Download or read book The Challenge of Religion after Modernity written by Raymond L. M. Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003:If God has departed, as Baudrillard claims, is religion still relevant? A new religious landscape is appearing in the new millennium. The middle classes with their electronic technologies are producing a culture of commodified images and signs that is radically transforming the religious landscape and re-enchanting the world. Ecstatic experiences pervade the reenchanted world. Both fundamentalism and the New Age movement promote the free flow of charisma, reshaping religion in unforeseen directions. Analysing the crisis of modernity, this book delves into the intricacies of these movements to examine the implications of religious change in the new millennium. The authors provide an incisive assessment of religious change in the West and Asia to suggest an eclecticism in re-enchantment that will usher in new ideas about charisma, consciousness and spirituality. These ideas focus on new forms of shamanism that point the way to experiences of empowerment beyond the structures of disenchantment.
Download or read book Signs and Wonders written by Ellen T. Armour and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are told modernity's end will destabilize familiar ways of knowing, doing, and being, but are these changes we should dread—or celebrate? Four significant events (and the iconic images that represent them) catalyze this question: the consecration of openly gay Episcopalian bishop Gene Robinson, the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, the politicization of the death of Terri Schiavo, and the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. Framed by an original appropriation of Michel Foucault, and drawing on resources in visual culture theory and the history of photography, Ellen T. Armour explores the anxieties, passions, and power dynamics bound up in the photographic representation and public reception of these events. Together, these phenomena expose modernity's benevolent and malevolent disruptions and reveal the systemic fractures and fissures that herald its end, for better and for worse. In response to these signs and wonders, Armour lays the groundwork for a theology and philosophy of life better suited to our (post)modern moment: one that owns up to the vulnerabilities that modernity sought to disavow and better enables us to navigate the ethical issues we now confront.
Download or read book Religious Responses to Modernity written by Yohanan Friedmann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dawn of the modern age posed challenges to all of the world’s religions – and since then, religions have countered with challenges to modernity. In Religious Responses to Modernity, seven leading scholars from Germany and Israel explore specific instances of the face-off between religious thought and modernity, in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As co-editor Christoph Markschies remarks in his Foreword, it may seem almost trivial to say that different religions, and the various currents within them, have reacted in very different ways to the “multiple modernities” described by S.N. Eisenstadt. However, things become more interesting when the comparative perspective leads us to discover surprising similarities. Disparate encounters are connected by their transnational or national perspectives, with the one side criticizing in the interest of rationality as a model of authorization, and the other presenting revelation as a critique of a depraved form of rationality. The thoughtful essays presented herein, by Simon Gerber, Johannes Zachhuber, Jonathan Garb, Rivka Feldhay, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Israel Gershoni and Christoph Schmidt, provide a counterweight to the popularity of some all-too-simplified models of modernization.
Download or read book Faith Challenges Culture written by Paul O'Callaghan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern culture we live off and take for granted is an elevated, sophisticated one, containing a great variety of precious anthropological insights and strengths, with a surprising adaptability and openness to absorb, to clarify and to unite. However, in the present moment it comes across, in many cases, as a culture detached from the faith that gave life to it in the first place, and without which it may simply not survive. In fact it has become, of late, a fragile culture, a culture less and less capable of adapting and absorbing and uniting. This may be seen in the way many aspects of modern culture and public life have fallen into a pathology of rationalism, individualism, inequality, discord, ingratitude. This may be seen in our attempt to live in isolation from our fellow humans, unwilling to recognize the world we live in and the privileges we enjoy as God’s gifts. Faith Challenges Culture: A Reflection of the Dynamics of Modernity describes the process in two directions: how culture challenges faith to provide answers that have not been previously given, and how faith challenges culture not only by showing modern culture’s fragility and ambivalence, but also by posing new questions.
