Download or read book Pantheologies written by Mary-Jane Rubenstein and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical—that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and—with striking regularity—monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”—at once repellent and seductive—is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources—medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms—Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.

Download or read book What Is Religion written by Thomas A. Idinopulos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1998 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of Religion: BRIAN C. WILSON.

Download or read book Prescribing the Dharma written by Ira Helderman and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in the psychotherapeutic capacity of Buddhist teachings and practices is widely evident in the popular imagination. News media routinely report on the neuropsychological study of Buddhist meditation and applications of mindfulness practices in settings including corporate offices, the U.S. military, and university health centers. However, as Ira Helderman shows, curious investigators have studied the psychological dimensions of Buddhist doctrine for well over a century, stretching back to William James and Carl Jung. These activities have shaped both the mental health field and Buddhist practice throughout the United States. This is the first comprehensive study of the surprisingly diverse ways that psychotherapists have related to Buddhist traditions. Through extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with clinicians, many of whom have been formative to the therapeutic use of Buddhist practices, Helderman gives voice to the psychotherapists themselves. He focuses on how they understand key categories such as religion and science. Some are invested in maintaining a hard border between religion and psychotherapy as a biomedical discipline. Others speak of a religious-secular binary that they mean to disrupt. Helderman finds that psychotherapists' approaches to Buddhist traditions are molded by how they define what is and is not religious, demonstrating how central these concepts are in contemporary American culture.

Download or read book The Pragmatics of Defining Religion written by Jan G. Platvoet and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1999 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Pragmatics of Defining Religion" is a multidisciplinary volume on the problem of the definition of religion with chapters on the polemics of defining religion in modern contexts, the history of the concept of religion, the methodology of its definition; it includes several definition proposals.

Download or read book Defining Magic written by Bernd-Christian Otto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic has been an important term in Western history and continues to be an essential topic in the modern academic study of religion, anthropology, sociology, and cultural history. Defining Magic is the first volume to assemble key texts that aim at determining the nature of magic, establish its boundaries and key features, and explain its working. The reader brings together seminal writings from antiquity to today. The texts have been selected on the strength of their success in defining magic as a category, their impact on future scholarship, and their originality. The writings are divided into chronological sections and each essay is separately introduced for student readers. Together, these texts - from Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology - reveal the breadth of critical approaches and responses to defining what is magic. CONTRIBUTORS: Aquinas, Augustine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Dennis Diderot, Emile Durkheim, Edward Evans-Pritchard, James Frazer, Susan Greenwood, Robin Horton, Edmund Leach, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Christopher Lehrich, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Plato, Pliny, Plotin, Isidore of Sevilla, Jesper Sorensen, Kimberley Stratton, Randall Styers, Edward Tylor

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion written by Michael Stausberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion provides a comprehensive overview of the academic study of religion. Written by an international team of leading scholars, its fifty-one chapters are divided thematically into seven sections. The first section addresses five major conceptual aspects of research on religion. Part two surveys eleven main frameworks of analysis, interpretation, and explanation of religion. Reflecting recent turns in the humanities and social sciences, part three considers eight forms of the expression of religion. Part four provides a discussion of the ways societies and religions, or religious organizations, are shaped by different forms of allocation of resources. Other chapters in this section consider law, the media, nature, medicine, politics, science, sports, and tourism. Part five reviews important developments, distinctions, and arguments for each of the selected topics. The study of religion addresses religion as a historical phenomenon and part six looks at seven historical processes. Religion is studied in various ways by many disciplines, and this Handbook shows that the study of religion is an academic discipline in its own right. The disciplinary profile of this volume is reflected in part seven, which considers the history of the discipline and its relevance. Each chapter in the Handbook references at least two different religions to provide fresh and innovative perspectives on key issues in the field. This authoritative collection will advance the state of the discipline and is an invaluable reference for students and scholars.

Download or read book Why Tolerate Religion written by Brian Leiter and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-24 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why it's wrong to single out religious liberty for special legal protections This provocative book addresses one of the most enduring puzzles in political philosophy and constitutional theory—why is religion singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse? Why are religious obligations that conflict with the law accorded special toleration while other obligations of conscience are not? In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter shows why our reasons for tolerating religion are not specific to religion but apply to all claims of conscience, and why a government committed to liberty of conscience is not required by the principle of toleration to grant exemptions to laws that promote the general welfare.

Download or read book Hebrews For You written by Michael J. Kruger and published by The Good Book Company. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applied expository guide to Hebrews—a book that shows us how and why Jesus is better than anything else. We are all tempted to drift away from Jesus, but in the book of Hebrews God gives us an anchor: a detailed understanding of how and why Jesus is better than anything else. Seminary professor Michael J. Kruger unpacks this rich book verse by verse. He explains the Old Testament background, gives plenty of application for our lives today, and shows us how Jesus is the fulfilment of all God's work on earth. He encourages us to live by faith in Jesus—the only anchor for our souls. This expository guide can be read as a book; used as a devotional; and utilized in teaching and preaching.

