Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions written by Michelle A. Gonzalez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions offers a comprehensive overview of Caribbean religions. The Caribbean is a microcosm of the world's religions, but the small geographic space resulted in the encounter of global religions and indigenous religious practices. The racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of this region makes brief introductions to Caribbean religions incapable of truly addressing its complex and diverse religious landscape. The Handbook also elaborates on the diversity of the religious traditions and the national particularity of the region while also considering multiple geographic settings. It mentions how often Caribbean religion is studied through the perspective of a discrete religious tradition or geographic setting"--

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions written by Mark Juergensmeyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reference for understanding world religious societies in their contemporary global diversity. Comprising 60 essays, the volume focuses on communities rather than beliefs, symbols, or rites. The contributors are leading scholars of world religions, many of whom are also members of the communities they study.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion written by Timothy Insoll and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 1135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview, by period and region, of the archaeology of ritual and religion. The coverage is global, and extends from the earliest prehistory to modern times. Written by over sixty renowned specialists, the Handbook presents the very best in current scholarship, and will also stimulate further research.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism written by Catherine Wessinger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventh-Day Adventists, Melanesian cargo cults, David Koresh's Branch Davidians, and the Raelian UFO religion would seem to have little in common. What these groups share, however, is a millennial orientation-the audacious human hope for a collective salvation, which may be either heavenly or earthly. The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism offers readers an in-depth look at both the theoretical underpinnings of the study of millennialism and its many manifestations across history and cultures.

Download or read book Afro Caribbean Religions written by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the largest African population in the world outside of Africa, and has historic ties to the Caribbean, Murrell includes a section on Candomble, Umbanda, Xango, and Batique. This accessibly written introduction to Afro-Caribbean religions examines the cultural traditions and transformations of all of the African-derived religions of the Caribbean along with their cosmology, beliefs, cultic structures, and ritual practices. Ideal for classroom use, Afro-Caribbean Religions also includes a glossary defining unfamiliar terms and identifying key figures.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Constitutions written by Richard Albert and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Constitutions offers a detailed and analytical view of the constitutions of the Caribbean region, examining the constitutional development of its diverse countries. The Handbook explains the features of the region's constitutions and examines themes emerging from the Caribbean's experience with constitutional interpretation and reform.0Part I, 'Caribbean Constitutions in the World', highlights what is distinctive about the constitutions of the Caribbean. Part II covers the constitutions of the Caribbean in detail, offering a rich analysis of the constitutional history, design, controversies, and future challenges in each country or group of countries. Each chapter in this section addresses topics such as the impact of key historical and political events on the constitutional landscape for the jurisdiction, a systematic account of the interaction between the legislature and the executive, the civil service, the electoral system,0and the independence of the judiciary.0Part III addresses fundamental rights debates and developments in the region, including the death penalty and socio-economic rights. Finally, Part IV features critical reflections on the challenges and prospects for the region, including the work of the Caribbean Court of Justice and the future of constitutional reform.0This is the first book of its kind, bringing together in a single volume a comprehensive review of the constitutional development of the entire Caribbean region, from the Bahamas in the north to Guyana and Suriname in South America, and all the islands in between. While written in English, the book embraces the linguistic and cultural diversity of the region, and covers the Anglophone Caribbean as well as the Spanish-, French-, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean countries.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology written by William F. Keegan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together examples of the best research to address the complexity of the Caribbean past.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Christmas written by Timothy Larsen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of all aspects of Christmas across the globe, from the specifically religious to the purely cultural. The contributions are drawn from a distinguished group of international experts from across numerous disciplines, including literary scholars, theologians, historians, biblical scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, and legal experts. The volume provides authoritative treatments of a range of topics, from the origins of Christmas to the present; decorating trees to eating plum pudding; from the Bible to contemporary worship; from carols to cinema; from the Nativity Story to Santa Claus; from Bethlehem to Japan; from Catholics to Baptists; from secularism to consumerism. Christmas is the biggest celebration on the planet. Every year, a significant percentage of the world's population is draw to this holiday—from Cape Cod to Cape Town, from South America to South Korea, and on and on across the globe. The Christmas season takes up a significant part of the entire year. For many countries, the holiday is a major force in their national economy. Moreover, Christmas is not just a modern holiday, but has been an important feast for most Christians since the fourth century and a dominant event in many cultures and countries for over a millennium. The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides an invaluable reference point for anyone interested in this global phenomenon.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion written by Peter Clarke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-04 with total page 1063 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion draws on the expertise of an international team of scholars providing both an entry point into the sociological study and understanding of religion and an in-depth survey into its changing forms and content in the contemporary world. The role and impact of religion and spirituality on the politics, culture, education and health in the modern world is rigorously discussed and debated. The study of the sociology of religion forges interdisciplinary links to explore aspects of continuity and change in the contemporary interface between society and religion. Using a combination of theoretical, methodological and content-led approaches, the fifty-seven contributors collectively emphasise the complex relationships between religion and aspects of life from scientific research to law, ecology to art, music to cognitive science, crime to institutional health care and more. The developing character of religion, irreligion and atheism and the impact of religious diversity on social cohesion are explored. An overview of current scholarship in the field is provided in each themed chapter with an emphasis on encouraging new thinking and reflection on familiar and emergent themes to stimulate further debate and scholarship. The resulting essay collection provides an invaluable resource for research and teaching in this diverse discipline.

