Download or read book The Paranormal and Popular Culture written by Darryl Caterine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-18 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in preternatural and supernatural themes has revitalized the Gothic tale, renewed explorations of psychic powers and given rise to a host of social and religious movements based upon claims of the fantastical. And yet, in spite of this widespread enthusiasm, the academic world has been slow to study this development. This volume rectifies this gap in current scholarship by serving as an interdisciplinary overview of the relationship of the paranormal to the artefacts of mass media (e.g. novels, comic books, and films) as well as the cultural practices they inspire. After an introduction analyzing the paranormal’s relationship to religion and entertainment, the book presents essays exploring its spiritual significance in a postmodern society; its (post)modern representation in literature and film; and its embodiment in a number of contemporary cultural practices. Contributors from a number of discplines and cultural contexts address issues such as the shamanistic aspects of Batman and lesbianism in vampire mythology. Covering many aspects of the paranormal and its effect on popular culture, this book is an important statement in the field. As such, it will be of utmost interest to scholars of religious studies as well as media, communication, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Blood from the Sky written by Adam Jortner and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape—fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At the same time, Enlightenment philosophers and American founders explicitly denied the possibility of supernatural events, dismissing them as deliberate falsehoods—and, therefore, efforts to suborn the state. Many feared that belief in the supernatural itself was a danger to democracy. In this way, miracles became a political problem and prompted violent responses in the religious communities of Prophetstown, Turtle Creek, and Nauvoo. In Blood from the Sky, Adam Jortner argues that the astonishing breadth and extent of American miracles and supernaturalism following independence derived from Enlightenment ideas about proof and sensory evidence, offering a chance at certain belief in an uncertain religious climate. Jortner breaks new ground in explaining the rise of radical religion in antebellum America, revisiting questions of disenchantment, modernity, and religious belief in a history of astounding events that—as early Americans would have said—needed to be seen to be believed.
Download or read book Space Place and Religious Landscapes written by Darrelyn Gunzburg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.
Download or read book The Rise of Network Christianity written by Brad Christerson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, when traditionally organized religious groups are seeing declining membership and participation, are networks of independent churches growing so explosively? Drawing on in-depth interviews with leaders and participants, The Rise of Network Christianity explains the social forces behind the fastest-growing form of Christianity in the U.S., which Brad Christerson and Richard Flory have labeled "Independent Network Charismatic." This form of Christianity emphasizes aggressive engagement with the supernatural-including healing, direct prophecies from God, engaging in "spiritual warfare" against demonic spirits--and social transformation. Christerson and Flory argue that macro-level social changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital revolution, have given competitive advantages to religious groups organized as networks rather than traditionally organized congregations and denominations. Network forms of governance allow for experimentation with controversial supernatural practices, innovative finances and marketing, and a highly participatory, unorthodox, and experiential faith, which is attractive in today's unstable religious marketplace. Christerson and Flory hypothesize that as more religious groups imitate this type of governance, religious belief and practice will become more experimental, more orientated around practice than theology, more shaped by the individual religious "consumer," and authority will become more highly concentrated in the hands of individuals rather than institutions. Network Christianity, they argue, is the future of Christianity in America.
Download or read book In Gods We Trust written by Scott Atran and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-09 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
Download or read book Landscape Literature and English Religious Culture 1660 1800 written by R. Mayhew and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the 'long' Eighteenth-century. Landscape has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of Eighteenth-century English culture; this book surveys those debates and offers a provocative new account. Mayhew shows that describing landscape was a religiously contested practice, and that different theological positions led differing authors to different descriptive approaches. Landscape description, then, shows English intellectual life still in the grips of a Christian and classical mentality in the 'long' Eighteenth-century.
Download or read book Where God and Science Meet written by Patrick McNamara Ph.D. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-09-30 with total page 918 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiritual practices, or awakenings, have an impact on brain, mind and personality. These changes are being scientifically predicted and proven. For example, studies show Buddhist priests and Franciscan nuns at the peak of religious feelings show a functional change in the lobes of their brain. Similar processes have been found in people with epilepsy, which Hippocrates called the sacred disease. New research is showing that not only does a person's brain activity change in particular areas while that person is experiencing religious epiphany, but such events can be created for some people, even self-professed atheists, by stimulating various parts of the brain. In this far-reaching and novel set, experts from across the nation and around the world present evolutionary, neuroscientific, and psychological approaches to explaining and exploring religion, including the newest findings and evidence that have spurred the fledgling field of neurotheology. It is not the goal of neurotheology to prove or disprove the existence of God, but to understand the biology of spiritual experiences. Such experiences seem to exist outside time and space - caused by the brain for some reason losing its perception of a boundary between physical body and outside world - and could help explain other intangible events, such as altered states of consciousness, possessions, alien visitations, near-death experiences and out-of-body events. Understanding them - as well as how and why these abilities evolved in the brain - could also help us understand how religion contributes to survival of the human race. Eminent contributors to this set help us answer questions including: How does religion better our brain function? What is the difference between a religious person and a terrorist who kills in the name of religion? Is there one site or function in the brain necessary for religious experience?
