focuses on cultural memory from the Egyptians, Babylonians, and the Osage Indians down to recent controversies about memorializing the Holocaust in Germany and the role of memory in the current disputes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East and between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Download or read book Religion and Media written by Hent de Vries and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counter The twenty-five contributors to this volume - who include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel - confront the conceptual, analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the complex relationship between religion and media. The book's introductory section offers a prolegomenon to the multiple problems raised by an interdisciplinary approach to these multifaceted phenomena. The essays in the following part provide exemplary approaches to the historical and systematic background to the study of religion and media. The third part presents case studies by anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion. The book concludes with two remarkable documents: a chapter from Theodor W. Adorno's study of the relationship between religion and media in the context of political agitation (The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas's Radio Addresses) and a section from Niklas Luhmann's monumental Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Society as a Social System).
Download or read book Cultural Memory and Early Civilization written by Jan Assmann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pt. 1. The theoretical basis -- Memory culture -- Written culture -- Cultural identity and political imagination -- pt. 2. Case studies -- Egypt -- Israel and the invention of religion -- The birth of history from the spirit of the law -- Greece and disciplined thinking -- Cultural memory : a summary.
Download or read book Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective written by Zuzanna Bogumił and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-27 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular. This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history.
Download or read book Belief written by Gianni Vattimo and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly personal book, one of Europes foremost contemporary philosophers confronts the theme of faith and religion. He argues that there is a substantial link between the history of Christian revelation and the history of nihilism, in particular as the latter appears in the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimos philosophical specialty. Tracing the relation between his response to these two thinkers and his own life as a devout Catholic, Vattimo shows how his interpretation of Heideggers work and his conceptions of "weak thought and "weak ontology can be seen as closely linked to a rediscovery of Christianity. Vattimo speaks here in the first person--a risk that results in a disarmingly open exploration of the themes of charity, truth, dogmatism, morality, and sin, viewed through the lens of his own life and his own return to Christianity. While deeply critical of institutionalized religion and the Church, Vattimo discovers in the Christian tradition a voice (not a distinct message) whose interpretation is still being played out around us. Shaped by his readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimos decision to affirm his formation within the Christian tradition provides an original and engaging contribution to the contemporary debate on religion. At the center of this book is the enigma of belief. Freed by modernity from its Platonic subordination to knowledge, belief is recovered as a crucial and inevitable feature of our cultural and personal lives. "Do you believe? Vattimo is asked. "I believe so, he replies.
Download or read book The Invention of Religion written by Jan Assmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking account of how the Book of Exodus shaped fundamental aspects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam The Book of Exodus may be the most consequential story ever told. But its spectacular moments of heaven-sent plagues and parting seas overshadow its true significance, says Jan Assmann, a leading historian of ancient religion. The story of Moses guiding the enslaved children of Israel out of captivity to become God's chosen people is the foundation of an entirely new idea of religion, one that lives on today in many of the world's faiths. First introduced in Exodus, new ideas of faith, revelation, and above all covenant transformed basic assumptions about humankind’s relationship to the divine and became the bedrock of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Download or read book Cultural Memory written by Jeanette Rodríguez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-01-27 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sangre llama a sangre. (Blood cries out to blood.)—Latin American aphorism The common "blood" of a people—that imperceptible flow that binds neighbor to neighbor and generation to generation—derives much of its strength from cultural memory. Cultural memories are those transformative historical experiences that define a culture, even as time passes and it adapts to new influences. For oppressed peoples, cultural memory engenders the spirit of resistance; not surprisingly, some of its most powerful incarnations are rooted in religion. In this interdisciplinary examination, Jeanette Rodriguez and Ted Fortier explore how four such forms of cultural memory have preserved the spirit of a particular people. Cultural Memory is not a comparative work, but it is a multicultural one, with four distinct case studies: the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the devotion it inspires among Mexican Americans; the role of secrecy and ceremony among the Yaqui Indians of Arizona; the evolving narrative of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador as transmitted through the church of the poor and the martyrs; and the syncretism of Catholic Tzeltal Mayans of Chiapas, Mexico. In each case, the authors' religious credentials eased the resistance encountered by social scientists and other researchers. The result is a landmark work in cultural studies, a conversation between a liberation theologian and a cultural anthropologist on the religious nature of cultural memory and the power it brings to those who wield it.
