Download or read book Performing the Sacred Engaging Culture written by Todd E. Johnson and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian theatre has rich roots, from ancient Hebrew dramas to medieval plays, but where does it fit in today's media-saturated society? Performing the Sacred is a fascinating dialogue between a theologian and theatre artist, offering the first full-scale exploration of theatre and theology. The authors illuminate the importance of live performance in a virtual world, of preserving the ancient art form of storytelling by becoming the story. Theologically, theatre reflects Christianity's central doctrines--incarnation, community, and presence--enhancing the human creative experience and simultaneously engaging viewers on multiple levels. This Engaging Culture series title will be a key volume for those interested in theatre as well as drama practitioners, worship leaders, and culture makers.
Download or read book The Sacred Act of Reading written by Anne Margaret Castro and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.
Download or read book A Matrix of Meanings written by Craig Detweiler and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2003-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A candid, often humorous look at how to find truth in music, movies, television, and other aspects of pop culture. Includes photos, artwork, and sidebars.
Download or read book A Sacred Look Becoming Cultural Mystics written by Nancy Usselmann and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-04-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should a follower of Christ engage the popular media culture? By becoming a mystic! Sr. Nancy challenges Christians today to delve deep into the rich theological tradition of the church as the root and foundation for recognizing the beauty of God present in all that is truly human. The artists of popular culture sometimes unwittingly seek transcendence while grappling with some of humanity's most profound existential longings. The cultural mystics of today point out those needs of humanity in the culture's artifacts in order to enter into dialogue with those who seek something beyond what this world satisfies. The anthropological-sacramental-incarnational paradigm presented gives us this ability to take a sacred look of the culture and offer the joy of the Gospel, Christ who is the answer of all humanity's yearnings!
Download or read book Performing Piety written by Elaine A. Pena and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-06-12 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Virgin of Guadalupe, though quintessentially Mexican, inspires devotion throughout the Americas and around the world. This study sheds new light on the long-standing transnational dimensions of Guadalupan worship by examining the production of sacred space in three disparate but interconnected locations—at the sacred space known as Tepeyac in Mexico City, at its replica in Des Plaines, Illinois, and at a sidewalk shrine constructed by Mexican nationals in Chicago. Weaving together rich on-the-ground observations with insights drawn from performance studies, Elaine A. Peña demonstrates how devotees’ rituals—pilgrimage, prayers, and festivals—develop, sustain, and legitimize these sacred spaces. Interdisciplinary in scope, Performing Piety paints a nuanced picture of the lived experience of Guadalupan devotion in which different forms of knowing, socio-economic and political coping tactics, conceptions of history, and faith-based traditions circulate within and between sacred spaces.
Download or read book Performing the Gospel written by Deborah Sokolove and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the difference between good worship and good entertainment? Too often, people disparage some aspect of worship by calling it "just entertainment" or "just a performance." Others say that they do not need to go to church because they have profound spiritual or even religious experiences at concerts, plays, movies, or dances. How is worship different from these performing arts? How is art different from entertainment? This book looks at the history of the performing arts both in worship and as worship, with particular attention to the attitudes that shape our ideas about both worship and entertainment. Working definitions of words like "art," "excellence," "liturgy," and "play" help to illuminate what different people mean when they use them in conversations about Christian worship. Putting theological, scriptural, and practical writings on worship and the performing arts in conversation with interviews with dancers, musicians, actors, preachers, and liturgical scholars, this volume is intended to help pastors, performers, and everyone who plans, leads, or cares about worship talk with one another in mutually respectful and helpful ways.
Download or read book Authentic Fakes written by David Chidester and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-04-18 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authentic Fakes explores the religious dimensions of American popular culture in unexpected places: baseball, the Human Genome Project, Coca-Cola, rock 'n' roll, the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, the charisma of Jim Jones, Tupperware, and the free market, to name a few. Chidester travels through the cultural landscape and discovers the role that fakery—in the guise of frauds, charlatans, inventions, and simulations—plays in creating religious experience. His book is at once an incisive analysis of the relationship between religion and popular culture and a celebration of the myriad ways in which invention can stimulate the religious imagination. Moving beyond American borders, Chidester considers the religion of McDonald’s and Disney, the discourse of W.E.B. Du Bois and the American movement in Southern Africa, the messianic promise of Nelson Mandela’s 1990 tour to America, and more. He also looks at the creative possibilities of the Internet in such phenomena as Discordianism, the Holy Order of the Cheeseburger, and a range of similar inventions. Arguing throughout that religious fakes can do authentic religious work, and that American popular culture is the space of that creative labor, Chidester looks toward a future "pregnant with the possibilities of new kinds of authenticity."
