Download or read book The Transformation of American Religion written by Alan Wolfe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this astounding account, a leading sociologist demonstrates that religion in America has become so tamed and softened that it hardly serves any of its original functions.

Download or read book Early Modern Europe 1450 1789 written by Merry E. Wiesner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-21 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thoroughly updated best-selling textbook with new learning features. This acclaimed textbook has unmatched breadth of coverage and a global perspective.

Download or read book Religious Stories in Transformation Conflict Revision and Reception written by Alberdina Houtman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Religious Stories in Transformation: Conflict, Revision and Reception, the editors present a collection of essays that reveal both the many similarities and the poignant differences between ancient myths in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and modern secular culture and how these stories were incorporated and adapted over time. This rich multidisciplinary research demonstrates not only how stories in different religions and cultures are interesting in their own right, but also that the process of transformation in particular deserves scholarly interest. It is through the changes in the stories that the particular identity of each religion comes to the fore most strikingly.

Download or read book Religion Identity and Change written by Simon Coleman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is of enduring importance in the lives of many people, yet the religious landscape has been dramatically transformed in recent decades. Established churches have been challenged by eastern faiths, revivals of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, and the eclectic spiritualities of the New Age. Religion has long been regarded by social scientists and psychologists as a key source of identity formation, ranging from personal conversion experiences to collective association with fellow believers. This book addresses the need for a reassessment of issues relating to identity in the light of current transformations in society as a whole and religion in particular. Drawing together case-studies from many different expressions of faith and belief - Hindu, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Anglican, New Age - leading scholars ask how contemporary religions or spiritualities respond to the challenge of forming individual and collective identities in a nation context marked by secularisation and postmodern decentring of culture, as well as religious revitalisation. The book focuses on Britain as a context for religious change, but asks important questions that are of universal significance for those studying religion: How is personal and collective identity constructed in a world of multiple social and cultural influences? What role can religion play in creating, reinforcing or even transforming such identity?

Download or read book Globalization and Orthodox Christianity written by Victor Roudometof and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With approximately 200 to 300 million adherents worldwide, Orthodox Christianity is among the largest branches of Christianity, yet it remains relatively understudied. This book examines the rich and complex entanglements between Orthodox Christianity and globalization, offering a substantive contribution to the relationship between religion and globalization, as well as the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and the sociology of religion – and more broadly, the interdisciplinary field of Religious Studies. While deeply engaged with history, this book does not simply narrate the history of Orthodox Christianity as a world religion, nor does it address theological issues or cover all the individual trajectories of each subgroup or subdivision of the faith. Orthodox Christianity is the object of the analysis, but author Victor Roudometof speaks to a broader audience interested in culture, religion, and globalization. Roudometof argues in favor of using globalization instead of modernization as the main theoretical vehicle for analyzing religion, displacing secularization in order to argue for multiple hybridizations of religion as a suitable strategy for analyzing religious phenomena. It offers Orthodox Christianity as a test case that illustrates the presence of historically specific but theoretically distinct glocalizations, applicable to all faiths.

Download or read book The Great Transformation written by Karen Armstrong and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s leading writers on religion and the highly acclaimed author of the bestselling A History of God, The Battle for God and The Spiral Staircase, comes a major new work: a chronicle of one of the most important intellectual revolutions in world history and its relevance to our own time. In one astonishing, short period – the ninth century BCE – the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity into the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Historians call this the Axial Age because of its central importance to humanity’s spiritual development. Now, Karen Armstrong traces the rise and development of this transformative moment in history, examining the brilliant contributions to these traditions made by such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Ezekiel. Armstrong makes clear that despite some differences of emphasis, there was remarkable consensus among these religions and philosophies: each insisted on the primacy of compassion over hatred and violence. She illuminates what this “family” resemblance reveals about the religious impulse and quest of humankind. And she goes beyond spiritual archaeology, delving into the ways in which these Axial Age beliefs can present an instructive and thought-provoking challenge to the ways we think about and practice religion today. A revelation of humankind’s early shared imperatives, yearnings and inspired solutions – as salutary as it is fascinating. Excerpt from The Great Transformation: In our global world, we can no longer afford a parochial or exclusive vision. We must learn to live and behave as though people in remote parts of the globe were as important as ourselves. The sages of the Axial Age did not create their compassionate ethic in idyllic circumstances. Each tradition developed in societies like our own that were torn apart by violence and warfare as never before; indeed, the first catalyst of religious change was usually a visceral rejection of the aggression that the sages witnessed all around them. . . . All the great traditions that were created at this time are in agreement about the supreme importance of charity and benevolence, and this tells us something important about our humanity.