Download or read book A Systems Theory of Religion written by Niklas Luhmann and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems consist entirely of communications and all are "autopoietic," which is to say, self-organizing and self-generating. Here, Luhmann explains how religion provides a code for coping with the complexity, opacity, and uncontrollability of our world. Religion functions to make definite the indefinite, to reconcile the immanent and the transcendent. Synthesizing approaches as disparate as the philosophy of language, historical linguistics, deconstruction, and formal systems theory/cybernetics, A Systems Theory of Religion takes on important topics that range from religion's meaning and evolution to secularization, turning decades of sociological assumptions on their head. It provides us with a fresh vocabulary and a fresh philosophical and sociological approach to one of society's most fundamental phenomena.
Download or read book Semites written by Gil Anidjar and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of essays about the invention—and disappearance—of the ‘Semites’ and the lingering effects, both institutional and theologico-political, of this invention.
Download or read book Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyzes the presence and function of traces of religious narratives in contemporary western culture, from the perspective of cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art.
Download or read book Mediation Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory written by Astrid Erll and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays brings together two major new developments in cultural memory studies: firstly, the shift away from static models of cultural memory, where the emphasis lies on cultural products, in the direction of more dynamic models where the emphasis lies instead on the cultural and social processes involved in the ongoing production of shared views of the past; and secondly, the growing interest in the role of the media, and their role beyond that of mere storage, within these dynamics. The specific concern of this collection is linking the use of media to the larger socio-cultural processes involved in collective memory-making. The focus rests in particular on two aspects of media use: the basic dynamics of “mediation” and “remediation”. The key questions are: What role do media play in the production and circulation of cultural memories? How do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can new, emergent media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered? The essays of this collection focus on social, historical, religious, and artistic media-memories. The authors analyze the memory-making impact of news media, the mediation and remediation of lieux de mémoire, the medial representation of colonial and postcolonial, of Holocaust and Second World War memories, and finally the problematization of these very processes in artistic media forms, such as novels and movies.
Download or read book Religion as a Chain of Memory written by Danièle Hervieu-Léger and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thus, religion may be perceived as a shared understanding with a collective memory that enables it to draw from the well of its past for nourishment in the increasingly secular present."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Memory and Urban Religion in the Ancient World written by Martin Bommas and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of memory in shaping religion in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Download or read book Goddesses in Myth and Cultural Memory written by Emilie Kutash and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have the goddesses of ancient myth survived, prevalent even now as literary and cultural icons? How do allegory, symbolic interpretation, and political context transform the goddess from her regional and individual identity into a goddess of philosophy and literature? Emilie Kutash explores these questions, beginning from the premise that cultural memory, a collective cultural and social phenomenon, can last thousands of years. Kutash demonstrates a continuing practice of interpreting and allegorizing ancient myths, tracing these goddesses of archaic origin through history. Chapters follow the goddesses from their ancient near eastern prototypes, to their place in the epic poetry, drama and hymns of classical Greece, to their appearance in Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy, Medieval allegory, and their association with Christendom. Finally, Kutash considers how goddesses were made into Jungian archetypes, and how some contemporary feminists made them a counterfoil to male divinity, thereby addressing the continued role of goddesses in perpetuating gender binaries.
Download or read book A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies written by Astrid Erll and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook represents the interdisciplinary and international field of cultural memory studies for the first time in one volume. Articles by renowned international scholars offer readers a unique overview of the key concepts of cultural memory studies. The handbook not only documents current research in an unprecedented way; it also serves as a forum for bringing together approaches from areas as varied as sociology, political sciences, history, theology, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences."
Download or read book The Transcultural Turn written by Lucy Bond and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection makes a progressive intervention into the interdisciplinary field of memory studies with a series of essays drawn from diverse theoretical, practitional and cultural backgrounds. The most seminal critical development within memory studies in recent years has arguably been the turn towards transculturalism. This movement engenders a series of methodologies that posit remembrance as a fluid process in which commemorative tropes work to inform the representation of diverse events and traumas beyond national or cultural boundaries, transcending – but not negating – spatial, temporal and ideational differences. Examining a wide range of historical and cultural contexts, the essays in this collection focus on the dialogues that shape processes of remembrance between and beyond borders, critiquing the problems and possibilities inherent in current discourses in memorial practice and theory as they approach the challenge of transculturalism.
Download or read book Religion Violence Memory and Place written by Oren Baruch Stier and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the intersections of violence, memory, and sacred space