Download or read book America s God written by Mark A. Noll and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-03 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos. In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of these thinkers combined with the religious revival of the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the consuming struggle for independence, and the rise of evangelical Protestantism to form a common intellectual coinage based on a rising republicanism and commonsense principles. As this Christian republicanism affirmed itself, it imbued in dedicated Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their beliefs over those of all others. Tragically, this sense of religious purpose set the stage for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was on their side served to deepen a schism that would soon rend the young nation asunder. Mark Noll has given us the definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story of a flexible and creative theological energy that over time forged a guiding national ideology the legacies of which remain with us to this day.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity written by David Thomas Orique and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By 2025, Latin America's population of observant Christians will be the largest in the world. Nonetheless, studies examining the exponential growth of global Christianity tend to overlook this region, focusing instead on Africa and Asia. Research on Christianity in Latin America provides a core point of departure for understanding the growth and development of Christianity in the "Global South." In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity an interdisciplinary contingent of scholars examines Latin American Christianity in all of its manifestations from the colonial to the contemporary period. The essays here provide an accessible background to understanding Christianity in Latin America. Spanning the era from indigenous and African-descendant people's conversion to and transformation of Catholicism during the colonial period through the advent of Liberation Theology in the 1960s and conversion to Pentecostalism and Charismatic Catholicism, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Christianity is the most complete introduction to the history and trajectory of this important area of modern Christianity.

Download or read book Plantation Church written by Noel Leo Erskine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Plantation Church, Noel Leo Erskine investigates the history of the Black Church as it developed both in the United States and the Caribbean after the arrival of enslaved Africans. Typically, when people talk about the "Black Church" they are referring to African-American churches in the U.S., but in fact, the majority of African slaves were brought to the Caribbean. It was there, Erskine argues, that the Black religious experience was born. The massive Afro-Caribbean population was able to establish a form of Christianity that preserved African Gods and practices, but fused them with Christian teachings, resulting in religions such as Cuba's Santería. Despite their common ancestry, the Black religious experience in the U.S. was markedly different because African Americans were a political and cultural minority. The Plantation Church became a place of solace and resistance that provided its members with a sense of kinship, not only to each other but also to their ancestral past. Despite their common origins, the Caribbean and African American Church are almost never studied together. This book investigates the parallel histories of these two strands of the Black Church, showing where their historical ties remain strong and where different circumstances have led them down unexpectedly divergent paths. The result will be a work that illuminates the histories, theologies, politics, and practices of both branches of the Black Church. This project presses beyond the nation state framework and raises intercultural and interregional questions with implications for gender, race and class. Noel Leo Erskine employs a comparative method that opens up the possibility of rethinking the language and grammar of how Black churches have been understood in the Americas and extends the notion of church beyond the United States. The forging of a Black Christianity from sources African and European, allows for an examination of the meaning of church when people of African descent are culturally and politically in the majority. Erskine also asks the pertinent question of what meaning the church holds when the converse is true: when African Americans are a cultural and political minority.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology written by Roger S. Gottlieb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-09 with total page 685 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last two decades have seen the emergence of a new field of academic study that examines the interaction between religion and ecology. Theologians from every religious tradition have confronted world religions past attitudes towards nature and acknowledged their own faiths complicity in the environmental crisis. Out of this confrontation have been born vital new theologies based in the recovery of marginalized elements of tradition, profound criticisms of the past, and ecologically oriented visions of God, the Sacred, the Earth, and human beings. The proposed handbook will serve as the definitive overview of these exciting new developments. Divided into three main sections, the books essays will reflect the three dominant dimensions of the field. Part one will explore traditional religious concepts of and attitudes towards nature and how these have been changed by the environmental crisis. Part II looks at larger conceptual issues that transcend individual traditions. Part III will examine religious participation in environmental politics.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History written by Kathryn Gin Lum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview for those interested in the role of religion and race in American history. Thirty-four scholars from the fields of History, Religious Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and more investigate the complex interdependencies of religion and race from pre-Columbian origins to the present. The volume addresses the religious experience, social realities, theologies, and sociologies of racialized groups in American religious history, as well as the ways that religious myths, institutions, and practices contributed to their racialization. Part One begins with a broad introductory survey outlining some of the major terms and explaining the intersections of race and religions in various traditions and cultures across time. Part Two provides chronologically arranged accounts of specific historical periods that follow a narrative of religion and race through four-plus centuries. Taken together, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History provides a reliable scholarly text and resource to summarize and guide work in this subject, and to help make sense of contemporary issues and dilemmas.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Origen written by Ronald E. Heine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interrogation of Origen's legacy for the 21st Century returns to old questions built upon each other over eighteen centuries of Origen scholarship-problems of translation and transmission, positioning Origen in the histories of philosophy, theology, and orthodoxy, and defining his philological and exegetical programmes. The essays probe the more reliable sources for Origen's thought by those who received his legacy and built on it. They focus on understanding how Origen's legacy was adopted, transformed and transmitted looking at key figures from the fourth century through the Reformation. A section on modern contributions to the understanding of Origen embraces the foundational contributions of Huet, the twentieth century movement to rehabilitate Origen from his status as a heterodox teacher, and finally, the identification in 2012 of twenty-nine anonymous homilies on the Psalms in a codex in Munich as homilies of Origen. Equally important has been the investigation of Origen's historical, cultural, and intellectual context. These studies track the processes of appropriation, assimilation and transformation in the formation and transmission of Origen's legacy. Origen worked at interpreting Scripture throughout his life. There are essays addressing general issues of hermeneutics and his treatment of groups of books from the Biblical canon in commentaries and homilies. Key points of his theology are also addressed in essays that give attention to the fluid environment in which Origen developed his theology. These essays open important paths for students of Origen in the 21st century.