Download or read book Islam the West and the Challenges of Modernity written by Tariq Ramadan and published by Kube Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tariq Ramadan attempts to demonstrate, using sources which draw upon Islamic thought and civilization, that Muslims can respond to contemporary challenges of modernity without betraying their identity. The book argues that Muslims, nurished by their own points of reference, can approach the modern epoch by adopting a specific social, political, and economic model that is linked to ethical values, a sense of finalities and spirituality. Rather than a modernism that tends to impose Westernization, it is a modernity that admits to the pluralism of civilizations, religions, and cultures. Table of Contents: Foreword Introduction History of a Concept The Lessons of History Part 1: At the shores of Transcendence: between God and Man Part 2: The Horizons of Islam: Between Man and the Community Part 3: Values and Finalities: The Cultural Dimension of the Civilizational Face to Face Conclusion Appendix Index Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor in Identity and Citizenship at Erasmus University. He was named by TIME Magazine as one of the one hundred innovators of the twenty-first century
Download or read book Religions of Modernity written by Stef Aupers and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religions of Modernity challenges the social-scientific orthodoxy that, once unleashed, the modern forces of individualism, science and technology inevitably erode the sacred and evoke the profane. The book's chapters, some by established scholars, others by junior researchers, document instead in rich empirical detail how modernity relocates the sacred to the deeper layers of the self and the domain of digital technology. Rather than destroying the sacred tout court, then, the cultural logic of modernization spawns its own religious meanings, unacknowledged spiritualities and magical enchantments. The editors argue in the introductory chapter that the classical theoretical accounts of modernity by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and others already hinted at the future emergence of these religions of modernity
Download or read book Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe written by Bruce R. Berglund and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgraceful collusion. Heroic resistance. Suppression of faith. Perseverance of convictions. The story of Christianity in twentieth-century Eastern Europe is often told in stark scenes of tragedy and triumph. Overlooked in the retelling of these dramas is how the region's clergy and lay believers lived their faith, acted within religious and political institutions, and adapted their traditions---while struggling to make sense of a changing world. The contributors to this volume, coming from the U.S. and Western and Eastern Europe, look beyond the narratives of resistance and collaboration. They offer surprising new evidence from archives and oral history interviews, and they provide fresh interpretations of Christianity as it was lived and expressed in modern Europe: from religiosity in the industrial cities of the late nineteenth century to current debates over immigration and European identity; from theological debates in East Germany to folk healing in post-socialist Bulgaria; and, counter-intuitively, from religious fervor among the Czechs to indifference among the Poles. Addressing Christianity in diverse forms---Orthodox, Protestant, Roman and Greek Catholic---as an integral part of the region's politics, society, and culture, this collection is a major addition to studies of both Eastern Europe and religion in the twentieth century. "A volume that specialists in the history of Christianity in other regions of the world will read with great interest, and a degree of envy. As an historian of religion in Western Europe, I can say that although there is a vast literature on the religious history of the nineteenth century and a growing literature on the twentieth century, there is nothing quite like this." From the Foreword by Hugh McLeod, author of The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. "This is a path-breaking book in two different ways. It contributes to the re-evaluation of the nature of modern European religion generally, and to the nature of religion in the modern world." Jeffrey Cox, University of Iowa, author of Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India.
Download or read book Religion Modernity Globalisation written by François Gauthier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the last four decades have seen profound and important changes in the nature and social location of religion, and that those changes are best understood when cast against the associated rise of consumerism and neoliberalism. These transformations are often misunderstood and underestimated, namely because the study of religion remains dependent on the secularisation paradigm which can no longer provide a sufficiently fruitful framework for analysis. The book challenges diagnoses of transience and fragmentation by proposing an alternative narrative and set of concepts for understanding the global religious landscape. The present situation is framed as the result of a shift from a National-Statist to a Global-Market regime of religion. Adopting a holistic perspective that breaks with the current specialisation tendencies, it charts the emergence of the State and the Market as institutions and ideas related to social order, as well as their changing rapports from classical modernity to today. Breaking with a tradition of Western-centeredness, the book offers probing enquiries into Indonesia and a synthesis of global and Western trends. This long-awaited book offers a bold new vision for the social scientific study of religion and will be of great interest to all scholars of the Sociology and Anthropology of religion, as well as Religious Studies in general.
Download or read book Modernity Religion and the War on Terror written by Richard Dien Winfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war on terror cannot be truly understood without investigating the legitimacy of modernity, the challenge that religion presents to modernization, the inescapable conflicts attending the emergence and expansion of modernity, and the post-colonial predicament from which Islamist reaction arises. Richard Dien Winfield illuminates the war on terror in light of these issues, presenting an anti-foundationalist justification of the rationality and freedom of modernity, while assessing how religion can stand in opposition to modernity and why Islam has been a privileged vehicle of anti-modern religious revolt. Winfield shows that the privatization that religion must undergo to be compatible with modern freedom involves no capitulation to relativism, but rather is a theological imperative on which the truth of religion depends. Exposing the limits of any purely secular modernization of Islam, Winfield shows how Islam can draw upon its core tradition to repudiate the oppression of Islamist reaction and become at home in the modern world.
Download or read book Public Religions in the Modern World written by José Casanova and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-29 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping reconsideration of the relation between religion and modernity, Jose Casanova surveys the roles that religions may play in the public sphere of modern societies. During the 1980s, religious traditions around the world, from Islamic fundamentalism to Catholic liberation theology, began making their way, often forcefully, out of the private sphere and into public life, causing the "deprivatization" of religion in contemporary life. No longer content merely to administer pastoral care to individual souls, religious institutions are challenging dominant political and social forces, raising questions about the claims of entities such as nations and markets to be "value neutral", and straining the traditional connections of private and public morality. Casanova looks at five cases from two religious traditions (Catholicism and Protestantism) in four countries (Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States). These cases challenge postwar—and indeed post-Enlightenment—assumptions about the role of modernity and secularization in religious movements throughout the world. This book expands our understanding of the increasingly significant role religion plays in the ongoing construction of the modern world.
