Download or read book The End of Faith Religion Terror and the Future of Reason written by Sam Harris and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-09-17 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated....Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say."—Natalie Angier, New York Times In The End of Faith, Sam Harris delivers a startling analysis of the clash between reason and religion in the modern world. He offers a vivid, historical tour of our willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs—even when these beliefs inspire the worst human atrocities. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism to deliver a call for a truly modern foundation for ethics and spirituality that is both secular and humanistic. Winner of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.
Download or read book Changing Religious Worlds written by Bryan Rennie and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assesses Mircea Eliade's contribution to the contemporary understanding of religion and the academic study of religion.
Download or read book The End s of Religion written by Eric Bain-Selbo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Bain-Selbo argues that the study of religion-from philosophers to psychologists, and historians of religion to sociologists-has separated out the “ends” or goals of religion and thus created the conditions by which institutional religion is increasingly irrelevant in contemporary Western culture. There is ample evidence that institutional religion is in trouble, and little evidence that it will strengthen in the future, giving some reason to believe that we are in the process of seeing the end of religion. At the same time, various cultural practices have met in the past and continue to meet today certain fundamental human needs-needs that we might identify as religious that now are being fulfilled through what Bain-Selbo calls the “religion of culture.” The End(s) of Religion traces the way that the very study of religion has led to institutional religion being viewed as just one human institution that can address our particular “religious” needs rather than the sole institution to do so. In turn, ultimately we can begin to see how other institutions or forms of culture can function to serve these same needs or “ends.”
Download or read book The End of Religion written by Bruxy Cavey and published by Tyndale House. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The End of Religion, Bruxy Cavey shares that relationship has no room for religion. Believers and seekers alike will discover anew the wondrous promise found in our savior. And Christ’s eternal call to walk in love and freedom will resonate with readers of all ages and denominations.
Download or read book The End of Religion written by Kathleen McPhillips and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. This book proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups. Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history. The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies.
Download or read book The Meaning and End of Religion written by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilfred Cantwell Smith, maintained in this vastly important work that Westerners have misperceived religious life by making "religion" into one thing. He shows the inadequacy of "religion" to capture the living, endlessly variable ways and traditions in which religious faith presents itself in the world.
Download or read book The End of Days written by Matthew Harper and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 4 million slaves, emancipation was a liberation and resurrection story of biblical proportion, both the clearest example of God's intervention in human history and a sign of the end of days. In this book, Matthew Harper demonstrates how black southerners' theology, in particular their understanding of the end times, influenced nearly every major economic and political decision they made in the aftermath of emancipation. From considering what demands to make in early Reconstruction to deciding whether or not to migrate west, African American Protestants consistently inserted themselves into biblical narratives as a way of seeing the importance of their own struggle in God's greater plan for humanity. Phrases like "jubilee," "Zion," "valley of dry bones," and the "New Jerusalem" in black-authored political documents invoked different stories from the Bible to argue for different political strategies. This study offers new ways of understanding the intersections between black political and religious thought of this era. Until now, scholarship on black religion has not highlighted how pervasive or contested these beliefs were. This narrative, however, tracks how these ideas governed particular political moments as African Americans sought to define and defend their freedom in the forty years following emancipation.
