Download or read book Infrastructures of Religion and Power written by Edward Swenson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the central role of religion in place-making and infrastructural projects in ancient polities. It presents a trilectic approach to archaeological study of religious landscapes that combines Indigenous philosophies with the spatial and semiotic thinking of Lefebvre, Peirce, and proponents of assemblage theories. Case studies from ancient Angkor and the Andes reveal how rituals of place-making activated processes of territorialization and semiosis fundamental to the experience of political worlds that shaped power relations in past societies. The perspectives developed in the book permit a reconstruction of how landscapes were variably conceived, perceived, and lived in the spirit of Henri Lefebvre, and how these registers may have aligned or clashed. In the end, the examination of built environments, infrastructures, and rituals staged within specialized buildings demonstrates how archaeologists can better infer past ontologies, cosmologies, ideologies of time and place, and historically specific political struggles. The study will appeal to students and researchers interested in ritual, infrastructures, landscape, archaeological theory, political institutions, semiotics, human geography, and the civilizations of the ancient Andes and Angkor.
Download or read book Ideologies and Infrastructures of Religious Urbanization in Africa written by David Garbin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do urbanization and development intersect with religious dynamics to shape contemporary African cityscapes? To answer this timely question, contributors from across Europe, North America and Africa are brought together to explore mega-cities including Lagos, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa as powerful venues for the creation and implementation of religious models of urbanization and development. This book interrogates how religious socio-spatial models and strategies engage with challenges of infrastructural development, urban social cohesion, inequalities and inclusion. Chapters explore how faith-based practices of urban and infrastructural development link moral subjectivities with individual and wider aspirations for modernization, change, deliverance and prosperity. The volume brings together ethnographically rich and theoretically grounded case studies of religious urbanization across the African continent. It advances discussions of the ambivalent role of urban religion in development and documents the complex, multifaceted socio-cultural and political dynamics associated with religious urbanization in Africa.
Download or read book The Power Worshippers written by Katherine Stewart and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the documentary God & Country For readers of Democracy in Chains and Dark Money, a revelatory investigation of the Religious Right's rise to political power. For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today's Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America's past. It forms common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals. The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart's probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.
Download or read book Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon written by Joanne Randa Nucho and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What causes violent conflicts around the Middle East? All too often, the answer is sectarianism—popularly viewed as a timeless and intractable force that leads religious groups to conflict. In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be. Through in-depth research with local governments, NGOs, and political parties in Beirut, she demonstrates how sectarianism is actually recalibrated on a daily basis through the provision of essential services and infrastructures, such as electricity, medical care, credit, and the planning of bridges and roads. Taking readers to a working-class, predominantly Armenian suburb in northeast Beirut called Bourj Hammoud, Nucho conducts extensive interviews and observations in medical clinics, social service centers, shops, banking coops, and municipal offices. She explores how group and individual access to services depends on making claims to membership in the dominant sectarian community, and she examines how sectarianism is not just tied to ethnoreligious identity, but also class, gender, and geography. Life in Bourj Hammoud makes visible a broader pattern in which the relationships that develop while procuring basic needs become a way for people to see themselves as part of the greater public. Illustrating how sectarianism in Lebanon is not simply about religious identity, as is commonly thought, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon offers a new look at how everyday social exchanges define and redefine communities and conflicts.
Download or read book Extrastatecraft written by Keller Easterling and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century. Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraftwill change how we think about cities-and, perhaps, how we live in them.
Download or read book Roads to Power written by Jo Guldi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roads to Power tells the story of how Britain built the first nation connected by infrastructure, how a libertarian revolution destroyed a national economy, and how technology caused strangers to stop speaking. In early eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but dirt track ran between most towns. By 1848 the primitive roads were transformed into a network of highways connecting every village and island in the nation—and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. The highway network led to contests for control over everything from road management to market access. Peripheries like the Highlands demanded that centralized government pay for roads they could not afford, while English counties wanted to be spared the cost of underwriting roads to Scotland. The new network also transformed social relationships. Although travelers moved along the same routes, they occupied increasingly isolated spheres. The roads were the product of a new form of government, the infrastructure state, marked by the unprecedented control bureaucrats wielded over decisions relating to everyday life. Does information really work to unite strangers? Do markets unite nations and peoples in common interests? There are lessons here for all who would end poverty or design their markets around the principle of participation. Guldi draws direct connections between traditional infrastructure and the contemporary collapse of the American Rust Belt, the decline of American infrastructure, the digital divide, and net neutrality. In the modern world, infrastructure is our principal tool for forging new communities, but it cannot outlast the control of governance by visionaries.
