Download or read book The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations written by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new and original analysis of the great ancient civilizations, focusing on the breakthroughs and their institutionalization in Greece, Israel, China, and India. The conditions under which these civilizations developed are systematically explored. For comparative purposes, the civilization of Assyria, where such a breakthrough did not take place is analyzed. Attention is given to the transformation of modes of thought and symbolism. Special focus is brought to the development of the great religions and the perception of tension between the transcendental and mundane orders and between rulers and other elites.
Download or read book Axial Civilizations and World History written by Johann P. Arnason and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by social theorists, historical sociologists and area specialists in classical, biblical and Asian studies. The contributions deal with cultural transformations in major civilizational centres during the “Axial Age”, the middle centuries of the last millennium BCE, and their long-term consequences.
Download or read book The Axial Age and Its Consequences written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes the bold claim that intellectual sophistication was born worldwide during the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter. A variety of utopian visions emerged and led to both reform and repression.
Download or read book From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond written by Saïd Amir Arjomand and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post–World War II idea of the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers, and as elaborated into the sociology of axial civilizations by S. N. Eisenstadt in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, continues to be the subject of intense scholarly debate. Examples of this can be found in recent works of Hans Joas and Jürgen Habermas. In From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond, an internationally distinguished group of scholars discuss, advance, and criticize the Jaspers-Eisenstadt thesis, and go beyond it by bringing in the critical influence of Max Weber's sociology of world religions and by exploring intercivilizational encounters in key world regions. The essays within this volume are of unusual interest for their original analysis of relatively neglected civilizational zones, especially Islam and the Islamicate civilization and the Byzantine civilization, and its continuation in Orthodox Russia.
Download or read book Religious Evolution and the Axial Age written by Stephen K. Sanderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era.
Download or read book Practicing Transcendence written by Christopher Peet and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces readers to the concept of the Axial Age and its relevance for a world in crisis. Scholars have become increasingly interested in philosopher Karl Jaspers’ thesis that a spiritual revolution in consciousness during the first millennium BCE decisively shaped world history. Axial ideas of transcendence develop into ideologies for world religions and civilizations, in turn coalescing into a Eurasian world-system that spreads globally to become the foundation of our contemporary world. Alongside ideas and ideologies, the Axial Age also taught spiritual practices critically resisting the new scale of civilizational power: in small counter-cultural communities on the margins of society, they turn our conscious focus inward to transform ourselves and overcome the destructive potentials within human nature. Axial spiritualities offer humanity a practical wisdom, a profound psychology, and deep hope: to transform despair into resilience, helping us face with courage the ecological and political challenges confronting us today.
Download or read book Breaking Monotheism written by Jeremiah W. Cataldo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers a social-scientific analysis of Yehud and uses that analysis to construct a model through which to analyze later monotheistic religious developments.
Download or read book A Social Political History of Monotheism written by Jeremiah W. Cataldo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-03 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Social-Political History of Monotheism, Cataldo shows how political concerns were fundamental to the development of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Beginning with the disruptive and devastating historical events that shook early Israelite culture and ending with the seemingly victorious emergence of Christianity under the Byzantine Empire, this work highlights critical junctures marking the path from political frustration to imperial ideology. Monotheism, Cataldo argues, was not an enlightened form of religion; rather, it was a cultic response to effluent anxieties pouring out from under the crushing weight of successive empires. This provocative work is a valuable tool for anyone with an interest in the development of early Christianity alongside empires and cultures.
Download or read book Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of essays intended to communicate effectively the current state of knowledge in comparative sociology, the major aim of which is to identify similarities and differences between and among societies. Forty significant biographies are included.
Download or read book Seeking the Favor of God The origins of penitential prayer in Second Temple Judaism written by Mark J. Boda and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2006 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).
Download or read book Religious Evolution and the Axial Age written by Stephen K. Sanderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era.
Download or read book Dialogue in the Digital Age written by Patrick Grant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-01-27 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining literary criticism and theory with anthropology and cognitive science, this highly relevant book argues that we are fundamentally shaped by dialogue. Patrick Grant looks at the manner in which dialogue informs and connects the personal, political, and religious dimensions of human experience and how literacy is being eroded through many factors, including advances in digital technology. The book begins by tracing the history of evolved communication skills and looks at ways in which interconnections among tragedy, the limits of language, and the silence of abjection contribute to an adequate understanding of dialogue. Looking at examples such as “truth decay” in journalism and falling literacy levels in school, alongside literary texts from Malory and Shakespeare, Grant shows how literature and criticism embody the essential values of dialogue. The maintenance of complex reading and interpretive skills is recommended for the recuperation of dialogue and for a better understanding of its fundamental significance in the shaping of our personal and social lives. Tapping into debates about the value of literature and the humanities, and the challenges posed by digitalization, this book will be of interest and significance to people working in a wide range of subjects, including literary studies, communication studies, digital humanities, social policy, and anthropology.