Download or read book Jews and the Ends of Theory written by Shai Ginsburg and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory, as it’s happened across the humanities, has often been coded as “Jewish.” This collection of essays seeks to move past explanations for this understanding that rely on the self-evident (the historical centrality of Jews to the rise of Critical Theory with the Frankfurt School) or stereotypical (psychoanalysis as the “Jewish Science”) in order to show how certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theory. In the range of violence and agency that attend the appellation “Jew,” depending on how, where, and by whom it’s uttered, we can see that Jewishness is a rhetorical as much as a sociological fact, and that its rhetorical and sociological aspects, while linked, are not identical. Attention to this disjuncture helps to elucidate the questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that modern theory has grappled with. These questions in turn implicate geopolitical issues such as the relation of a people to a state and the violence done in the name of simplistic identitarian ideologies. Clarifying a situation where “the Jew” is not readily or unproblematically legible, the editors propose what they call “spectral reading,” a way to understand Jewishness as a fluid and rhetorical presence. While not divorced from sociological facts, this spectral reading works in concert with contemporary theory to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities. Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Andrew Bush, Sergey Dolgopolski, Jay Geller, Sarah Hammerschlag, Hannan Hever, Martin Land, Martin Jay, James I. Porter, Yehouda Shenhav, Elliot R. Wolfson
Download or read book Islam written by John Kaltner and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Recent events have focussed attention on Islam, the often-misunderstood faith of one billion people. Westerners are showing a new openness to learning about Islam and other religions, in part perhaps because religion is arguably the single most important and volatile factor in geopolitics today. Islam needs to be understood on its own terms, John Kaltner argues." "This little Facet offers the most basic information about Islam in an accessible and sympathetic presentation. Kaltner portrays Islam as first and foremost a religion of prescribed practices - the five pillars of Islam. Showing the deep humanism of Islam and its most cherished commitments, Kaltner presents Islam through assertions that counter frequent misconceptions of the faith."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The End Is Music written by Chris E. W. Green and published by . This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Jenson has been praised by Stanley Hauerwas, David Bentley Hart, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and others as one of the most creative and important contemporary theologians. But his work is daunting for many, both because of its conceptual demands and because of Jenson's unusual prose style. This book is an attempt to give Jenson the kind of hearing that puts his creativity and significance on display, and allows newcomers to and old friends of his theology the opportunity to hear it afresh.
Download or read book The Proper Study of Religion written by Sam D. Gill and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Proper Study of Religion, Sam Gill charts an innovative course of development for the academic study of religion by engaging the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith, Gill's teacher and mentor for fifty years. Building on Smith's foundational legacy through creative encounters, Gill explores an extensive range of absorbing topics including: comparison as essential to academic technique and to human knowledge itself; play, philosophically understood, as a core dynamic of Smith's entire program; the relationship of academic document-based studies to the sensory-rich real world of religions; and self-moving as providing a biological and philosophical foundation on which to develop and expand upon a proper academic study of religion.
Download or read book The End of College written by Robert Wilson-Black and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: College in the United States changed dramatically during the twentieth century, ushering in what we know today as the American university in all its diversity. Religion departments made their way into institutions in the 1930s to the 1960s, while significant shifts from college to university occurred. The college ideal was primarily shaping the few to enter the Protestant management class through the inculcation of values associated with a Western civilization that relied upon this training done residentially, primarily for young men. Protestant Christian leaders created religion departments as the college model was shifting to the university ideal, where a more democratized population, including women and non-Protestants, studied under professors trained in specialized disciplines to achieve professional careers in a more internationally connected and post-industrial class. Religion departments at mid-century were addressing the lack of an agreed-upon curricular center in the wake of changes such as the elective system, Carnegie credit-hour formulation, and numerous other shifts in disciplines spelling the end of the college ideal, though certainly continuing many of its traditions and structures. Religion departments were an attempt to provide a cultural and religious center that might hold, enhance existential and moral meaning for students, and strengthen an argument against the German research university ideals of naturalistic science whose so-called objectivity proved, at best, problematic and, at worst, inept given the political crisis in Europe. Colleges found they were losing sight of the college ideal and hoped religion as a taught subject could bring back much of what college had meant, from moral formation and curricular focus to personal piety and national unity. That hope was never realized, and what remained in its wake helped fuel the university model with its specialized religion departments seeking entirely different ends. In the shift from college to university, religion professors attempted to become creators of a legitimate academic subject quite apart from the chapel programs, attempts at moralizing, and centrality in the curriculum of Western Christian thought and history championed in the college model.
Download or read book The End written by Phil Torres and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a genuinely unique period of human history, one in which the alarmist's hackneyed warning that "The end is near!" could actually come true. The world is cluttered with increasingly powerful advanced technologies. Global warming and biodiversity loss are unchecked catastrophes that will likely push society to the brink of collapse. How are we to respond to this situation? What can we do to maximize the probability of a positive outcome for our species? The End surveys the expanding wilderness of big-picture hazards before us. It offers a comprehensive and detailed analysis of our evolving existential predicament, which includes risks from synthetic biology, nanotechnology, nuclear weaponry, and (possibly, soon) superintelligence. But understanding the science of risks isn't enough to effectively mitigate them: one must also understand the social, political, and especially religious contexts in which advanced technologies are being developed. The End provides this knowledge by showing how faith-based belief in religious eschatologies (or end-times narratives) is inching us ever closer to a secular apocalypse. Action needs to be taken immediately to avert a disaster. The question is whether humanity will choose reason over faith, observation over revelation, and science over religion.