Download or read book Religion and Modernity written by Detlef Pollack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is not a book that provides a new integrated theory of religious change in modern societies, but rather one that develops theoretical elements that contribute to the understanding of some contemporary religious developments. Most of the approaches in sociology of religion are prone to emphasize either processes of religious decline or of religious upswing. For example, secularization theory usually includes a couple of relevant factors--such as functional differentiation, economic affluence or social equality--in order to account for religious change. However, the result of such a theory's empirical analyses seems to be certain in advance, namely that the social relevance of religion is decreasing. In contrast, the religious market model devised by sociologists of religion in the US is inclined to detect everywhere processes of religious upsurge. Religion and Modernity: An International Comparison avoids a purely theoretically based perspective on religious changes. For this reason, Detlef Pollack and Gergely Rosta do not begin with theoretical propositions but with questions. The authors raise the question of how the social significance of religion in its various facets has changed in modern societies, and explain what factors and conditions have contributed to these changes.
Download or read book Ninian Smart on World Religions Traditions and the challenges of modernity I Individual traditions Buddhism Mysticism and scripture in Therav da Buddhism written by Ninian Smart and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ninian Smart came to public prominence as the founding Professor of the first British university Department of Religious Studies in the late 1960s. His pioneering views on education in religion proved hugely influential at all levels, from primary schools to academic teaching and research. An unending string of publications, many of them accessible to the general public, sustained a reputation that became worldwide.Here, for the first time, a selection of Ninian Smart's wide-ranging writings is organised systematically under a set of categories which both comprehend and also illuminate his varied output over a career spanning half a century. The editor, John Shepherd, was Principal Lecturer in Religion and Philosophy at the University of Cumbria. He first met Smart as a postgraduate student, and recently helped establish the Ninian Smart Archive at the University of Lancaster.
Download or read book God in Gotham written by Jon Butler and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism. In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity's rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion's demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem's storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan's young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island's booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth. God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than floundered in it. Far from the world of "disenchantment" that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.
Download or read book Globalization Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism written by Dimitrios Methenitis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of religious fundamentalism in a globalized, post-colonial world poses a significant challenge to the "End of History" narratives common in academic and non-academic literature alike. Globalization, Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism proposes that we must seek new explanations for this phenomenon that recasts the relationship between globalization, modernity and religion. One model through which this possible is that of a dialectical kaleidoscopic methodology – one that applies a variety of theoretical tools and takes a truly multi-dimensional perspective. Through the overlapping and complementary approaches of systems theory, field theory and network theory, this book redefined the concepts of globalization, modernity and religion itself by challenging the inherent misconceptions of ethnocentric biases. It also provides a thorough historical analysis of religious systems from antiquity to the present to show the integration of modern and archaic elements within the structure of religious fundamentalism. Interdisciplinary in nature, Globalization, Modernity and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as geopolitics, history of race and ethnicity, postcolonialism, globalization and sociology of religion.
Download or read book Religion Modernity and Postmodernity written by Paul Heelas and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this study of religion, theorise over modern culture, consider whether postmodern forms of religion exist and whether theories of religion framed in terms of modernity can be recast to suit new or emerging circumstances.
Download or read book Religion in China and Its Modern Fate written by Paul R. Katz and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul R. Katz has composed a fascinating account of the fate of Chinese religions during the modern era by assessing mutations of communal religious life, innovative forms of religious publishing, and the religious practices of modern Chinese elites traditionally considered models of secular modernity. The author offers a rare look at the monumental changes that have affected modern Chinese religions, from the first all-out assault on them during the 1898 reforms to the eve of the Communist takeover of the mainland. Tracing the ways in which the vast religious resources (texts, expertise, symbolic capital, material wealth, etc.) that circulated throughout Chinese society during the late imperial period were reconfigured during this later era, Katz sheds new light on modern Chinese religious life and the understudied nexus between religion and modern political culture. Religion in China and Its Modern Fate will appeal to a broad audience of religionists and historians of modern China.
Download or read book Modernity and Re enchantment written by Philip Taylor and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representative of a new wave of anthropological research on religion in Vietnam, Modernity and Re-enchantment brings together in a single book the latest and best research available on this topic. Its lively and original descriptions deftly evoke the burgeoning field of religiosity in contemporary Vietnam. With case studies into a great variety of religious practices, it covers more ground than the small handful of single-authored books currently available on religion in Vietnam.
