Download or read book The Secular Magi written by William Lloyd Newell and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modern Enchantments written by Simon During and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During's superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts--and by "magic," During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows--affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society's image of itself.
Download or read book The Re enchantment of the World written by Joshua Landy and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.
Download or read book Modern Enchantments written by Simon During and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A history of “secular,” or non-supernatural, or entertainment magic as an important but neglected constituent of modern culture” (Nicholas Daly). Magic, Simon During suggests, has helped shape modern culture. Devoted to this deceptively simple proposition, During’s superlative work, written over the course of a decade, gets at the aesthetic questions at the very heart of the study of culture. How can the most ordinary arts—and by “magic,” During means not the supernatural, but the special effects and conjurings of magic shows—affect people? Modern Enchantments takes us deeply into the history and workings of modern secular magic, from the legerdemain of Isaac Fawkes in 1720, to the return of real magic in nineteenth-century spiritualism, to the role of magic in the emergence of the cinema. Through the course of this history, During shows how magic performances have drawn together heterogeneous audiences, contributed to the molding of cultural hierarchies, and extended cultural technologies and media at key moments, sometimes introducing spectators into rationality and helping to disseminate skepticism and publicize scientific innovation. In a more revealing argument still, Modern Enchantments shows that magic entertainments have increased the sway of fictions in our culture and helped define modern society’s image of itself. Praise for ModernEnchantment “During documents the extent to which magic and magical thinking have pervaded, and continue to pervade, secular life . . . the author examines 19th- and 20th-century theatrical magic and “commercial conjuring” with great sensitivity to the social and cultural context in the Western world. Equally fascinating is the analysis of magic and early film.” —R. Sugarman, Choice “A richly informed, warmly argued addition to the growing number of books in which writers worry at the pervasive blurring of distinctions between act and appearance, organic consciousness and artificial intelligence, imagination and empirical experience, illusion and thought, reality TV and real life, dreams and money.” —Marina Warner, Financial Times “During moves confidently across three centuries of magic (and covers aspects of a few more besides). The sheer wealth of historical detail he provides is impressive, but no less impressive is the subtlety of his argumentation, and the suggestiveness of his claims . . . This extremely significant piece of work will appeal to literary critics, historians, and not least, devotees of magic.” —Nicholas Daly, author of Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914
Download or read book Secular Magic and the Moving Image written by Max Sexton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The convergence of film and television and the tension between the unmediated ‘reality’ of the moving image and the enchantment and illusion offered by magic suggests new ways of thinking about the interstices between film and television.
Download or read book Secular Steeples written by Conrad Ostwalt and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2003-03-24 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conrad Ostwalt explores the confluence of religion and popular cultural forms in the secular world, demonstrating that a secular religiosity has co-opted some of the functions previously reserved for religions institutions.
Download or read book Secular Steeples 2nd edition written by Conrad Ostwalt and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of secularization in America, this book provides students with an innovative way of understanding the relationship between religion and secular culture. In Secular Steeples, Conrad Ostwalt challenges long-held assumptions about the relationship between religion and culture and about the impact of secularization. Moving away from the idea that religion will diminish as secularization continues, Ostwalt identifies areas of popular culture where secular and sacred views and objectives interact and enrich each other. The book demonstrates how religious institutions use the secular and popular media of television, movies, and music to make sacred teachings relevant. From megachurches to sports arenas, the Bible to Harry Potter, biker churches to virtual worship communities, Ostwalt demonstrates how religion persists across cultural forms, secular and sacred, with secular culture expressing religious messages and sometimes containing more authentic religious content than official religious teachings. An ideal text for anyone studying religion and popular culture, each chapter provides questions for discussion, a list of important terms and guided readings.