Download or read book Belief Transformations written by Mikael Rothstein and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RENNER Studies on New Religions is an initiative supported by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. The series was established to publish books on alternative spiritual movements from a wide range of perspectives. The books will appeal to an international readership of scholars, students, and professionals in the study of religion, theology, the arts, and the social sciences. It is hoped that this series will provide a proper context for scientific exchange between these often competing disciplines. Simply stated, the authorAes main contention is that the two onewo religions under scrutiny - TM and ISKCON - are, despite their common rootedness in Vedic Hinduism, fundamentally opposed to each other. As presented here, they are fundamentally opposed particularly in their attitudes toward modern Western science, which world-affirming TM celebrates and would assimilate ...and world-denying ISKCON rejects as an illusion...in sum this book is both instructive and provocative - C. MacCormick, Wells College.

Download or read book Public Religion and Urban Transformation written by Lowell W Livezey and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-05-01 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American cities are in the midst of fundamental changes. De-industrialization of large, aging cities has been enormously disruptive for urban communities, which are being increasingly fragmented. Though often overlooked, religious organizations are important actors, both culturally and politically in the restructuring metropolis. Public Religion and Urban Transformation provides a sweeping view of urban religion in response to these transformations. Drawing on a massive study of over seventy-five congregations in urban neighborhoods, this volume provides the most comprehensive picture available of urban places of worship-from mosques and gurdwaras to churches and synagogues-within one city. Revisiting the primary site of research for the early members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, the volume focuses on Chicago, which provides an exceptionally clear lens on the ways in which religious organizations both reflect and contribute to changes in American pluralism. From the churches of a Mexican American neighborhood and of the Black middle class to communities shared by Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims and the rise of "megachurches," Public Religion and Urban Transformation illuminates the complex interactions among religion, urban structure, and social change at this extraordinary episode in the history of urban America.

Download or read book Converting Cultures written by Dennis Washburn and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-05-30 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume fundamentally improves our understanding of processes like the secularization of society, and the growth of mass ideological movements, by looking upon these transformations to modernity as a species of conversion akin to religious conversion. The geographical areas covered by the contributors—the Ottoman domain, India, China, and Japan—provide striking examples of the dynamic force of conversion as a reaction to the tremendous pressures exerted by colonialism and imperialism and by the types of transformations constitutive of modernity.

Download or read book Religion in the 21st Century written by Margit Warburg and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spite of the debate about secularization or de-secularization, the existential-bodily need for religion is basically the same as always. What have been changed are the horizons within which religions are interpreted and the relationships within which religions are integrated. This book explores how religions continue to challenge secular democracy and science, and how religions are themselves being challenged by secular values and practices. All traditions - whether religious or secular - experience a struggle over authority, and this struggle seems to intensify with globalization, as it has brought people around the world in closer contact with each other. In this book internationally leading scholars from sociology, law, political science, religious studies, theology and the religion and science debate, take stock of the current interdisciplinary research on religion and open new perspectives at the cutting edge of the debate on religion in the 21st century.

Download or read book Christianity and the Transformation of the Book written by Anthony Grafton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

Download or read book Constructs of Meaning and Religious Transformation written by Herman Westerink and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2013 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the major trends in the psychology of religion is the growing interest in religious and spiritual meaning making in relation to religious and spiritual transformation processes, notably as the aftermath of traumatic experiences and in situations of crisis, stress or disease when personal well-being is at stake and coping activities and skills are enhanced. This volume covers this broad and complex area of interrelated issues. The contributions focus on religious and spiritual meaning making and transformation. They do not compose an integrated perspective on religious meaning making and transformation processes. Rather, this volume assembles and presents the current state of research on this complex of issues. Thus it not only provides an excellent overview of the psychological study of constructs of meaning and religious transformation, but also contributes to our knowledge of contemporary religious life in the context of socio-cultural transformation processes (pluralisation, globalization).

