Download or read book A Critique of the New Commonplaces written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacques Ellul--much less solemn in mood than usual--here cracks open political and sociological commonplaces, destructively and wittily demonstrating how our unthinking acceptance of them encourages hypocrisy, smugness, and mental inertia. Among the stereotypes of thought and speech thus exploded are such phrases as "You can't act without getting your hands dirty," "Work is freedom," "We must follow the current of history," and "Women find their freedom (dignity) in work." A certain number of these old saws preside over our daily life. They permit us to understand one another and to swim in the ordinary current of society. They are accepted as so certain that we almost never question them. They serve at once as sufficient explanations for everything and as "clinchers" in too many arguments. Ellul explores the ways in which such clichs mislead us and prevent us from having independent thoughts--and in fact keep us from facing the problems to which they are theoretically addressed. They are the "new commonplaces." Just as the nineteenth century brought forth many such commonplaces (they are enshrined in Leon Bloy's Exgse and Flaubert's Dictionnaire des ides reues), so our century has been busy creating its own. What Ellul has done is to stand still long enough to look at them carefully, attack them with cool reason, and leave them nakedly exposed. In this remarkable document, Ellul's caustic fearlessness is at the service of truths that often are cruel, but always are lucid and impassioned. He represents the voice of intelligence, and while doing so is often hilarious and always therapeutic about matters of first importance.
Download or read book Printed Commonplace books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought written by Ann Moss and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The commonplace-book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and its deployment of knowledge. In this ground-breaking study Ann Moss investigates the commonplace-book's medieval antecedents, its methodology and use as promulgated by its humanist advocates, its varieties as exemplified in its printed manifestations, and the reasons for its gradual decline in the seventeenth century.
Download or read book Technique Discourse and Consciousness written by David Lovekin and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French thinker Jacques Ellul's technology refers not only to machines and their usage, but also to the mentalities for which it has become a necessity. Technology is shown as a will to power, an obsession with order, and a drive toward efficiency that establishes its own specific symbology and language.
Download or read book Evil in Modern Myth and Ritual written by Richard Stivers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Stivers’ concern is with the social construction of evil, that is, with how modern societies, in a partly unconscious way, create evil as a category of the sacred and how symbols, myths, and rituals of evil are related to this. He is interested, moreover, in how modern societies provoke individuals to commit evil actions. This fascinating and stimulating book is the first attempt to work out in detail how the concepts of the sacred, symbol, myth, and ritual form a cultural configuration in modern technological societies, and not just in traditional societies.
Download or read book Islam and Judeo Christianity written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme of Islam and Judeo-Christianity is the relationship between these three faiths under three headings that are often promoted as a basis for commonality between them (sons of Abraham, monotheism, and religions of the book). Ellul incisively critiques these expressions, finding less common ground than is generally accepted and a pattern of conformism. The English edition of Islam and Judeo-Christianity includes a foreword by David Gill and Dominique North Ellul, and Alain Besancon's extensive foreword to the French edition of Islam and Judeo-Christianity (relocated to the appendices in this edition). The book also includes other writings on this theme by Ellul: Firstly, chapter 5 from Ellul's Subversion of Christianity where "Islam is portrayed as a non-progressive, totalitarian religion, founded on the concept of divine right, and credited with having introduced into Christianity the idea of holy war." Secondly, Ellul's foreword to The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam written by Bat Ye'or (1985), which documents the conditions of Jews and Christians in Muslim society. Thirdly, Ellul's foreword to The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, also by Bat Ye'or (1996), which further explores the history of Jews and Christians under Islam.
Download or read book The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture written by Richard Stivers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture proposes that modern technology seriously influences every aspect of culture and personality. Technology shapes our beliefs and values and even how we think of ourselves. It affects religion, morality, education, language, communication, and sexual identity. Every institution, every organization, is brought under its purview. This book attempts to awaken the reader to the destructive side of modern technology that exists side-by-side with its constructive side. What modern technology is destroying, however, is the very meaning of being human. The essay “The Media Creates Us in Its Image” makes this case most dramatically. The book asks the reader the following question: Is what you have gained from the use of modern technology more important than what you have lost? How do we once again bring technology under our control in the face of its inexorable “progress”?
