Download or read book Confronting Religious Absolutism written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy provide the conceptual foundations of theocracy, which is to say religiously-based totalitarianism. These absolutist doctrines emerge for the very first time among the Victorians: they are not ancient beliefs at all. They appear in the 19th century, right alongside secular varieties totalitarian thought, and in response to all the same cultural anxieties. Reactionary religious leaders used these doctrines to oppose scholarly conclusions in geology and evolutionary biology. That much everyone knows. What's not as well known is the fact that their principal target was Christian-humanist biblical scholarship, an unbroken 500-year tradition of inquiry undertaken primarily by Christian clergy and seminary faculty. The alternative to faith-based totalitarianism is faith based upon the imagination, our most sophisticated cognitive skill. Faith rooted in the moral imagination does not depend upon abject deference to an array of rigid doctrines and improbable claims. Wallace contends that faith is best understood as a creative process, and religion is best understood as a multi-media art (and originally the Mother of all arts). The arts convince, they do not command. They persuade, they do not prove. The arts provide humane resources whereby we grapple with life's deepest mysteries. Symbolism, like quantum mathematics, is a tool for grappling with inescapable paradox at the heart of reality. It is an ancient strategy for articulating what we discover at the elusive mind-body interface.
Download or read book A History of Law in Europe written by Antonio Padoa-Schioppa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 823 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English translation of a comprehensive legal history of Europe from the early middle ages to the twentieth century, encompassing both the common aspects and the original developments of different countries. As well as legal scholars and professionals, it will appeal to those interested in the general history of European civilisation.
Download or read book Diversity and Dissent written by Howard Louthan and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern Central Europe was the continent’s most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe’s most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration—one of the most debated questions of the early modern period—is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.
Download or read book Radical Thought among the Young A Survey of French Lyc e Students written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France experienced an unprecedented wave of terrorist attacks in 2015. Following these tragic events, social science researchers felt the need to undertake new work to better understand the dynamics of this new radicalism. This book is the result of one of these attempts. A large quantitative and qualitative survey was conducted among French Lycée students in order to gather substantive information and propose an interpretation of the penetration of radical ideas, be they religious or political, among them. How widespread are these radical ideas? What are the main characteristics of youngsters who share them? Are there links between religious radicalism and political radicalism? How do young people feel about the 2015 terrorist attacks? How do young people use media and social media to keep abreast of and understand radical acts and opinions? Those are the main questions explored in this book. Contributors are: Vincenzo Cicchelli, Alexandra Frénod, Olivier Galland, Laurent Lardeux, Anne Muxel, Jean-François Mignot and Sylvie Octobre.
Download or read book Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist written by James C. Alexander and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2008-04-30 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been said that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Drawing on this notion, Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist: Understanding and Responding to Christian Absolutism recounts the author’s journey as a member of the fundamentalist subculture as a child and his life among the Jesus Freaks (Jesus Movement)-- a congregation of deserters from the hippie drug culture of the late 1960's and early 1970's. This movement, though of great importance in the culture of the times, now largely goes unrecognized--although the Jesus Movement provided the cover stories for many prominent secular magazines chronicling the youth culture of the late 60's and early 70's. While, not devoted to a history of the Jesus Movement, the book does a service in bringing a discussion of the Jesus Freak phenomenon to the attention of today's readers. The book goes on to recount the author's eventual abandonment of fundamentalism. As the story unfolds, critical research related to the psychology, sociology, and history of the subculture provides a framework for understanding Christian fundamentalism. Stories of a Recovering Fundamentalist recounts a gripping personal pilgrimage—at times both humorous and painful— that is rooted in honest reflection and informed by theory and research. It offers worthwhile reading for mainline Christians, curious evangelicals, recovering fundamentalists or anyone wanting to understand this timely topic.
Download or read book The Invention of Religion written by Derek R. Peterson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is religion an obstacle to the values of modernity? Popular and scholarly opinion says that it is. In a world gripped in a clash of civilizations, religious absolutism seems to threaten the modern virtues of tolerance, reason, and freedom. This collection of historical essays argues that this popular view--religion versus modernity--is used by the politically powerful to construct the religious as irrational and antimodern. The authors study how nationalists, state officials, missionaries, and scholars in the West and in the colonized world defined and redefined the relationship between the political and the religious --From publisher's description.
Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Download or read book Leviathan written by Thomas Hobbes and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written during a moment in English history when the political and social structures were in flux and open to interpretation, Leviathan played an essential role in the development of the modern world.
Download or read book The Varieties of Religious Experience written by William James and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."
Download or read book Against the Backdrop of Sovereignty and Absolutism written by Massimiliano Traversino Di Cristo and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a foreword by Diego Quaglioni. This book analyses the bearing of one of the most long-standing debates of the Middle Ages, the distinction between potentia Dei absoluta and ordinata (God’s absolute and ordered power), on the modern Western legal tradition.
