Download or read book Magic Science and Religion and Other Essays written by Bronislaw Malinowski and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vintage book comprises three famous Malinowski essays on the subject of religion. Malinowski is one of the most important and influential anthropologists of all time. He is particularly renowned for his ability to combine the reality of human experience, with the cold calculations of science. An important collection of three of his most famous essays, "Magic, Science and Religion" provides its reader with a series of concepts concerning religion, magic, science, rite and myth. This is undertaken in an attempt to form a definite impression and understanding of the Trobrianders of New Guinea. The chapters of this book include: "Magic, Science and Religion", "Primitive Man and his Religion", "Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings", "Faith and Cult", "The Creative Acts of Religion", "Providence in Primitive Life", "Man's Selective Interest in Nature", etcetera. This book is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
Download or read book Magic Science and Religion in Early Modern Europe written by Mark A. Waddell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the recovery of ancient ritual magic at the height of the Renaissance to the ignominious demise of alchemy at the dawn of the Enlightenment, Mark A. Waddell explores the rich and complex ways that premodern people made sense of their world. He describes a time when witches flew through the dark of night to feast on the flesh of unbaptized infants, magicians conversed with angels or struck pacts with demons, and astrologers cast the horoscopes of royalty. Ground-breaking discoveries changed the way that people understood the universe while, in laboratories and coffee houses, philosophers discussed how to reconcile the scientific method with the veneration of God. This engaging, illustrated new study introduces readers to the vibrant history behind the emergence of the modern world.
Download or read book Magic Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality written by Stanley J. Tambiah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-22 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible and illuminating book explores the classical opposition between magic, science and religion.
Download or read book Making Magic written by Randall Styers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randall Styers seeks to account for the vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that it can best be explained in light of the European and Euro-American drive to establish and secure their own identity as normative.
Download or read book Religion Magic and Science in Early Modern Europe and America written by Allison Coudert and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was a time when highly educated men believed witches flew to "Sabbaths" on broomsticks and the' backs of goats, had sex with the devil, and cooked and ate infant body parts. How did eminent artists, philosophers, and scientists pave the way for the modern age during a period of such outdated perceptions? --
Download or read book Magic Mystery and Science written by Dan Burton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[P.D. Ouspensky's] yearning for a transcendent, timeless reality—one that cancels out physical disintegration and death—figures into science at some fundamental level. Einstein found solace in his theory of relativity, which suggested to him that events are ever-present in the space-time continuum. When his friend Michele Besso passed on shortly before his own death, he wrote: 'For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'" —from Magic, Mystery, and Science The triumph of science would appear to have routed all other explanations of reality. No longer does astrology or alchemy or magic have the power to explain the world to us. Yet at one time each of these systems of belief, like religion, helped shed light on what was dark to our understanding. Nor have the occult arts disappeared. We humans have a need for mystery and a sense of the infinite. Magic, Mystery, and Science presents the occult as a "third stream" of belief, as important to the shaping of Western civilization as Greek rationalism or Judeo-Christianity. The occult seeks explanations in a world that is living and intelligent—quite unlike the one supposed by science. By taking these beliefs seriously, while keeping an eye on science, this book aims to capture some of the power of the occult. Readers will discover that the occult has a long history that reaches back to Babylonia and ancient Egypt. It proceeds alongside, and frequently mingles with, religion and science. From the Egyptian Book of the Dead to New Age beliefs, from Plato to Adolf Hitler, occult ways of knowing have been used—and hideously abused—to explain a world that still tempts us with the knowledge of its dark secrets.
Download or read book The Sorcerer s Tale written by Alec Ryrie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An earl's son, plotting murder by witchcraft; conjuring spirits to find buried treasure; a stolen coat embroidered with pure silver; crooked gaming-houses and brothels; a terrifying new disease, and the self-trained surgeon who claims he can treat it. This is the world of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man in sixteenth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man's career, Alec Ryrie takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London's gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into the chaotic, exhilarating religious upheavals of the Reformation. On the way, we learn how Tudor England's dignified public face and its rapacious underworld were intimately connected to each other. Gregory Wisdom's career is an object lesson in how to conjure up wealth and respectability from nothing in a turbulent age. Praised as "an excellent snapshot of a time intrigued by the spiritual realm" (Los Angeles Times), this is a unique glimpse into a world intoxicated by new ideas.
Download or read book Religion and the Decline of Magic written by Keith Thomas and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.
Download or read book Magic Science Religion written by Ira Livingston and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate. Among the many case studies are accounts of how an eighteenth-century actor gave his audience goosebumps; how painters, poets, and pool sharks use nonlinearity in working their magics; how the first vertebrates gained consciousness; how plants fine-tuned human color vision; and the necessarily magical element of activism that builds on the conviction that "another future is possible" while working to push self-fulfilling prophecy into political action.