Download or read book Confronting Technology written by Matthew T. Prior and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living through a digital revolution which already touches every area of life and will continue to shape the future in as yet unforeseen ways. Digital technologies are an ordinary part of daily life, and yet they also present an unprecedented challenge to Christians to articulate a biblical, theological framework to navigate times of rapid change. The work of the French theologian Jacques Ellul is a theological time-bomb primed for times like these. Accounts of Ellul’s career often divide off his sociology and theology, but this book argues that Ellul conceived a single project of bringing technology into confrontation with the Word of God, tackling the phenomenon he named technique, the pursuit of maximal power and efficiency implicit in the technological enterprise, with a profound depth of biblical and ethical insight. Centering himself on the apocalypse or revelation of Jesus Christ in history, Ellul offers a monumental, timely (though far from flawless) contribution to contemporary ethical debates about the uses and abuses of technologies. His work blazes a trail that Christians and all concerned for the future would do well to follow, as we avoid both the naivety of “technological neutrality” and the dread of “technological determinism.”
Download or read book French Philosophy of Technology written by Sacha Loeve and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-28 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an overall insight into the French tradition of philosophy of technology, this volume is meant to make French-speaking contributions more accessible to the international philosophical community. The first section, “Negotiating a Cultural Heritage,” presents a number of leading 20th century philosophical figures (from Bergson and Canguilhem to Simondon, Dagognet or Ellul) and intellectual movements (from Personalism to French Cybernetics and political ecology) that help shape philosophy of technology in the Francophone area, and feed into contemporary debates (ecology of technology, politics of technology, game studies). The second section, “Coining and Reconfiguring Technoscience,” traces the genealogy of this controversial concept and discusses its meanings and relevance. A third section, “Revisiting Anthropological Categories,” focuses on the relationships of technology with the natural and the human worlds from various perspectives that include anthropotechnology, Anthropocene, technological and vital norms and temporalities. The final section, “Innovating in Ethics, Design and Aesthetics,” brings together contributions that draw on various French traditions to afford fresh insights on ethics of technology, philosophy of design, techno-aesthetics and digital studies. The contributions in this volume are vivid and rich in original approaches that can spur exchanges and debates with other philosophical traditions.
Download or read book Sources and Trajectories written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2003-12-19 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wipf & Stock Publishers (Eugene, Oregon) is proud to publish the Jacques Ellul Legacy Series, a growing series of books by Ellul in reprint editions. Wipf & Stock also prints new translations of books by Ellul and secondary studies about Ellul. Editor: David W. Gill, Ph.D. President, International Jacques Ellul Society
Download or read book Theology Ethics and Technology in the Work of Jacques Ellul and Paul Virilio written by Michael Morelli and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theology, Ethics, and Technology in the Work of Jacques Ellul and Paul Virilio examines biographical and textual connections between sociologist-theologian Jacques Ellul and philosopher-phenomenologist Paul Virilio. Through an examination of their embeddedness in the socio-historical context of postwar France, Michael Morelli identifies a relationship between these critics of technology that bears the marks of a nascent theological tradition. He shows from various vantage points how Ellul and Virilio’s nascent tradition exposes technology as modernity’s primary idol; and, how these thinkers use multiple disciplines—including history, sociology, philosophy, phenomenology, theology, and ethics—to resist the perilous consequences of the modern world’s worship of power and the kinds of technologies this misdirected worship produces. Jacques Ellul’s death in 1994 and Paul Virilio’s death in 2018 may have prevented the maturation of this nascent theological tradition, but this book will aid in this tradition’s ripening through the presentation of an illuminating way to read these two unique, prophetic intellectuals.
Download or read book Ethic of Christian Freedom and Discipleship written by Ronald R. Ray and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-03-27 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethics of Christian Freedom and Discipleship is written for teachers and students of Christian ethics within the English-speaking world. It demonstrates the basis of Christian ethics in Christian theology. Twenty-nine years ago, before leaving the Nigerian theological college where the author had been teaching, Between Two Worlds: An Ethic of Christian Freedom was privately printed. In Kenya, at what became St. Paul’s University, the author primarily used copies of this book for eleven years of teaching Christian ethics. Ethics of Christian Freedom and Discipleship manifests continuity with the author’s earlier book, but is a distinctly different work.
Download or read book Jesus and Marx written by Jacques Ellul and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At what point does a theology become an ideology? How can a Christian distinguish the two? Jacques Ellul has always taken pains to differentiate them, but in this book he provides both a theoretical framework and important examples. Some popular theologies, particularly those that attempt to intertwine biblical theology with Marxist thought, fall into the trap of reaching "theological" conclusions by other means, Ellul believes, so that we cannot consider them as true theologies. From both a biblical-theological and sociopolitical perspective Ellul examines the attempt to relate Christianity to Marxist thought. By reviewing in detail several key Marxist-Christian books, Ellul exposes the weaknesses of so-called Marxist Christianity (which he says is neither Marxist nor Christian), and argues that the biblical perspective takes exception to all political power, leaving Christian anarchism as the realistic revolutionary option. The preface by translator Joyce Main Hanks provides an excellent introduction to the book, showing how it fits into Ellul's thought and how it relates to Ellul's previous work.
