Download or read book Sacred Places Tell Tales written by Yoram Meital and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred Places Tell Tales is the previously untold history of Egyptian Jewry and the ways in which Cairo’s synagogues historically functioned as active institutions in the social lives of these Jews. Historian Yoram Meital interprets Cairo’s synagogues as exquisite storytellers. The synagogues still stand in Cairo, and they shed new light on the social, cultural, and political processes that Egyptian society and the Jews underwent from 1875 to the present. Studying old and new synagogues in the Egyptian capital, their locations, the items they stored, and the range of religious and nonreligious activities they hosted reveals the social heterogeneity and the diverse ways in which modern Jewish sociocultural identity was constructed within Cairo’s Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Karaite communities. Meital contends that studying the congregations and the social services provided in synagogues reveals the local Jewish community’s customs, cultural preferences, socioeconomic gaps, and class divisions. Sacred Places Tell Tales narrates not only the past but also the unprecedented transformations that have occurred in recent years in Egypt. While only a handful of Jews live in Egypt, the preservation of Jewish heritage, first and foremost synagogues and cemeteries, enjoy a growing interest in public discourse and popular culture. This new desire to preserve Jewish heritage is inseparable from the ongoing public debate about Egyptian society, its characteristics, and its identity, past and present. By contextualizing Jewish heritage preservation in a longer Egyptian and Jewish history, Meital opens a window into one of the most significant political discussions dividing Egyptian society today.
Download or read book Temple Tales written by Sudha G. Tilak and published by Hachette India Children's Books. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Which holy place in India has the mysteries of the universe hidden away in an icy cave? Where would you find a shrine for a goddess of veggies? At which deity’s temple is the daily offering a tonic, of all things? This delightful and enchanting book opens the doors to the secrets and surprises hidden in temples across the country. These unique temples are not just places of worship, but living museums of architectural wonders, mind-boggling sculptures, graceful dances, colourful crafts and many other cultural activities. More than anything, they are treasure troves of lore and legend, teeming with tales of gods and goddesses, demons and devotees, plants and beasts, the magical and the mysterious – all just waiting to be discovered by you. Join Sudha G. Tilak as she takes you on an unusual journey to the country’s most sacred places, where the lines between fact and faith are blurred and stories come alive!
Download or read book Navajo Sacred Places written by Klara Bonsack Kelley and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sacred High City Sacred Low City written by Steven Heine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author argues that lived religion in Japan functions as an integral part of daily life; any apparent lack of interest masks a fundamental commitment to participating regularly in diverse, though diffused, religious practices. The book uses case studies of religious sites at two representative but contrasting Tokyo neighborhoods as a basis for reflecting on this apparently contradictory quality.
Download or read book Sacred Places of a Lifetime written by National Geographic and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A listing of five hundred sites new and old, famous and unknown, that have been used to connect humanity with its gods.
Download or read book Between Earth and Sky written by Joseph Bruchac and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1999-04-19 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With grace and drama, Abenaki poet and author Joseph Bruchac retells ten Native American legends of awe-inspiring landscapes. These wise stories, together with Thomas Locker's luminous paintings, evoke the sacred places above, below, and within us all. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Sacred Sites and Sacred Stories Across Cultures written by David W. Kim and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers global perspectives from Mediterranean, Asian, Australian, and American cultures on sacred sites and their related stories in regional history. Contemporary society witnesses many travelers visiting sacred sites (temples, mountains, castles, churches, houses) throughout the world. These visits often involve discovery of new historical facts through the origin stories of the associated tribe, region, or nation. The transmission of oral tradition and myth carries on the significant meaning of those religious sites. This volume unveils multi-angle perspectives of symbolic and mystical places. The contributors describe the religio-political experiences of each regional case, and analyze the religiosity of local people as a lens through which readers can re-examine the concept of iconography, syncretism, and materialism. In addition, contributors interpret the growth of new religions as the alternative perspectives of anti-traditional religions. This new approach offers significant insight into comprehending the practical agony and sorrow of regional people in the context of contemporary history.
Download or read book Sacred Places North America written by Brad Olsen and published by CCC Publishing. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised and updated comprehensive travel guide examines North America's most sacred sites for spiritually attuned explorers. Important archaeological, geological, and historical destinations from coast to coast are exhaustively examined, from the weathered pueblos of the American Southwest and the medicine wheels of western Canada to Graceland and the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr. Histories and cultural contexts are objectively surveyed, along with the latest academic theories and insightful metaphysical ruminations. Detailed maps, drawings, and travel directions are also included.
