Download or read book Manufacturing Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-19 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. As such, he charges, it has helped to create departments, jobs, and publication outlets for those who are comfortable with such a suspect construction, while establishing a disciplinary ethos of astounding theoretical naivete and a body of scholarship to match. Surveying the textbooks available for introductory courses in comparative religion, the author finds that they uniformly adopt the sui generis line and all that comes with it. As a result, he argues, they are not just uncritical (which helps keep them popular among the audiences for which they are intended, but badly disserve), but actively inhibit the emergence of critical perspectives and capacities. And on the geo-political scale, he contends, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.
Download or read book Fabricating Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised essays collected here, four of which are published for the first time, continue a longstanding argument made by McCutcheon and others: that the study of religion would benefit from self-conscious scrutiny of its tools, the interests that may drive them, and the effects that might follow their use. The chapters examine a variety of contemporary sites in the modern field where this thesis can be argued, whether involving the anachronistic use of of the category religion when studying the ancient world to current interest in so-called critical religion or critical realist approaches. Moreover – contrary to some past characterizations of such critiques – a constructive way forward for the field is once again recommended and, at several sites, exemplified in detail: redescribing not only religion as something ordinary but also our tendency to create the impression of exceptional and thus set-apart things, places, and people. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the book is an invitation to examine our own scholarly practices and thereby take a more active role in shaping the field in which we carry out our work as scholars of this thing we call religion.
Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.
Download or read book Fabricating Faith written by Richard Hagenston and published by . This book was released on 2014-07 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Hagenston, Jesus had such a hard edge when it came to Gentiles that he coined his own unflattering term for them-dogs. He limited what he was offering strictly to Jews. Yet the religion that began in his name quickly transformed into a predominantly Gentile movement centered on human sacrifice, a practice rejected by Judaism long before Jesus came on the scene. How did this happen? Hagenston exposes the roots of brutal justice underpinning traditional Christianity, but finds hope in a Jewish movement toward grace that preceded and influenced the historical Jesus.
Download or read book Making Religion Making the State written by Yoshiko Ashiwa and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines the perspective of religion as a constructed category of modernity with the analytic focus and empirical grounding of institutional social science to develop a new approach to the study of state and religion in modern and contemporary China.
Download or read book The Making of Religion written by Andrew Lang and published by IndyPublish.com. This book was released on 1909 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern Science of the History of Religion has attained conclusions which already possess an air of being firmly established. These conclusions may be briefly stated thus: Man derived the conception of 'spirit' or 'soul' from his reflections on the phenomena of sleep dreams death shadow and from the experiences of trance and hallucination.
Download or read book Making Magic written by Randall Styers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Randall Styers seeks to account for the vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that it can best be explained in light of the European and Euro-American drive to establish and secure their own identity as normative.
Download or read book Making Religion written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discursive approaches to the study of religion have received a lot of attention recently. Making Religion brings together leading theorists in the field who explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of the analysis of religious discourse. The volume provides an overview of current debates in the field, extends and improves upon contemporary theories and methodologies, and contributes to the discipline more broadly by flagging the importance of this emerging field of research. The combination of theoretical reflection and practical application of discourse analysis as a tool to study religion opens up new perspectives for future research. Contributors are: Helge Årsheim, Stephanie Garling, Adrian Hermann, Titus Hjelm, Mitsutoshi Horii, George Ioannides, Jay Johnston, Reiner Keller, Jens Köhrsen, Marcus Moberg, Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer, Leif-Hagen Seibert, Adrián Tovar Simoncic, Kocku von Stuckrad, Teemu Taira, and Frans Wijsen.
Download or read book Representing Religion in World Cinema written by S. Plate and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious traditions have provided a seemingly endless supply of subject matter for film, from the Ten Commandments to the Mahabharata . At the same time, film production has engendered new religious practices and has altered existing ones, from the cult following of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to the 2001 Australian census in which 70,000 people indicated their religion to be 'Jedi Knight'. Representing Religion in World Cinema begins with these mutual transformations as the contributors query the two-way interrelations between film and religion across cinemas of the world. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary by nature, this collection by an international group of scholars draws on work from religious studies, film studies, and anthropology, as well as theoretical impulses in performance, gender, ethnicity, colonialism, and postcolonialism.
Download or read book Religion in the Making written by Alfred North Whitehead and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Invention of Religion in Japan written by Jason Ānanda Josephson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.
Download or read book Before Religion written by Brent Nongbri and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.
Download or read book Studying Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely used as a primer, a text and a provocation to critical thinking, 'Studying Religion' aims to develop students' skills. The book clearly explains the methods and theories employed in the study of religion. Essays are offered on a range of topics: from the history and functions of religion to public discourse on religion and the classification of religions. The works of key scholars - from Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Otto to Mircea Eliade, James G. Frazer, and Sigmund Freud - are analysed and explored. 'Studying Religion' represents a shift away from the traditional focus of describing the exotic or curious religious 'Other' to an examination of how religious behaviours and institutions are studied. The book will be invaluable to students of religious studies.
Download or read book Secularism and Religion Making written by Markus Dressler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book conceives of "religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered "religious" are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion. The individual contributions, written by a new generation of scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the processes of translation and globalization of historically specific concepts and practices of religion - and its dialectical counterpart, the secular - into new contexts. This volume contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion and secularism as modern concepts.
Download or read book Religious Aesthetics written by Frank Burch Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1993-05-09 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking work, Brown shows how aesthetics, no less than ethics, can play a central role in the study of religion and in the practice of theology. "An important book, wide ranging, often very witty . . . showing an impressive grasp of the current state of aesthetics and possible new directions".--Nick McAdoo, British Journal of Aesthetics.
Download or read book Under the Banner of Heaven written by Jon Krakauer and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2004-06-08 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. • Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU. “Fantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.” —San Francisco Chronicle Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.
Download or read book The Meaning and End of Religion written by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilfred Cantwell Smith, maintained in this vastly important work that Westerners have misperceived religious life by making "religion" into one thing. He shows the inadequacy of "religion" to capture the living, endlessly variable ways and traditions in which religious faith presents itself in the world.