Download or read book Faith in Politics written by A. James Reichley and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004-05-26 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to current polls, about 85 percent of Americans identify with some religious faith and more than 40 percent say they attend religious services at least once a week. In recent years, religious observance—and even religious belief—have become important factors influencing voter choice. Active participation in electoral politics by some religious groups has fueled apprehensions that the traditional separation of church and state may be threatened. A. James Reichley explores the questions and conflicting positions surrounding the relations between government and politics in a new book that draws upon his landmark work, Religion in American Public Life. In Faith in Politics, Reichley explores the history of religion in American public life, and considers some practical and philosophic questions affecting future participation by religious groups in the formation of public policy. Reichley begins by examining the various attitudes and points of view of strict separationists, liberal social activists, moderate accommodationists, and direct interventionists. He goes on to discuss the way religion and politics relate to each other through a theoretic structure of seven value systems: monism, absolutism, ecstacism, egoism, collectivism, civil humanism, and transcendent idealism. Further chapters examine the trends and constitutional arrangements that developed during the formative years of the American Republic; the evolution of judicial interpretations of the free exercise and establishment clauses; and the history of church involvement in politics from the early years of the Republic to the 2000 election and the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. A chapter covering events and developments from 1986 to 2002 includes accounts of political activism by the African American church, ideological divisions among Roman Catholics, Jewish liberalism and commitment to Israel, the rise and decline of the religious right, and political differences
Download or read book John Hick s Religious Pluralism in Global Perspective written by Sharada Sugirtharajah and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains fresh scholarly contributions to mark the birth centenary of John Hick, the internationally well-known philosopher of religion, whose works continue to have significant global relevance in today’s religiously diverse and conflict-ridden world. His writings have reset the parameters of religious pluralism. Up till now, Hick’s religious pluralism has been mainly seen in relation to the Western context where Christianity is the predominant religion. This volume includes both Western and non-Western engagement with his thinking in contexts such as Japan, China, Korea, Nigeria, and India, where Christianity is a minority religion with little political power. Its distinctiveness lies in widening the debate on religious pluralism by bringing Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis into a constructive cross-cultural and interreligious conversation with scholars of Hinduism, Jainism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and African traditional religions. In doing so, this collection examines how Hick’s philosophy of religious pluralism has been received, appropriated and appraised by these scholars. It has been appreciated and critiqued in equal measure, and continues to impact on current thinking on religious pluralism. This volume makes a significant contribution to the debate initiated by Hick.
Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 1384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Process and Pluralism written by Zhihe Wang and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a uniquely process relational oriented Chinese approach to inter-religious dialogue called Chinese Harmonism. The key features of Chinese harmonism are peaceful co-existence, mutual transformation, and openness to change. As developed with help from Whiteheadian process thought, Chinese harmonism provides a middle way between particularism and universalism, showing how diversity can exist within unity. Chinese harmonism is open to similarities among religions, but it also emphasizes that differences among religions can be complementary rather than contradictory. Thus Chinese harmonism implies an attitude of respect for others and a willingness to learn from others, without reducing the other to one’s own identity: that is, to sameness. By emphasizing the possibility of complementariness, a process oriented Chinese harmonism avoids a dichotomy between universalism and particularism represented respectively by John Hick and S. Mark Heim, and will make room for a genuine openness and do justice to the culturally and religiously “other.”
Download or read book Intolerant Religion in a Tolerant Liberal Democracy written by Yossi Nehushtan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-21 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to examine and critically analyse the role that religion has and should have in the public and legal sphere. The main purpose of the book is to explain why religion, on the whole, should not be tolerated in a tolerant-liberal democracy and to describe exactly how it should not be tolerated – mainly by addressing legal issues. The main arguments of the book are, first, that as a general rule illiberal intolerance should not be tolerated; secondly, that there are meaningful, unique links between religion and intolerance, and between holding religious beliefs and holding intolerant views (and ultimately acting upon these views); and thirdly, that the religiosity of a legal claim is normally a reason, although not necessarily a prevailing one, not to accept that claim.
Download or read book Popery the antagonist of liberty civil and religious By a layman written by and published by . This book was released on 1869 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Church and Religious Other written by Gerard Mannion and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together the prestigious speakers at the inaugural Church in Our Times Lecture Series at Liverpool Hope, throughout the first 4 months of 2006, and invited contributors from and addressing wider international contexts - Africa, Sri Lanka, India and the United States. The volume explores themes such as questions of ecclesial and religious identity in these post-modern times, the advent of neo-exclusivism, divisions within the contemporary Roman Catholic and Anglicans churches, inter-faith relations and dialogue, questions of sexuality and Christian ministry, contemporary understandings of ecclesial authority, teaching and tradition, the inter-relation between the church and the kingdom of God today, an Asian appraisal of Pope Benedict's first sermon, inculturation and the rhetoric and reality of the notion of Church as Christianity's most distinctive and defining feature and constructive proposals for ecumenical ways forward in the future. The commonality and coherence of the papers, along with the manner in which a number of them together contribute towards making a cumulative case upon similar issues of concern for the 'church in our times', constitute a major strength of this collection. This volume will interest faculty and students engaged in the study of the contemporary church, ecumenism, global Christianity, secularity and inter-religious dialogue, as well as appealing to ministers and pastors as well as the general reader excited by the most pressing debates pertaining to the church in these times.