Download or read book Religions in the Modern World written by Linda Woodhead and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive guide offers an unrivalled introduction to recent work in the study of religion, from the religious traditions of Asia and the West, to new forms of religion and spirituality such as New Age. With an historical introduction to each religion and detailed analysis of its place in the modern world, Religions in the Modern World is ideal for newcomers to the study of religion. It incorporates case-studies and anecdotes, text extracts, chapter menus and end-of-chapter summaries, glossaries and annotated further reading sections. Topics covered include: * religion, colonialism and postcolonialism * religious nationalism * women and religion * religion and globalization * religion and authority * the rise of new spiritualities.

Download or read book Fertility and Faith written by Philip Jenkins and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demography drives religious change. High-fertility societies, like most of contemporary Africa, tend to be fervent and devout. The lower a population's fertility rates, the greater the tendency for people to detach from organized or institutional religion. Thus, fertility rates supply an effective gauge of secularization trends. In Fertility and Faith, Philip Jenkins maps the demographic revolution that has taken hold of many countries around the globe in recent decades and explores the implications for the future development of the world's religions. Demographic change has driven the secularization of contemporary Western Europe, where the revolution began. Jenkins shows how the European trajectory of rapid declines in fertility is now affecting much of the globe. The implications are clear: the religious character of many non-European areas is highly likely to move in the direction of sweeping secularization. And this is now reshaping the United States itself. This demographic revolution is reshaping Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. In order to accommodate the new social trends, these religions must adapt to situations where large families are no longer the norm. Each religious tradition will develop distinctive emphases concerning morality, gender, and sexuality, as well as the roles of clergy and laity in the faith's institutional structures. Radical change follows great upheaval. The tidal shift is well underway. With Fertility and Faith, Philip Jenkins describes this ongoing phenomenon and envisions our collective religious future.

Download or read book Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities written by Yosef Kaplan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 654 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the sixteenth century on, hundreds of Portuguese New Christians began to flow to Venice and Livorno in Italy, and to Amsterdam and Hamburg in northwest Europe. In those cities and later in London, Bordeaux, and Bayonne as well, Iberian conversos established their own Jewish communities, openly adhering to Judaism. Despite the features these communities shared with other confessional groups in exile, what set them apart was very significant. In contrast to other European confessional communities, whose religious affiliation was uninterrupted, the Western Sephardic Jews came to Judaism after a separation of generations from the religion of their ancestors. In this edited volume, several experts in the field detail the religious and cultural changes that occurred in the Early Modern Western Sephardic communities. "Highly recommended for all academic and Jewish libraries." - David B Levy, Touro College, NYC, in: Association of Jewish Libraries News and Reviews 1.2 (2019)

Download or read book Religion and Social Transformations written by David Herbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-27 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2002: Religion and Social Transformations examines the reciprocal relationship between religion, modernity and social change. The book focuses on the world's three major missionary religions - Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. It explores how these three traditions are responding to some of the most challenging issues associated with globalization, including the role of religion in the fall of Communism; the tension between religion and feminism; the compatibility of religion and human rights; and whether ancient religions can accommodate new challenges such as environmentalism. The five textbooks and Reader that make up the Religion Today Open University/Ashgate series are: From Sacred Text to Internet; Religion and Social Transformations; Perspectives on Civil Religion; Global Religious Movements in Regional Context; Belief Beyond Boundaries; Religion Today: A Reader

Download or read book Religious Transformation in Modern Asia written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the religious transformation of each nation in modern Asia. When the Asian people, who were not only diverse in culture and history, but also active in performing local traditions and religions, experienced a socio-political change under the wave of Western colonialism, the religious climate was also altered from a transnational perspective. Part One explores the nationals of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, focusing on the manifestations of Japanese religion, Chinese foreign policy, the British educational system in Hong Kong in relation to Tibetan Buddhism, the Korean women of Catholicism, and the Scottish impact in late nineteenth century Korea. Part Two approaches South Asia through the topics of astrology, the works of a Gujarātī saint, and Himalayan Buddhism. The third part is focused on the conflicts between ‘indigenous religions and colonialism,’ ‘Buddhism and Christianity,’ ‘Islam and imperialism,’ and ‘Hinduism and Christianity’ in Southeast Asia.