Download or read book Ritual A Very Short Introduction written by Barry Stephenson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual is part of what it means to be human. Like sports, music, and drama, ritual defines and enriches culture, putting those who practice it in touch with sources of value and meaning larger than themselves. Ritual is unavoidable, yet it holds a place in modern life that is decidedly ambiguous. What is ritual? What does it do? Is it useful? What are the various kinds of ritual? Is ritual tradition bound and conservative or innovative and transformational? Alongside description of a number of specific rites, this Very Short Introduction explores ritual from both theoretical and historical perspectives. Barry Stephenson focuses on the places where ritual touches everyday life: in politics and power; moments of transformation in the life cycle; as performance and embodiment. He also discusses the boundaries of ritual, and how and why certain behaviors have been studied as ritual while others have not. Stephenson shows how ritual is an important vehicle for group and identity formation; how it generates and transmits beliefs and values; how it can be used to exploit and oppress; and how it has served as a touchstone for thinking about cultural origins and historical change. Encompassing the breadth and depth of modern ritual studies, Barry Stephenson's Very Short Introduction also develops a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Reviewing Leadership written by Robert J. Banks and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the idea of leadership in our culture today and in the past through theological evaluation, theory and practice, and examples of exemplary leaders.
Download or read book Tradition Performance and Religion in Native America written by Dennis Kelley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-08 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contemporary Indian Country, many of the people who identify as "American Indian" fall into the "urban Indian" category: away from traditional lands and communities, in cities and towns wherein the opportunities to live one's identity as Native can be restricted, and even more so for American Indian religious practice and activity. Tradition, Performance, and Religion in Native America: Ancestral Ways, Modern Selves explores a possible theoretical model for discussing the religious nature of urbanized Indians. It uses aspects of contemporary pantribal practices such as the inter-tribal pow wow, substance abuse recovery programs such as the Wellbriety Movement, and political involvement to provide insights into contemporary Native religious identity. Simply put, this book addresses the question what does it mean to be an Indigenous American in the 21st century, and how does one express that indigeneity religiously? It proposes that practices and ideologies appropriate to the pan-Indian context provide much of the foundation for maintaining a sense of aboriginal spiritual identity within modernity. Individuals and families who identify themselves as Native American can participate in activities associated with a broad network of other Native people, in effect performing their Indian identity and enacting the values that are connected to that identity.
Download or read book Mormons and Popular Culture written by J. Michael Hunter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-12-05 with total page 885 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people are unaware of how influential Mormons have been on American popular culture. This book parts the curtain and looks behind the scenes at the little-known but important influence Mormons have had on popular culture in the United States and beyond. Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon provides an unprecedented, comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture. Authored by a Mormon studies librarian and author of numerous writings regarding Mormon folklore, culture, and history, this book provides students, scholars, and interested readers with an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic that can serve as a key reference book on the topic. The work contains fascinating coverage on the most influential Mormon actors, musicians, fashion designers, writers, artists, media personalities, and athletes. Some topics—such as the Mormon influence at Disney, and how Mormon inventors have assisted in transforming American popular culture through the inventions of television, stereophonic sound, video games, and computer-generated animation—represent largely unknown information. The broad overview of Mormons and American popular culture offered can be used as a launching pad for further investigation; researchers will find the references within the book's well-documented chapters helpful.
Download or read book Sensing Sacred Texts written by James Washington Watts and published by Equinox Publishing (UK). This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the human senses become engaged in ritualizing sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination. Ritualized display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalizing the contents of texts by reading and memorization. The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas. Books thus physically incarnate cultural and religious values, doctrines, beliefs, and ideas. These essays bring theories of comparative scriptures and affect theory to bear on the topic as well as rich ethnographic descriptions of scriptural practices with Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and modern art and historical accounts of changing practices with sacred texts in ancient and medieval China and Korea, and in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures.