Download or read book Evangelicals Incorporated written by Daniel Vaca and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity. American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success? According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century. Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.
Download or read book The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe written by Daniel H. Nexon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule. Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony. Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.
Download or read book Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements: Arguments from the Margins, Rocha, Hutchinson and Openshaw argue that Australia has made and still makes important contributions to how Pentecostal and charismatic Christianities have developed worldwide. This edited volume fills a critical gap in two important scholarly literatures. The first is the Australian literature on religion, in which the absence of the charismatic and Pentecostal element tends to reinforce now widely debunked notions of Australia as lacking the religious tendencies of old Europe. The second is the emerging transnational literature on Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. This book enriches our understanding not only of how these movements spread worldwide but also how they are indigenised and grow new shoots in very diverse contexts.
Download or read book Religion s Power written by Robert Wuthnow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-25 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1903, a representative from the Salvation Army's headquarters in London traveled to Canada to explore the possibility of relocating Britain's poor overseas. Over the next three decades, a quarter of a million people were shipped to destinations in Canada, Australia, and Africa. More than a hundred thousand of those deported were children: abandoned, orphaned, and otherwise separated from their natural parents. Dozens of religious organizations took part in the effort: the Catholic Emigration Association, Church of England Society for Empire Settlement, Church of Scotland, Inter-Church Immigration Committee, Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church, Society of Friends, St. Vincent de Paul, and the United Church of Canada, among others. The practice resumed on a smaller scale after World War II and continued until 1970. The agencies involved described their activities in the language of salvation, moral uplift, and service to God. "Carrying off the children of distress to the lands beyond the sea," one of the organizers wrote, was a service "to religion, humanity and civilization.""--
Download or read book Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities written by Aaron Pinnix and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infrastructure comprises a combination of sociotechnical, political, and cultural arrangements that provide resources and services. The contributors to this volume show, in their respective fields, how infrastructures are both generative forces and the materialized products of quotidian practices that affect and guide people's lives. Organized via shared conceptual foci, this volume demonstrates infrastructuralist perspectives as an important transdisciplinary approach within the humanities.
Download or read book Big Gods written by Ara Norenzayan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how the belief in gods has lead to cooperation and sometimes conflict between groups. The author also looks at how some cooperative societies have developed without belief in gods.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities written by Katie Day and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like an ecosystem, cities develop, change, thrive, adapt, expand, and contract through the interaction of myriad components. Religion is one of those living parts, shaping and being shaped by urban contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is an outstanding interdisciplinary reference source to the key topics, problems, and methodologies of this cutting-edge subject. Representing a diverse array of cities and religions, the common analytical approach is ecological and spatial. It is the first collection of its kind and reflects state-of-the-art research focusing on the interaction of religions and their urban contexts. Comprising 29 chapters, by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts: Research methodologies Religious frameworks and ideologies in urban contexts Contemporary issues in religion and cities Within these sections, emerging research and analysis of current dynamics of urban religions are examined, including: housing, economics, and gentrification; sacred ritual and public space; immigration and the refugee crisis; political conflicts and social change; ethnic and religious diversity; urban policy and religion; racial justice; architecture and the built environment; religious art and symbology; religion and urban violence; technology and smart cities; the challenge of climate change for global cities; and religious meaning-making of the city. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and urban studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, history, architecture, urban planning, theology, social work, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Modernizing America s Electricity Infrastructure written by Mason Willrich and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, coherent strategy for modernizing America's electricity infrastructure while ensuring affordable, reliable, secure, and environmentally sustainable electricity services. America's aging electricity infrastructure is deteriorating rapidly even as the need for highly reliable electric service—driven by the explosion of digital technology—continues to rise. Largely missing from national discussions, however, is a coherent, comprehensive national strategy for modernizing this critical infrastructure. Energy expert Mason Willrich presents just such a strategy in this book, connecting the dots across electric utilities, independent suppliers, government bureaucracies, political jurisdictions, and academic disciplines. He explains the need for a coherent approach, offers a framework for analyzing policy options, and proposes a step-by-step strategy for modernizing electrical infrastructure, end-to-end, in a way that ensures the delivery of affordable, reliable, secure, and environmentally sustainable electricity services. Willrich argues that an effective electrical infrastructure modernization strategy must incorporate flexibility, adaptability, and the capacity to coordinate policies at local, state, and federal levels. He reviews the history of America's electrification, from Edison's demonstration of the incandescent light bulb through the recent expansion of wind, solar, and energy efficiency as carbon-free energy resources. He describes the current ownership and operation of the electric industry and the complicated web of federal and state policies that govern it.