Download or read book Secular Magic and the Moving Image written by Max Sexton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power of the moving image to conjure marvelous worlds has usually been to understand it in terms of 'move magic'. On film, a fascination for enchantment and wonder has transmuted older beliefs in the supernatural into secular attractions. But this study is not about the history of special effects or a history of magic. Rather, it attempts to determine the influence and status of secular magic on television within complex modes of delivery before discovering interstices with film. Historically, the overriding concern on television has been for secular magic that informs and empowers rather than a fairytale effect that deceives and mystifies. Yet, shifting notions of the real and the uncertainty associated with the contemporary world has led to television developing many different modes that have become capable of constant hybridization. The dynamic interplay between certainty and indeterminacy is the key to understanding secular magic on television and film and exploring the interstices between them. Sexton ranges from the real-time magic of street performers, such as David Blaine, Criss Angel, and Dynamo, to Penn and Teller's comedy magic, to the hypnotic acts of Derren Brown, before finally visiting the 2006 films The Illusionist and The Prestige. Each example charts how the lack of clear distinctions between reality and illusion in modes of representation and presentation disrupt older theoretical oppositions. Secular Magic and the Moving Image not only re-evaluates questions about modes and styles but raises further questions about entertainment and how the relations between the program maker and the audience resemble those between the conjuror and spectator. By re-thinking these overlapping practices and tensions and the marking of the indeterminacy of reality on media screens, it becomes possible to revise our understanding of inter-medial relations.
Download or read book Across the Secular Abyss written by William Sims Bainbridge and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the Secular Abyss explains the cultural chasm we currently face, with a traditional religion-based society behind us, and an as-yet unknown secular society ahead. For over a century, scholars, social scientists, and policy makers have debated the apparent erosion of religious faith and wondered whether Western Civilization was turning its back on religion. Today, the issue has reached a crisis point. In the U.S., a new battle between faith and science has erupted within educational institutions, as political polarization progressively divides the country along religious lines. After a century-long truce in which religion and science implicitly agreed to leave each other alone, science is again invading the territory of religion, most obviously in cognitive science that is debunking religious notions of the human soul, and in the broad convergence of many branches of science into one that leaves few gaps where supernatural beliefs could survive. Religion, for its part, is resisting a range of emerging technologies that could transform human nature, namely human reproductive cloning and the kinds of transformative technologies advocated by the Transhumanist movement. Although pure Atheism has little to offer people, and Atheists tend to be people lacking in social obligations, entirely new possibilities are offered by emerging technologies such as computer emulation of human personalities.
Download or read book Everyday Magic in Early Modern Europe written by Kathryn A. Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While pre-modern Europe is often seen as having an 'enchanted' or 'magical' worldview, the full implications of such labels remain inconsistently explored. Witchcraft, demonology, and debates over pious practices have provided the main avenues for treating those themes, but integrating them with other activities and ideas seen as forming an enchanted Europe has proven to be a much more difficult task. This collection offers one method of demystifying this world of everyday magic. Integrating case studies and more theoretical responses to the magical and preternatural, the authors here demonstrate that what we think of as extraordinary was often accepted as legitimate, if unusual, occurrences or practices. In their treatment of and attitudes towards spirit-assisted treasure-hunting, magical recipes, trials for sanctity, and visits by guardian angels, early modern Europeans showed more acceptance of and comfort with the extraordinary than modern scholars frequently acknowledge. Even witchcraft could be more pervasive and less threatening than many modern interpretations suggest. Magic was both mundane and mysterious in early modern Europe, and the witches who practiced it could in many ways be quite ordinary members of their communities. The vivid cases described in this volume should make the reader question how to distinguish the ordinary and extraordinary and the extent to which those terms need to be redefined for an early modern context. They should also make more immediate a world in which magic was an everyday occurrence.
