Download or read book From Belonging to Belief written by Julie McBrien and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-06-08 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Belonging to Belief presents a nuanced ethnographic study of Islam and secularism in post-Soviet Central Asia, as seen from the small town of Bazaar-Korgon in southern Kyrgyzstan. Opening with the juxtaposition of a statue of Lenin and a mosque in the town square, Julie McBrien proceeds to peel away the multiple layers that have shaped the return of public Islam in the region. She explores belief and nonbelief, varying practices of Islam, discourses of extremism, and the role of the state, to elucidate the everyday experiences of Bazaar-Korgonians. McBrien shows how Islam is explored, lived, and debated in both conventional and novel sites: a Soviet-era cleric who continues to hold great influence; popular television programs; religious instruction at wedding parties; clothing; celebrations; and others. Through ethnographic research, McBrien reveals how moving toward Islam is not a simple step but rather a deliberate and personal journey of experimentation, testing, and knowledge acquisition. Moreover she argues that religion is not always a matter of belief—sometimes it is essentially about belonging. From Belonging to Belief offers an important corrective to studies that focus only on the pious turns among Muslims in Central Asia, and instead shows the complex process of evolving religion in a region that has experienced both Soviet atheism and post-Soviet secularism, each of which has profoundly formed the way Muslims interpret and live Islam.
Download or read book Believing in Belonging written by Abby Day and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on empirical research exploring mainstream religious belief and identity in Euro-American countries, Abby Day explores how people 'believe in belonging', choosing religious identifications to complement other social and emotional experiences of 'belongings'.
Download or read book Believing in Belonging written by Abby Day and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Believing in Belonging draws on empirical research exploring mainstream religious belief and identity in Euro-American countries. Starting from a qualitative study based in northern England, and then broadening the data to include other parts of Europe and North America, Abby Day explores how people 'believe in belonging', choosing religious identifications to complement other social and emotional experiences of 'belongings'. The concept of 'performative belief' helps explain how otherwise non-religious people can bring into being a Christian identity related to social belongings. What is often dismissed as 'nominal' religious affiliation is far from an empty category, but one loaded with cultural 'stuff' and meaning. Day introduces an original typology of natal, ethnic and aspirational nominalism that challenges established disciplinary theory in both the European and North American schools of the sociology of religion that assert that most people are 'unchurched' or 'believe without belonging' while privately maintaining beliefs in God and other 'spiritual' phenomena. This study provides a unique analysis and synthesis of anthropological and sociological understandings of belief and proposes a holistic, organic, multidimensional analytical framework to allow rich cross cultural comparisons. Chapters focus in particular on: the genealogies of 'belief' in anthropology and sociology, methods for researching belief without asking religious questions, the acts of claiming cultural identity, youth, gender, the 'social' supernatural, fate and agency, morality and a development of anthropocentric and theocentric orientations that provides a richer understanding of belief than conventional religious/secular distinctions.
Download or read book Planted written by Patrick Q. Mason and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Down from the Mountaintop written by Joshua Dolezal and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lyrical coming-of-age memoir, Down from the Mountaintop chronicles a quest for belonging. Raised in northwestern Montana by Pentecostal homesteaders whose twenty-year experiment in subsistence living was closely tied to their faith, Joshua Doležal experienced a childhood marked equally by his parents’ quest for spiritual transcendence and the surrounding Rocky Mountain landscape. Unable to fully embrace the fundamentalism of his parents, he began to search for religious experience elsewhere: in baseball, books, and weightlifting, then later in migrations to Tennessee, Nebraska, and Uruguay. Yet even as he sought to understand his place in the world, he continued to yearn for his mountain home. For more than a decade, Doležal taught in the Midwest throughout the school year but returned to Montana and Idaho in the summers to work as a firefighter and wilderness ranger. He reveled in the life of the body and the purifying effects of isolation and nature, believing he had found transcendence. Yet his summers tied him even more to the mountain landscape, fueling his sense of exile on the plains. It took falling in love, marrying, and starting a family in Iowa to allow Doležal to fully examine his desire for a spiritual mountaintop from which to view the world. In doing so, he undergoes a fundamental redefinition of the nature of home and belonging. He learns to accept the plains on their own terms, moving from condemnation to acceptance and from isolation to community. Coming down from the mountaintop means opening himself to relationships, grounding himself as a husband, father, and gardener who learns that where things grow, the grower also takes root.
Download or read book Sacred Mobilities written by Dr Tim Gale and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection draws on the Mobilities approach to look afresh at notions of the sacred where they intersect with people, objects and other things on the move. Consideration of a wide range of spiritual meanings and practices also sheds light on the motivations and experiences associated with particular mobilities. Drawing on rich, situated, case studies, this multi-disciplinary collection discusses what mobility in the social sciences, arts and humanities can tell us about movements and journeys prompted by religious, more broadly ‘spiritual’ and 'secular-sacred' practices and priorities. Problematizing the fixity of sacred places and times as territorially and temporally bounded entities that exist in opposition to ‘profane’ everyday life, this collection looks at the intersection between the embodied-emotional-spiritual experience of places, travel, belief-practices and communities. It is this geographically-informed perspective on the interleaving of religious/ spiritual/ secular notions of the sacred with the material and more-than-representational attributes of associated mobilities and related practices which constitutes this volume’s original contribution to the field.
Download or read book Belief and Belonging written by and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What Do Christians Believe written by Malcolm Guite and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2008-02-19 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the rise of Christianity from a minor sect within Judaism to one of the world's major faiths, an unbiased analysis of modern Christianity considers its incarnations throughout myriad cultures while also identifying the commonalities among its many denominations. Original.