Download or read book Faith Hope and Love in the Technological Society written by Franz A. Foltz and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Franz and Frederick Foltz examine how modern technology creates an environment that significantly affects Christianity by reducing the mysteries of faith to manageable techniques. The body of their work analyzes the effects of technology on the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, the triad that believers have used for a common narrative to understand and express their thoughts and experiences. They begin by looking at how recent developments have brought us into a post-truth era by removing words from their context in nature, time, place, and community. Popular theologies such as the power of positive thinking, the laws of creation, the plan for salvation, and the prosperity gospel reflect this change by gearing all for efficiently getting what we want and ignoring tradition. The authors then examine each of the virtues separately, finding that faith has become a risk management tool that depends on confidence in systems rather than personal relationships, hope is defined as the expectation that our present desires shall be granted rather than a vision of the future, and love has become an intimacy that provides escape from the real world and community rather than a self-denying care for them. Finally, the authors take a look at some appropriate responses.
Download or read book To Will and To Do Vol II written by Jacques Ellul and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In To Will and To Do, twentieth-century French thinker Jacques Ellul presented his landmark theological contribution, yet the full text has never before been available in English. Incorporating recent insights on Ellul, and benefitting from the discovery of a lost manuscript, this new publication remedies this, combining a fresh translation of Volume One with a first English translation of Volume Two. Together, the two volumes constitute the first part of Ellul's planned four-part treatment of Christian ethics. In Volume Two, Ellul examines the origin of the problem of Good and Evil, surveys the contemporary morality of Western society, and provocatively sketches the paradox of an impossible and yet necessary Christian ethics. In Volume Two, he carries this discussion forward, outlining the characteristics and conditions of Christian ethics, and analysing the relationship between ethics, the legal texts of the Bible, and dogmatic theology. He concludes by reimagining the theological use of the ‘analogy of faith’ for scriptural interpretation. Throughout, Ellul remains in dialogue with Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Ricoeur and others, helping to cement To Will and To Do as a major intervention in twentieth-century theological ethics.
Download or read book Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues written by Brent Waters and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day, we do commonplace things and interact with ordinary people without giving them much thought. This volume offers a theological guide to thinking Christianly about the ordinary nature of everyday life. Leading ethicist Brent Waters shows that the activities and relationships we think of as mundane are actually expressions of love of neighbor that are vitally important to our wellbeing. We live out the Christian gospel in the contexts that define us and in the routine chores, practices, activities, and social settings that give ordinary life meaning. It is in those contexts that we discover what we were created for, to be, and to become.
Download or read book Political Illusion and Reality written by David W. Gill and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are all governments--east and west, Muslim and secular, authoritarian and constitutional, Republican and Democratic--fundamentally the same, all of them under the extraordinary, growing power of "technique" and bureaucracy? Is all politics, then, just an illusory affair of lies, deception, propaganda, partisan passions, and chaos on the surface of government and party? In his vast and penetrating writings, Bordeaux sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) points in those directions. Political Illusion and Reality is a collection of twenty-three essays on Ellul's political thought. Veteran as well as younger Ellul scholars, political leaders, activists, and pastors, discuss aspects of Ellul's thought as they relate to their own fields of study and political experience. Beginning with his 1936 essay "Fascism, Son of Liberalism," translated and published here in English for the first time, Ellul and these authors will provoke readers to think some new thoughts about politics and government, and think more deeply about the main issues we face in our politically divided and troubled times.
Download or read book Illusions of Freedom written by Jeffrey M. Shaw and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illusions of Freedom examines the opinions and ideas of two twentieth-century writers--Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk living in the United States, and Jacques Ellul, a French Protestant. Contemporaries, they never met or corresponded with each other, but their critique of the influence that technology was beginning to have on the human condition is strikingly similar. Both Merton and Ellul drew upon the ideas of others in formulating their worldview, to include Karl Barth, Soren Kierkegaard, Aldous Huxley, and Karl Marx. Jeffrey Shaw examines the influence that these other philosophers had on Merton and Ellul as they formulated their own ideas on technology's impact on freedom. Tracing the similarities, and in some cases the differences, between their critiques of technology and the idea that progress is always to be seen as something inherently good, one finds that they bring a unique perspective to the debate and offer readers an alternative avenue for reflecting on the meaning of technology and its impact on our lives in the twenty-first century.