Download or read book English Magic and Imperial Madness written by Peter D. Mathews and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-10-27 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regency England was a pivotal time of political uncertainty, with a changing monarchy, the Napoleonic Wars, and a population explosion in London. In Susanna Clarke's fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the era is also witness to the unexpected return of magic. Locating the consequences of this eruption of magical unreason within the context of England's imperial history, this study examines Merlin and his legacy, the roles of magicians throughout history, the mythology of disenchantment, the racism at work in the character of Stephen Black, the meaning behind the fantasy of magic's return, and the Englishness of English magic itself. Looking at the larger historical context of magic and its links to colonialism, the book offers both a fuller understanding of the ethical visions underlying Clarke's groundbreaking novel of madness intertwined with magic, while challenging readers to rethink connections among national identity, rationality, and power.
Download or read book The Popular Handbook of World Religions written by Daniel J McCoy and published by Harvest House Publishers. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Christian’s Guide to the World’s Most Prominent Religions Meeting people from other religions is an incredible blessing and a unique challenge. As Christians, what do we need to know about their beliefs to effectively interact with them? And how can we share about Jesus with sensitivity for someone’s relationship to their current faith? A compilation from some of today’s top religion scholars, The Popular Handbook of World Religions is a clear and insightful guide to understanding and conversing with followers of the world’s major belief systems. You will… gain a balanced, nuanced comprehension of what followers of other religions believe, and see how those beliefs compare with those of Christianity develop deeper respect for different cultures and appreciate their unique traditions and ideas learn how to share about Christ with true compassion and a recognition of other people’s individuality and heritage Featuring the writings of Dr. Douglas Groothuis, Dr. Paul Copan, Dr. Winfried Corduan, and more, The Popular Handbook of World Religions is designed to help you gain the wisdom you need to interact with people of other faiths, from atheism to Judaism, Buddhism to Islam, Jainism to Sikhism, and more.
Download or read book The Witness of the Magi The Meaning of the Visitors from the East in Art and Culture written by Christopher Silva and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking to discuss the purpose of the Magi in the Gospel this book turns to tradition and iconography and draws conclusions about the Magi in the religious imaginations of Christians from the earliest times of Christianity until the Protestant Reformation, as well as, considers what the Magi could possibly mean for today.The Magi become more than simple characters on a page, and communicate a larger truth to the people of every age. Whether they existed as three men, two men, a caravan of peoples, or literary devices, the Magi communicate a deep desire for something outside of ourselves. They call for change and renewal in the lives of people in the act of giving to something much more then themselves.
Download or read book The Secular Chronicle written by and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Prester John Legend between East and West During the Crusades written by Ahmed M. A. Sheir and published by Trivent Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-22 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the emergence of the legend in the mid-twelfth century. Second, the work presents a historical discussion of the legend and its association with actual occurrences in the Far East and the Levant, analysing the legend history under the crusading crisis and the imperial papal schism in Europe. Meanwhile, the work considers the vague Prester John Letter addressed to Manuel I Komnenus, Byzantine Emperor, and its elaborate conception of a mythical eastern kingdom, revealing imaginative parallels on the wondrous East and legendary Eastern Christian kings in Arabic Muslim and Christian accounts of the Muslim geographer and cartographer al-Idrisi, the Coptic Abu al-Makarim and the Syriac Ibn al-'Ibri (Bar Hebraeus), among others. Moreover, the book examines how the legend impacted war and peace processes between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders during the Fifth Crusade against Egypt (1217-1221), revealing how it was mingled with Arabic and Eastern Christian prophecies at the time. The study concludes by investigating the perception of Prester John by the papal and European envoys to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, revealing how the legend was instrumentalised (and even weaponised) to establish a Latin-Mongol crusade through a parallel exploration of relevant Latin, Arabic and Syriac sources.
Download or read book A full and satisfactorie answer to the late unadvised Bull thundered by Pope Paul the Fift against the renowned State of Venice being modestly entitled by the learned author Considerations upon the censure of Pope Paul the Fift Translated out of Italian written by Servita Pietro Sarpi PAOLO and published by . This book was released on 1606 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Church and Community 1200 1600 written by Richard C. Trexler and published by Ed. di Storia e Letteratura. This book was released on 1987 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