Download or read book The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs written by Solomon Schimmel and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2008-08-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs is a passionate yet analytical critique of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural fundamentalists. Schimmel examines the ways in which otherwise intelligent and bright Jews, Christians, and Muslims defend their belief in the divine authorship of the Bible or of the Koran, and other religious beliefs derived from those claims, against overwhelming evidence and argument to the contrary from science, scholarship, common sense, and rational analysis. He also examines the motives, fears, and anxieties of scriptural fundamentalists that induce them to cling so tenaciously to their unreasonable beliefs.Schimmel begins with reflections on his own journey from commitment to Orthodox Judaism, through doubts about its theological dogmas and doctrines, to eventual denial of their truth. He follows this with an examination of theological and philosophical debates about the proper relationships between faith, reason, and revelation. Schimmel then devotes separate chapters to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural fundamentalism, noting their similarities and differences. He analyzes in depth the psychological and social reasons why people acquire, maintain, and protect unreasonable religious beliefs, and how they do so. Schimmel also discusses unethical and immoral consequences of scriptural fundamentalism, such as gender inequality, homophobia, lack of intellectual honesty, self-righteousness, intolerance, propagation of falsehood, and in some instances, the advocacy of violence and terrorism. He concludes with a discussion of why, when, and where it is appropriate to critique, challenge, and combat scriptural fundamentalists. The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs is thoughtful and provocative, written to encourage self-reflection and self-criticism, and to stimulate and to enlighten all who are interested in the psychology of religion and in religious fundamentalism.

Download or read book Supernatural Agents written by Iikka Pyysiainen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cognitive science of religion is a rapidly growing field whose practitioners apply insights from advances in cognitive science in order to provide a better understanding of religious impulses, beliefs, and behaviors. In this book Ilkka Pyysiäinen shows how this methodology can profitably be used in the comparative study of beliefs about superhuman agents. He begins by developing a theoretical outline of the basic, modular architecture of the human mind and especially the human capacity to understand agency. He then goes on to discuss examples of supernatural agency in detail, arguing that the human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others forms the basis of conceptions of supernatural agents and of such social cognition in which supernatural agents are postulated as interested parties in social life. Beliefs about supernatural agency are natural, says Pyysiäinen, in the sense that such concepts are used in an intuitive and automatic fashion. Two dots and a straight line below them automatically trigger the idea of a face, for example. Given that the mind consists of a host of such modular mechanisms, certain kinds of beliefs will always have a selective advantage over others. Abstract theological concepts are usually elaborate versions of such simpler and more contagious folk conceptions. Pyysiäinen uses ethnographical and survey materials as well as doctrinal treatises to show that there are certain recurrent patterns in beliefs about supernatural agents both at the level of folk-religion and of formal theology.