Download or read book A Church Beyond Belief written by William L. Sachs and published by Church Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses “belonging before believing” and other new patterns for remaking congregations As we move beyond the “emergent” or “missional” church paradigm, pastors and other church leaders are discovering a new reality: people (especially younger generations) are coming to church not as believers, but to find a place to belong—with or without faith. This book describes the dilemma and the distractions that currently prevent congregations from being the place where that sense of belonging can unfold and guide newcomers in the discovery of faith. The authors argue that despite elaborate talk of change, spirituality, transformation, and conflict resolution, congregations are still mired in old patterns of belonging. Using broad-based career experiences, surveys of religious life, historical precedent, and insights from social psychology about what it means to belong today, the book suggests new and effective approaches to help churches make vital connections.
Download or read book The Meaning of Belief written by Tim Crane and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] lucid and thoughtful book... In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers.” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review Contemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The Meaning of Belief offers a way out of this stalemate. An atheist himself, Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists’ basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience, even if it cannot be explicitly articulated. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists’ conventional conception of religion emerges. The Meaning of Belief does not assess the truth or falsehood of religion. Rather, it looks at the meaning of religious belief and offers a way of understanding it that both makes sense of current debate and also suggests what more intellectually responsible and practically effective attitudes atheists might take to the phenomenon of religion.
Download or read book Mormons Musical Theater and Belonging in America written by Jake Johnson and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted the vocal and theatrical traditions of American musical theater as important theological tenets. As Church membership grew, leaders saw how the genre could help define the faith and wove musical theater into many aspects of Mormon life. Jake Johnson merges the study of belonging in America with scholarship on voice and popular music to explore the surprising yet profound link between two quintessentially American institutions. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common platform for transmitting political and theological ideas. Johnson sees Mormons using musical theater as a medium for theology of voice--a religious practice that suggests how vicariously voicing another person can bring one closer to godliness. This sounding, Johnson suggests, created new opportunities for living. Voice and the musical theater tradition provided a site for Mormons to negotiate their way into middle-class respectability. At the same time, musical theater became a unique expressive tool of Mormon culture.
Download or read book Belonging written by Nora Krug and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).
Download or read book Believing by Faith written by John Bishop and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does our available evidence show that some particular religion is correct? It seems unlikely, given the great diversity of religious - and non-religious - views of the world. But if no religious beliefs can be shown true on the evidence, can it be right to make a religious commitment? Should people make 'leaps of faith'? Or would we all be better off avoiding commitments that outrun our evidence? And, if leaps of faith can be acceptable, how do we tell the difference between goodand bad ones - between sound religion and dogmatic ideology or fundamentalist fanaticism? Believing by Faith offers answers to these questions, inspired by a famous attempt to justify faith made by William James in 1896. In doing so, it engages critically with much recent discussion in the philosophyof religion, and, especially, the epistemology of religious belief.
Download or read book Religion Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland written by Ms Claire Mitchell and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has conflict in Northern Ireland kept political dimensions of religion alive, and has religion played a role in fuelling conflict? Conflict in Northern Ireland is not and never will be a holy war. Yet religion is more socially and politically significant than many commentators presume. In fact, religion has remained a central feature of social identity and politics throughout conflict as well as recent change. There has been an acceleration of interest in the relationship between religion, identity and politics in modern societies. Building on this debate, Claire Mitchell presents a challenging analysis of religion in contemporary Northern Ireland, arguing that religion is not merely a marker of ethnicity and that it continues to provide many of the meanings of identity, community and politics. In light of the multifaceted nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland, Mitchell explains that, for Catholics, religion is primarily important in its social and institutional forms, whereas for many Protestants its theological and ideological dimensions are more pressing. Even those who no longer go to church tend to reproduce religious stereotypes of 'them and us'. Drawing on a range of unique interview material, this book traces how individuals and groups in Northern Ireland have absorbed religious types of cultural knowledge, belonging and morality, and how they reproduce these as they go about their daily lives. Despite recent religious and political changes, the author concludes that perceptions of religious difference help keep communities in Northern Ireland socially separate and often in conflict with one another.
Download or read book Belief Doubt and Fanaticism written by Osho and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Belief, Doubt, and Fanaticism", Osho brings his unique and often surprising perspective to the religious, political, social and economic forces that drive people into opposing camps, fanatical groups, and belief systems that depend on seeing every "other" as the "enemy." As always, the focus is first and foremost on the individual psyche and consciousness, to identify the root causes and hidden demons of our human need to belong and have something to "believe in."
Download or read book Community written by Peter Block and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of our communities are fragmented and at odds within themselves. Businesses, social services, education, and health care each live within their own worlds. The same is true of individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. What keeps this from changing is that we are trapped in an old and tired conversation about who we are. If this narrative does not shift, we will never truly create a common future and work toward it together. What Peter Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation. How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? What can individuals and formal leaders do to create a place they want to inhabit? We know what healthy communities look like—there are many success stories out there. The challenge is how to create one in our own place. Block helps us see how we can change the existing context of community from one of deficiencies, interests, and entitlement to one of possibility, generosity, and gifts. Questions are more important than answers in this effort, which means leadership is not a matter of style or vision but is about getting the right people together in the right way: convening is a more critical skill than commanding. As he explores the nature of community and the dynamics of transformation, Block outlines six kinds of conversation that will create communal accountability and commitment and describes how we can design physical spaces and structures that will themselves foster a sense of belonging. In Community, Peter Block explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.
Download or read book Belief and Belonging Living and Celebrating the Faith written by and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