Download or read book Religious Violence Today 2 volumes written by Michael Jerryson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 941 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through sections containing overview essays and reference entries related to particular religions, this resource explores the rise of religious violence, hate crime, and persecution around the world. Religious violence and persecution have been growing steadily both within the United States and around the world. Drawing on the expertise of a wide range of scholars, this current and comprehensive reference helps readers understand the persecution of members of particular faiths as well as violence committed by members of those faiths. In doing so, it promotes a greater understanding of the role of religion in global politics, domestic and international terrorism, and religious bigotry. The book contains sections on particular religious traditions from around the world. Each section begins with an overview essay surveying violence related to that particular religion, whether committed by or against members of that faith. Reference entries in each section then provide objective, fundamental information about particular topics related to violence and the religion discussed. The entries provide cross-references and suggestions for further reading, and the work closes with a bibliography of resources for further study.
Download or read book Rituals Collapse and Radical Transformation in Archaic States written by Joanne M.A. Murphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rituals, Collapse, and Radical Transformation in Archaic States explores the role of ritual in a variety of archaic states and generates discussion on how the decline in a state’s ability to continue in its current form affected the practices of ritual and how ritual as a culture-forming dynamic affected decline, collapse, and regeneration of the state. Chapters examine ritual in collapsing and regenerating archaic states from diverse locations, time periods, and societies including Crete, Mycenean and Byzantine Greece, Mesopotamia, India, Africa, Mexico, and Peru. Underscoring similarities in a variety of archaic states in the role of ritual during periods of threat, collapse, and transformation, the volume shows how ritual can be used as a stabilizing or divisive force or a connecting medium between the present to the past in an empowering way. It also highlights the diversity of ritual roles and location in similar situations and illustrates how states in close proximity and sharing many cultural similarities can respond differently through ritual to stress and contrast the different response in rural and urban settings. Through detailed, cultural specific studies, the book provides a nuanced understanding of the diverse roles of ritual in the decline, collapse, and regeneration of societies and will be important for all archaeologists involved in the important notions of state "collapse" and "regeneration".
Download or read book Digital Humanities and Material Religion written by Emily Suzanne Clark and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building from a range of essays representing multiple fields of expertise and traversing multiple religious traditions, this important text provides analytic rigor to a question now pressing the academic study of religion: what is the relationship between the material and the digital? Its chapters address a range of processes of mediation between the digital and the material from a variety of perspectives and sub-disciplines within the field of religion in order to theorize the implications of these two turns in scholarship, offer case studies in methodology, and reflect on various tools and processes. Authors attend to religious practices and the internet, digital archives of religion, decolonization, embodiment, digitization of religious artefacts and objects, and the ways in which varied relationships between the digital and the material shape religious life. Collectively, the volume demonstrates opportunities and challenges at the intersection of digital humanities and material religion. Rather than defining the bounds of a new field of inquiry, the essays make a compelling case, collectively and on their own, for the interpretive scrutiny required of the humanities in the digital age.