Download or read book Science Magic and Religion written by Mary Bouquet and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the idea of the museum as a ritual site, this volume looks at contemporary experience across Europe and Africa to reveal the different ways in which various actors involved in cultural production dramatize and ritualize such places
Download or read book Wonder Shows written by Fred Nadis and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-13 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Wonder Shows, Fred Nadis offers a colorful history of these traveling magicians, inventors, popular science lecturers, and other presenters of “miracle science” who revealed science and technology to the public in awe-inspiring fashion. The book provides an innovative synthesis of the history of performance with a wider study of culture, science, and religion from the antebellum period to the present.
Download or read book Magic Miracles and Religion written by Ilkka Pyysiäinen and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004-06-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can scientists study religion? Ilkka PyysiSinen says that they can. While the study of religion cannot be reduced to other disciplines, it must not ignore what other disciplines have learned about human thought and behavior. In this collection of essays, PyysiSinen shows how findings from cognitive science can offer new directions to debates in religion. After providing a historical and theoretical overview of the cognitive science of religion, PyysiSinen demonstrates how knowledge of the mind's workings can help deconstruct such concepts as 'god,' 'ideology,' 'culture,' 'magic,' 'miracles,' and 'religion.' For scholars of religion or for scholars of the mind-brain, Magic, Miracles, and Religion provides a helpful overview to this emerging field.
Download or read book Science Religion and Reality written by Joseph Needham and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science Vs Religion written by Elaine Howard Ecklund and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: That the longstanding antagonism between science and religion is irreconcilable has been taken for granted. And in the wake of recent controversies over teaching intelligent design and the ethics of stem-cell research, the divide seems as unbridgeable as ever.In Science vs. Religion, Elaine Howard Ecklund investigates this unexamined assumption in the first systematic study of what scientists actually think and feel about religion. In the course of her research, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and interviewed 275 of them. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls "spiritual entrepreneurs," seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion. The book centers around vivid portraits of 10 representative men and women working in the natural and social sciences at top American research universities. Ecklund's respondents run the gamut from Margaret, a chemist who teaches a Sunday-school class, to Arik, a physicist who chose not to believe in God well before he decided to become a scientist. Only a small minority are actively hostile to religion. Ecklund reveals how scientists-believers and skeptics alike-are struggling to engage the increasing number of religious students in their classrooms and argues that many scientists are searching for "boundary pioneers" to cross the picket lines separating science and religion.With broad implications for education, science funding, and the thorny ethical questions surrounding stem-cell research, cloning, and other cutting-edge scientific endeavors, Science vs. Religion brings a welcome dose of reality to the science and religion debates.
Download or read book Religion Science and Magic In Concert and in Conflict written by Jacob Neusner Professor of Religion University of South Florida and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989-06-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every culture makes the distinction between "true religion" and magic, regarding one action and its result as "miraculous," while rejecting another as the work of the devil. Surveying such topics as Babylonian witchcraft, Jesus the magician, magic in Hasidism and Kabbalah, and magic in Anglo-Saxon England, these ten essays provide a rigrous examination of the history of this distinction in Christianity and Judaism. Written by such distinguished scholars as Jacob Neusner, Hans Penner, Howard Kee, Tzvi Abusch, Susan R. Garrett, and Moshe Idel, the essays explore a broad range of topics, including how certain social groups sort out approved practices and beliefs from those that are disapproved--providing fresh insight into how groups define themselves; "magic" as an insider's term for the outsider's religion; and the tendency of religious traditions to exclude the magical. In addition the collection provides illuminating social, cultural, and anthropological explanations for the prominence of the magical in certain periods and literature.
Download or read book Religion Science and Magic written by Jacob Neusner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every culture makes the distinction between "true religion" and magic, regarding one action and its result as "miraculous," while rejecting another as the work of the devil. Surveying such topics as Babylonian witchcraft, Jesus the magician, magic in Hasidism and Kabbalah, and magic in Anglo-Saxon England, these ten essays provide a rigorous examination of the history of this distinction in Christianity and Judaism. Written by such distinguished scholars as Jacob Neusner, Hans Penner, Howard Kee, Tzvi Abusch, Susan R. Garrett, and Moshe Idel, the essays explore a broad range of topics, including how certain social groups sort out approved practices and beliefs from those that are disapproved--providing fresh insight into how groups define themselves; "magic" as an insider's term for the outsider's religion; and the tendency of religious traditions to exclude the magical. In addition the collection provides illuminating social, cultural, and anthropological explanations for the prominence of the magical in certain periods and literatures.
Download or read book Making Magic written by Randall Styers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.