Download or read book Supernatural Agents written by Iikka Pyysiainen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cognitive science of religion is a rapidly growing field whose practitioners apply insights from advances in cognitive science in order to provide a better understanding of religious impulses, beliefs, and behaviors. In this book Ilkka Pyysiäinen shows how this methodology can profitably be used in the comparative study of beliefs about superhuman agents. He begins by developing a theoretical outline of the basic, modular architecture of the human mind and especially the human capacity to understand agency. He then goes on to discuss examples of supernatural agency in detail, arguing that the human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others forms the basis of conceptions of supernatural agents and of such social cognition in which supernatural agents are postulated as interested parties in social life. Beliefs about supernatural agency are natural, says Pyysiäinen, in the sense that such concepts are used in an intuitive and automatic fashion. Two dots and a straight line below them automatically trigger the idea of a face, for example. Given that the mind consists of a host of such modular mechanisms, certain kinds of beliefs will always have a selective advantage over others. Abstract theological concepts are usually elaborate versions of such simpler and more contagious folk conceptions. Pyysiäinen uses ethnographical and survey materials as well as doctrinal treatises to show that there are certain recurrent patterns in beliefs about supernatural agents both at the level of folk-religion and of formal theology.
Download or read book Landscape Religion and the Supernatural written by Matthias Egeler and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of "time and memory", "repeating patterns", "identity formation", "morality", "labor", "playfulness and adventure", "power and subversion", "sound", "emotions", "coping with contingency", "home and unhomeliness", as well as "nature and environment", the book engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary field of landscape theory and the study of religions. It brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been collected since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this rich heritage with the insights of landscape theory both in and beyond the study of religions allows important new contributions to theorizing landscape and religion, especially when it comes to considering the perspectives on landscape held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have stood in the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities, and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the urban perspectives of literature and the arts"--
Download or read book Judgment and Grace in Dixie written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1997-03-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilson appraises the influence of religion on various aspects of Southern culture.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Religion Magic and Witchcraft written by Rebecca L. Stein and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise and accessible textbook introduces students to the anthropological study of religion. Stein and Stein examine religious expression from a cross-cultural perspective and expose students to the varying complexity of world religions. The chapters incorporate key theoretical concepts and a rich range of ethnographic material. The fourth edition of The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft offers: • increased coverage of new religious movements, fundamentalism, and religion and conflict/violence; • fresh case study material with examples drawn from around the globe; • further resources via a comprehensive companion website. This is an essential guide for students encountering anthropology of religion for the first time.
Download or read book East Asian Landscapes and Legitimation written by Yasmin Koppen and published by Frank & Timme GmbH. This book was released on 2024-06-17 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conquest of Sichuan and Vietnam by the Chinese Empire led to very different outcomes. This volume examines the negotiations between central authority and local autonomy, the physical manifestations of socially constructed identities, and the transformation of sacred spaces which reflect broader social, political, and religious currents. It also offers a method to study spatial-social interactions in historical settings that provides insights into dynamics of power imposition and identity negotiation in local contexts. Experiential Architecture Analysis (EAA) serves to explore the interplay of local traditions, transcultural ideology transfer, and sacred water sites in the peripheries of Chinese culture. It analyzes the spatial ensembles of sacred sites regarding their roles for legitimation, dominance, and social resistance, while highlighting the agency of consumers to redefine spatial media. All scholars of Chinese and Southeast Asian History, of Religious Studies or Cultural Anthropology find in this volume valuable insights for their research, especially where it concerns areas lacking reliable written sources.
Download or read book Layered Landscapes written by Eric Nelson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.
Download or read book Landscapes churches and moralities by the author of Recreations of a country parson written by Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Introduction to Human Geography A Disciplinary Approach written by Steven Graves and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is designed for use in survey courses on US Geography, Introduction to Human or Cultural Geography. It is free of charge online, or the minimum cost permissible by the printer for the print version. Print version of the Second Edition of the text by Professor Graves.
Download or read book Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare s England written by Kristen Poole and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.
Download or read book Landscapes and Communities on the Pacific Rim From Asia to the Pacific Northwest written by Karen K. Gaul and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays offer a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary study of the ways in which communities of people understand and inhabit their environments. They examine and compare human/environmental interactions in communities across the Pacific Northwest, the Pacific Rim, and Asia.