Download or read book The Future of Ritual written by Richard Schechner and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant examination of cultural expression and communal action, The Future of Ritual asks pertinent questions about art, theatre and the changing meaning of 'culture' in today's intercultural world.
Download or read book Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance written by Donnalee Dox and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performance has become a paradigm for analyzing contemporary culture, a pattern that structures a particular view of human interaction and experience. Performance is also widely used to better understand how we express values and ideas, including religious beliefs. Reckoning with Spirit in the Paradigm of Performance asks how the sensibilities of religious experience, which many people call spirituality, shape people's performance. When we observe people performing words, dances, music, and rituals they consider sacred, what (if any) conclusions can we draw about their experiences from what we see, read, and hear? By analyzing performances of spirituality and what people experience as "spirit," this book adds a new dimension to the paradigm of performance. Rather than reducing the spiritual dimension to either biology or culture, the book asks what such experiences might have to offer a reasoned analysis of vernacular culture. The specific performances presented are meditative dance and shamanic drumming, including descriptions of these practices and exegesis of practitioners' writings on the nature of spiritual experience and performance.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Performance written by Frank J. Korom and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropology of Performance is an invaluable guide to this exciting and growing area. This cutting-edge volume on the major advancements in performance studies presents the theories, methods, and practices of performance in cultures around the globe. Leading anthropologists describe the range of human expression through performance and explore its role in constructing identity and community, as well as broader processes such as globalization and transnationalism. Introduces new and advanced students to the task of studying and interpreting complex social, cultural, and political events from a performance perspective Presents performance as a convergent field of inquiry that bridges the humanities and social sciences, with a distinctive cross-cultural perspective in anthropology Demonstrates the range of human expression and meaning through performance in related fields of religious & ritual studies, folkloristics, theatre, language arts, and art & dance Explores the role of performance in constructing identity, community, and the broader processes of globalization and transnationalism Includes fascinating global case studies on a diverse range of phenomena Contributions from leading scholars examine verbal genres, ritual and drama, public spectacle, tourism, and the performances embedded in everyday selves, communities and nations
Download or read book Performing Religion on the Secular Stage written by Sharon Aronson-Lehavi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-02 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the relations between Western religion, secularism, and modern theater and performance. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi posits that the ongoing cultural power of religious texts, icons, and ideas on the one hand and the artistic freedom enabled by secularism and avant-garde experimentalism on the other, has led theatre artists throughout the twentieth century to create a uniquely modern theatrical hybrid–theater performances that simultaneously re-inscribe and grapple with religion and religious performativity. The book compares this phenomenon with medieval forms of religious theater and offers deep and original analyses of significant contemporary works ranging from plays and performances by August Strindberg, Hugo Ball (Dada), Jerzy Grotowski, and Hanoch Levin, to those created by Adrienne Kennedy, Rina Yerushalmi, Deb Margolin, Milo Rau, and Sarah Ruhl. The book analyzes a new and original historiography of a uniquely modern theatrical phenomenon, a study that is of high importance considering the reemergence of religion in contemporary culture and politics.
Download or read book Sustainable Development and Planning X written by G. Passerini and published by WIT Press. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 1025 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains research from the 10th International Conference on Sustainable Development and Planning. The papers included in this volume form a collection of research from academics, policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders from across the globe who discuss the latest advances in the field. Problems related to development and planning, which affect rural and urban areas, are present in all regions of the world. Accelerated urbanisation has resulted in deterioration of the environment and loss of quality of life. Urban development can also aggravate problems faced by rural areas such as forests, mountain regions and coastal areas, amongst many others. Taking into consideration the interaction between different regions and developing new methodologies for monitoring, planning and implementation of novel strategies can offer solutions for mitigating environmental pollution and non-sustainable use of available resources. Energy saving and eco-friendly building approaches have become an important part of modern development, which places special emphasis on resource optimisation. Planning has a key role to play in ensuring that these solutions as well as new materials and processes are incorporated in the most efficient manner. The application of new academic findings to planning and development strategies, assessment tools and decision making processes are all covered in this book.