Download or read book Interpreting and Explaining Transcendence written by Robert A. Yelle and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, an interdisciplinary group of scholars uses history, sociology, anthropology, and semiotics to approach Transcendence as a human phenomenon, and shows the unavoidability of thinking with and through the Beyond. Religious experience has often been defined as an encounter with a transcendent God. Yet humans arguably have always tried to get outside or beyond themselves and society. The drive to exceed some limit or condition of finitude is an eduring aspect of culture, even in a "disenchanted" society that may have cut off most paths of access to the Beyond. The contributors to this volume demonstrate the humanity of Transcendence in various ways: as an effort to get beyond our crass physical materiality; as spiritual entrepreneurship; as the ecstasy of rituals of possession; and as a literary, aesthetic, and semiotic event. These efforts build from a shared conviction that Transcendene is thoroughly human, and accordingly avoid purely confessional and parochial approches while taking seriously the various claims and behavioral expressions of traditions in which Transcendence has been understood in theological terms.
Download or read book Order and Transcendence written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology written by Seth Abrutyn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There may not be a concept so central to sociology, yet so vaguely defined in its contemporary usages, than institution. In Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology, Abrutyn takes an in-depth look at what institutions are by returning to some of the insights of classical theorists like Max Weber and Herbert Spencer, the functionalisms of Talcott Parsons and S.N. Eisenstadt, and the more recent evolutionary institutionalisms of Gerhard Lenski and Jonathan Turner. Returning to the idea that various levels of social reality shape societies, Abrutyn argues that institutions are macro-level structural and cultural spheres of action, exchange, and communication. They have emergent properties and dynamics that are not reducible to other levels of social reality. Rather than fall back on old functionalist solutions, Abrutyn offers an original and synthetic theory of institutions like religion or economy; the process by which they become autonomous, or distinct cultural spaces that shape the color and texture of action, exchange, and communication embedded within them; and how they gain or lose autonomy by theorizing about institutional entrepreneurship. Finally, Abrutyn lays bare the inner workings of institutions, including their ecology, the way structure and culture shape lower-levels of social reality, and how they develop unique patterns of stratification and inequality founded on their ecology, structure, and culture. Ultimately, Abrutyn offers a refreshing take on macrosociology that brings functionalist, conflict, and cultural sociologies together, while painting a new picture of how the seemingly invisible macro-world influences the choices humans make and the goals we set.
Download or read book Making and Unmaking Modern Japan written by Ritu Vij and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers assembled here share the dual conviction that (1) understanding the lineaments of Japanese modernity entails an appreciation of the specific forms of distinctions, discriminations and exclusions constitutive of it; (2) that the socio-economic-political fractures increasingly visible under conditions of late modernity reveal the precarious nature of the making of modernity in Japan. Bringing together a group of critical intellectuals, mostly based in Japan with long-standing political commitments to groups emblematic of modern Japan’s constitutive outside - inorities, migrants, foreigners, victims of the Fukushima disaster, welfare recipients among others this collection of essays aims to draw attention to processes of ‘making and unmaking’ that constellate Japanese modernity. Unlike previous attempts, however, devoted to destabilizing positivist/culturalist approaches to a post-war ‘miracle’ Japan via a critical post-structural theoretical vocabulary and episteme, the essays gathered here aim principally to examine traces of the making of modern Japan in the fissures and displacements visible at sites of modernity’s unmaking. Deploying a range of theoretical approaches, rather than a commitment to any single framework, the essays that follow aim to locate contemporary Japan and the ravages of its modernity within a wider critical discourse of modernity.
Download or read book The Evolution of Love written by Sheldon W. Liebman and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, an examination of Judaism as it evolved over a period of approximately 1,500 years, is an analysis of the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Jewish writings, with special emphasis on theology and morality. By the middle of the first millennium, with the writing of Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and the works of the prophets, Judaism had embraced the idea that God is a compassionate father; that His relationship with His people is based on love rather than fear; and that His response to their commission of sins is based on the assumption that they are capable of repentance and worthy of forgiveness. In the final stage of its development—culminating in the first and second centuries AD—Judaism was understood to require its adherents to enact the will of God—specifically, to establish a community based on political, economic, and social laws that enforce the principles of justice and mercy. And that process came to be seen as inevitably dependent on human agency—the need for human beings to fulfill God’s commandments. In Judaism, loving neighbors (and strangers) came to be understood as the principal—and, for many Jews, the only—way of loving God.