Download or read book The Demise of Religion written by Michael Stausberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do religions fail or die? Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this open access book explores this important question that has received little scholarly attention to date. International contributors provide case studies from the United States, England, Sweden, Japan, New Guinea, and France resulting in a work that explores processes of attenuation, disintegration, transmutation, death, and extinction across cultures. These include: instances where mass suicides or homicides resulted in religious dissolution; the fall of Mars Hills Church and its larger-than-life megachurch pastor, accused of plagiarism and bullying in 2012; the death of the last member of the Panacea Society in England in 2012; and the disintegration of Knutby Filadelfia, a religious community in Sweden with Pentecostal roots that ceased to exist in May 2018 after a pastor shot his wife. Combining case studies and theoretical contributions, The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, or Dissipate fills a gap in literature to date and paves the way for future research The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Download or read book The Right to Be Wrong written by Kevin Seamus Hasson and published by Image. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the running debate we call the "culture wars," there exists a great feud over religious diversity. One side demands that only their true religion be allowed in the public square; the other insists that no religions ever belong there. The Right to Be Wrong offers a solution, drawing its lessons from a series of stories--both contemporary and historical--that illustrates the struggle to define religious freedom. The book concludes that freedom for all is guaranteed by the truth about each of us: Our common humanity entitles us to freedom--within broad limits--to follow what we believe to be true as our consciences say we must, even if our consciences are mistaken. Thus, we can respect others' freedom when we're sure they're wrong. In truth, they have the right to be wrong.
Download or read book Surviving Religion 101 written by Michael J. Kruger and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2021-03-22 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I can't imagine a college student—skeptic, doubter, Christian, struggler—who wouldn't benefit from this book." —Kevin DeYoung For many young adults, the college years are an exciting period of selfdiscovery full of new relationships, new independence, and new experiences. Yet college can also be a time of personal testing and intense questioning— especially for Christian students confronted with various challenges to Christianity and the Bible for the first time. Drawing on years of experience as a biblical scholar, Michael Kruger addresses common objections to the Christian faith—the exclusivity of Christianity, Christian intolerance, homosexuality, hell, the problem of evil, science, miracles, and the reliability of the Bible. If you're a student dealing with doubt or wrestling with objections to Christianity from fellow students and professors alike, this book will equip you to engage secular challenges with intellectual honesty, compassion, and confidence—and ultimately graduate college with your faith intact.
Download or read book Religion after Religion written by Steven M. Wasserstrom and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-15 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of World War II, religion appeared to be on the decline throughout the United States and Europe. Recent world events had cast doubt on the relevance of religious belief, and modernizing trends made religious rituals look out of place. It was in this atmosphere that the careers of Scholem, Eliade, and Corbin--the twentieth century's legendary scholars in the respective fields of Judaism, History of Religions, and Islam--converged and ultimately revolutionized how people thought about religion. Between 1949 and 1978, all three lectured to Carl Jung's famous Eranos circle in Ascona, Switzerland, where each in his own way came to identify the symbolism of mystical experience as a central element of his monotheistic tradition. In this, the first book ever to compare the paths taken by these thinkers, Steven Wasserstrom explores how they overturned traditional approaches to studying religion by de-emphasizing law, ritual, and social history and by extolling the role of myth and mysticism. The most controversial aspect of their theory of religion, Wasserstrom argues, is that it minimized the binding character of moral law associated with monotheism. The author focuses on the lectures delivered by Scholem, Eliade, and Corbin to the Eranos participants, but also shows how these scholars generated broader interest in their ideas through radio talks, poetry, novels, short stories, autobiographies, and interviews. He analyzes their conception of religion from a broadly integrated, comparative perspective, sets their distinctive thinking into historical and intellectual context, and interprets the striking success of their approaches.