Download or read book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces written by Jon Pahl and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2008-12-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian historian Sidney Mead has observed: In America space has played the part that time has played in older cultures of the world. In Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl examines this provocative statement in conversation with what he calls the spatial character of American theology. He argues that places are always imaginatively constructed by the human beings who inhabit them. Sometimes this spatial theology works to our benefit; other times it poses spiritual risks. What happens when our banal clothing of the sacred violates our genuine need for comfort and intimacy? Or when we remember that the fleeting pleasures of a shopping trip or a Disneyland escape are designed to fill someone else's pocket rather than the spiritual emptiness in our own hearts? Pahl develops several ways to clothe the divine from within the Christian tradition. He introduces a theology of place that reveals aspects of God's character through biblical metaphors drawn from physical spaces, such as the true vine, the rock, and the living water. Accessible and thought provoking, this enlightening book provides a better grasp of our particularly American way of lending religious significance to spaces of all kinds.
Download or read book The Festival of Pirs written by Afsar Mohammad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each year 300,000 pilgrims embark on a pilgrimage to the remote Indian village of Gugudu. Like many villages in South India, Gugudu is populated mostly by non-Muslims. Yet these pilgrims are coming to mark Muharram, which is observed by Shi'i Muslim communities across South Asia. In this book, Afsar Mohammad presents a lively ethnographic study of the textured religious life of Gugudu. Muharram, he shows, takes on a strikingly different color in Gugudu because of the central place of a local Hindu pir, or saint, called Kullayappa. This intense and shared devotion to the pir, Mohammad argues, represents local Islam interacting with global Islam. In the words of one devotee, "There is no Hindu or Muslim. They all have one religion, which is called 'Kullayappa devotion.'" Through his compelling fieldwork, Mohammad expands our ideas about devotion to the martyrs of Karbala, not only in this particular village but also in the wider world, and explores the intersection between an Islam with locally defined practices and global Hinduism.
Download or read book Welcome to Your Designer Planet written by Richard Leviton and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2007-09 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We now live in the time of the Gaian hierophant. This is the one who reveals and shows us how to relate to the sacred aspects of Gaia, our planet. Who is this hierophant? Each of us, when we join the campaign with Gaia against the desecration of our natural environment. But first we have to discover what the Earth really is. The Earth's thousands of sacred sites hold a secret: they are functional parts of the planet's geomantic body, consciousness nodes in the Earth's subtle body. Each veils a Light temple, each once known widely and remembered in myth, and Welcome to Your Designer Planet! documents 165 different kinds. The Earth is not an accident of the cosmos, but was designed specifically for humans as an extended Mystery temple primed to support and enhance our greater awareness. And the designers intended that humans help maintain it. Want to help the ecosystem and modulate global warming and climate change? Plug yourself into the Earth's Light grid through your nearest sacred site and start helping. Earth Mysteries researcher Richard Leviton presents a working model of the Earth's geomantic reality based on 24 years of research. The world's myths are the doorway into this fantastic domain of the Earth's visionary geography, showing us where to go and what to do and even what kinds of spiritual beings to expect to see. The future of the Earth is in our hands. Here are some pages from its design manual showing us how to fine-tune our wonderful host planet.
Download or read book Tourism Religion and Spiritual Journeys written by Dallen Timothy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion and spirituality are still among the most common motivations for travel - many major tourism destinations have developed largely as a result of their connections to sacred people, places and events. Providing a comprehensive assessment of the primary issues and concepts related to this intersection of tourism and religion, this revealing book gives a balanced discussion of both the theoretical and applied subjects that destination planners, religious organizations, scholars, and tourism service providers must deal with on a daily basis. Bringing together a distinguished list of contributors, this volume takes a global approach and incorporates substantial empirical cases from Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, New Ageism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and the spiritual philosophies of East Asia. On a conceptual level, it considers, amongst other topics: contested heritage the pilgrim-tourist dichotomy secularization of pilgrimage experiences religious humanism educational aspects of religious tourism commodification of religious icons and services. A vibrant collection of essays, this outstanding book discusses many important practices, paradigms, and problems that are currently being examined and debated. It raises an array of significant and interesting questions and as such is a valuable resource for students, scholars and researchers of tourism, religion and cultural studies.