Download or read book Defining Religion written by Robert Cummings Neville and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays, written over the past decade, Robert Cummings Neville addresses contemporary debates about the concept of religion and the importance of the comparative method in theology, while advancing and defending his own original definition of religion. Neville's hypothesis is that religion is a cognitive, existential, and practical engagement of ultimate realities—five ultimate conditions of existence that need to be engaged by human beings. The essays, which range from formal articles to invited lectures, develop this hypothesis and explore its ramifications in religious experience, philosophical theology, religious studies, and the works of important thinkers in philosophy of religion. Defining Religion is an excellent introduction to Neville's work, especially to the systematic philosophical theology presented in his magisterial three-volume set Philosophical Theology.

Download or read book Religion written by Hent de Vries and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we talk about when we talk about "religion"? Is it an array of empirical facts about historical human civilizations? Or is religion what is in essence unpredictable--perhaps the very emergence of the new? In what ways are the legacies of religion--its powers, words, things, and gestures--reconfiguring themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century? Given the Latin roots of the word religion and its historical Christian uses, what sense, if any, does it make to talk about "religion" in other traditions? Where might we look for common elements that would enable us to do so? Has religion as an overarching concept lost all its currency, or does it ineluctably return--sometimes in unexpected ways--the moment we attempt to do without it? This book explores the difficulties and double binds that arise when we ask "What is religion?" Offering a marvelously rich and diverse array of perspectives, it begins the task of rethinking "religion" and "religious studies" in a contemporary world. Opening essays on the question "What is religion?" are followed by clusters exploring the relationships among religion, theology, and philosophy and the links between religion, politics, and law. Pedagogy is the focus of the following section. Religion is then examined in particular contexts, from classical times to the present Pentacostal revival, leading into an especially rich set of essays on religion, materiality, and mediatization. The final section grapples with the ever-changing forms that "religion" is taking, such as spirituality movements and responses to the ecological crisis. Featuring the work of leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines, traditions, and cultures, Religion: Beyond a Concept will help set the agenda for religious studies for years to come. It is the first of five volumes in a collection entitled The Future of the Religious Past, the fruit of a major international research initiative funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

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 Defining Religion written by Arthur L. Greil and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debate over the proper definition of "religion" has occupied the attention of social scientists for many years without shedding much light on the nature of religion. This volume aims to inspire a re-orientation in the way students of religion think about the task of defining religion.

Download or read book The Catholic Encyclopedia written by and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 946 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Religion on the Edge written by Courtney Bender and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteen essays in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the essays reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blindspots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. Religion on the Edge addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the U.S. or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? Religion on the Edge offers groundbreaking new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion. By challenging many of its long-standing empirical and analytic tendencies, the contributors to this volume show how their work informs and is informed by debates in other fields and the analytical purchase gained by bringing these many conversations together. Religion on the Edge will be a crucial resource for any scholar seeking to understand our post-modern, post-secular world.

Download or read book The Pragmatics of Defining Religion written by Platvoet and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume promotes a pragmatic, anti-essentialist and anti-hegemonic approach to the problem of the definition of religion. It argues that definitions of religion are context-bound strategies for pursuing a variety of purposes, extra-academic as well as academic. Religions being immensely varied, complex and multi-functional phenomena, they need to be studied by several academic disciplines from many different perspectives. It is, therefore, legitimate and useful that many definitions of religions are developed. The volume has contributions from scholars in Philosophy of Religion, the Comparative Study of Religions, Anthropology of Religion, Sociology of Religion and Psychology of Religion. It has chapters on the polemics of defining religion in modern contexts, the history of the concept of religion, and the methodology of its definition; it includes several definition proposals.

Download or read book The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions written by John Bowker and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 1111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Dictionary of World Religion is the most wide-ranging A-Z reference guide to all aspects of the world's religions past and present. Whether the reader seeks quick, accessible answers from the short entries or more detailed discussion from the longer more discursive articles, it offers a wealth of unrivalled and unbiased authoritative detail. With a total of over 8,200 entries, an extensive topic index, and an original and in-depth introductory essay this new dictionary, drawing on the latest research, is the definitive compendium on the subject. Religions; movements, sects, and cults; texts books; individuals; sacred sites; customs; themes on general topics relevant to all religions such as prayer, biogenetics, asceticism, confession, cosmology, art and architecture, music and dance; accessible reference hundreds of quotations many translated specially for this book; and a topic index listing 13,000 entries on major themes such as Brahman, breathing, death beliefs and rituals, heavens and paradises, kami, mandala, mantra, mysticism, Sufism, yoga, and Zen practice.

Download or read book A Secular Age written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.