Download or read book Middle of Nowhere written by Sara M. Patterson and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pilgrims travel thousands of miles to visit Salvation Mountain, a unique religious structure in the Southern California desert. Built by Leonard Knight (1931–2014), variously described as a modern-day prophet and an outsider artist, Salvation Mountain offers a message of divine love for humanity. In Middle of Nowhere Sara M. Patterson argues that Knight was a spiritual descendant of the early Christian desert ascetics who escaped to the desert in order to experience God more fully. Like his early Christian predecessors, Knight received visitors from all over the world who were seeking his wisdom. In Knight’s wisdom they found a critique of capitalism, a challenge to religious divisions, and a celebration of the common person. Recounting the pilgrims’ stories, Middle of Nowhere examines how Knight and the pilgrims constructed a sacred space, one that is now crumbling since the death of its creator.
Download or read book The Irish Story Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland written by Oxford R. F. Foster Professor of Irish History and a Fellow Hertford College and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002-09-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roy Foster is one of the leaders of the iconoclastic generation of Irish historians. In this opinionated, entertaining book he examines how the Irish have written, understood, used, and misused their history over the past century. Foster argues that, over the centuries, Irish experience itself has been turned into story. He examines how and why the key moments of Ireland's past--the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter 1916, the Troubles--have been worked into narratives, drawing on Ireland's powerful oral culture, on elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance. The result of this constant reinterpretation is a shifting "Story of Ireland," complete with plot, drama, suspense, and revelation. Varied, surprising, and funny, the interlinked essays in The Irish Story examine the stories that people tell each other in Ireland and why. Foster provides an unsparing view of the way Irish history is manipulated for political ends and that Irish poverty and oppression is sentimentalized and packaged. He offers incisive readings of writers from Standish O'Grady to Trollope and Bowen; dissects the Irish government's commemoration of the 1798 uprising; and bitingly critiques the memoirs of Gerry Adams and Frank McCourt. Fittingly, as the acclaimed biographer of Yeats, Foster explores the poet's complex understanding of the Irish story--"the mystery play of devils and angels which we call our national history"--and warns of the dangers of turning Ireland into a historical theme park. The Irish Story will be hailed by some, attacked by others, but for all who care about Irish history and literature, it will be essential reading.
Download or read book Abandoned Sacred Places written by Lawrence Joffe and published by Abandoned. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Roman temples to Buddhist shrines in the Chinese desert, these hallowed halls have been abandoned to nature. More than 200 outstanding images show what happens to sacred places when humanity retreats. What happens when the congregation moves away from its place of worship? Or when shifting borders or persecution mean that people can no longer reach their church, synagogue, or mosque? Through magnificent, sometimes haunting images, Abandoned Sacred Places explores more than 100 lost worlds, including ancient and modern temples, synagogues, churches, mosques, and stone circles. Organized geographically, this unforgettable volume wanders from Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France to crumbling inner-city churches and synagogues in present-day Detroit and Chicago, from Mayan pyramids in Mexico to Hindu temples lost in the Indian jungle.
Download or read book Singer of the Land of Snows written by Rachel H. Pang and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The singular role of Shabkar in the development of the idea of Tibet Shabkar (1781–1851), the “Singer of the Land of Snows,” was a renowned yogi and poet who, through his autobiography and songs, developed a vision of Tibet as a Buddhist “imagined community.” By incorporating vernacular literature, providing a narrative mapping of the Tibetan plateau, reviving and adapting the legend of Tibetans as Avalokiteśvara’s chosen people, and promoting shared Buddhist values and practices, Shabkar’s concept of Tibet opened up the discursive space for the articulation of modern forms of Tibetan nationalism. Employing analytical lenses of cultural nationalism and literary studies, Rachel Pang explores the indigenous epistemologies of identity, community, and territory that predate contemporary state-centric definitions of nation and nationalism in Tibet and provides the definitive treatment of this foundational figure.
Download or read book The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture written by Laura Varnam and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an exciting new approach to the medieval church by examining the role of literary texts, visual decorations, ritual performance and lived experience in the production of sanctity. The meaning of the church was intensely debated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This book explores what was at stake not only for the church’s sanctity but for the identity of the parish community as a result. Focusing on pastoral material used to teach the laity, it shows how the church’s status as a sacred space at the heart of the congregation was dangerously – but profitably – dependent on lay practice. The sacred and profane were inextricably linked and, paradoxically, the church is shown to thrive on the sacrilegious challenge of lay misbehaviour and sin.
