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Genealogies Of Religion
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Book Synopsis Genealogies of Religion by : Talal Asad
Download or read book Genealogies of Religion written by Talal Asad and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1993-08-18 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes—for Westerners and non-Westerners alike—particular forms of "history making."
Book Synopsis Genealogies of Religion by : Talal Asad
Download or read book Genealogies of Religion written by Talal Asad and published by . This book was released on 1993-08-18 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Geneologies of Religion, Talal Asad explores how religion as a historical category emerged in the West and has come to be applied as a universal concept. The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invokved to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions. He argues that "religion" is a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes—for Westerners and non-Westerners alike—particular forms of "history making."
Book Synopsis Genealogies of Religion by : Talal Asad
Download or read book Genealogies of Religion written by Talal Asad and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 1993-08-18 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He argues that "religionis a construction of European modernity, a construction that authorizes—for Westerners and non-Westerners alike—particular forms of "history making."
Book Synopsis Formations of the Secular by : Talal Asad
Download or read book Formations of the Secular written by Talal Asad and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A dark but brilliantly original work . . . one of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.” —H-Net Reviews Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity. “A difficult if stunningly eloquent book, a response both elusive and forthright to the many shelves of ‘books on terrorism’ which this country’s trade publishers are rushing into print.” —Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature “This wonderfully illuminating book should be read alongside the author’s Genealogies of Religion.” —Religion “One of the most interesting scholars of religious writing today.” —Christian Scholar’s Review “Asad’s brilliant study remains a defining piece of intellectual and scholarly contribution for all of those interested in exploring the religious and the secular in the modern era.” —The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
Book Synopsis Genealogies of the Secular by : Willem Styfhals
Download or read book Genealogies of the Secular written by Willem Styfhals and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a historical and philosophical overview of the twentieth-century German debates on secularization, and their significance for contemporary discussions about the relationship between theology and modernity. While the concept of secularization is traditionally used to define the nature of modern culture, and sometimes to uncover the theological origins of secular modernity, its validity is being questioned ever more radically today. Genealogies of the Secular returns to the historical, intellectual, and philosophical roots of this concept in the twentieth-century German debates on religion and modernity, and presents a wide range of strategies that German thinkers have applied to apprehend the connection between religion and secularism. In fundamentally heterogeneous ways, these strategies all developed “genealogies of the secular” by tracing modern phenomena back to their religious or theological roots. This book aims to disclose the complex prehistory of the contemporary debates on political theology and postsecularism, and to show how prominent thinkers continue this German tradition today. It explores and assesses the classic theories of secularization that are epitomized in Carl Schmitt’s writings on political theology, but also addresses German philosophers whose work has been rarely associated with secularization, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Attention is also paid to two thinkers whose role in these discourses has not been fully explored yet: Jacob Taubes and Jan Assmann. By introducing their thinking on religion, politics, and secularization, the book also makes two of their own key texts available to an English-language readership. “What makes the book so valuable pedagogically is the clarity and scope of its synthetic gestures about the dense questions congealing around the topic of secularization. It offers a pronouncement of central significance, emerging from some of the most important contemporary voices in these fields. The scholarship is internationally informed and engaged, even as it feels vibrant, immediate, and agenda setting.” — Ward Blanton, University of Kent, Canterbury
Book Synopsis The Ascetic Ideal by : Stephen Mulhall
Download or read book The Ascetic Ideal written by Stephen Mulhall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Ascetic Ideal, Stephen Mulhall shows how areas of cultural life that seem to be either essentially unconnected to evaluative commitments (science and philosophy) or to involve non-moral values (aesthetics) are in fact deeply informed by ethico-religious commitments, for better and for worse. The book develops a reading of Nietzsche's concept of 'the ascetic ideal', which he used to track the evolution, mutation, and expansion of the system of slave moral values, associated primarily with Judaeo-Christian religious belief through diverse fields of Western European culture—not just religion and morality, but aesthetics, science, and philosophy. Mulhall also offers an interpretation of Nietzsche's genealogical method that aims to rebut standard criticisms of its nature, and to emphasize its potential for enhancing philosophical understanding more generally. The focus throughout is on developments in those fields which occurred after the end of Nietzsche's intellectual career, and in particular on influential modes of thought and practice that have a contemporary significance. The goal is not simply to argue that Nietzsche's diagnosis and critique retains considerable merit, but also to show that Nietzsche is himself significantly indebted to the ideals he criticizes, and that this opens up a possibility of synthesizing elements of his approach with those drawn from its target. Hence, the book also tracks various ways in which the object of Nietzsche's criticism has undergone further mutations (just as his genealogical method would suggest), and in doing so has generated ways of pursuing the values central to asceticism that avoid Nietzsche's criticisms, and might even further his own goals.
Book Synopsis History and Presence by : Robert A. Orsi
Download or read book History and Presence written by Robert A. Orsi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, PROSE Award A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Junto Favorite Book of the Year Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable. “This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle... If reformed theology has led to the gods’ ostensible absence in modern religion, History and Presence is a sort of counter-reformation literature that revels in the excesses of divine materiality: the contradictions, the redundancies, the scrambling of borders between the sacred and profane, the dead and the living, the past and the present, the original and the imitator...History and Presence is a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think.” —Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion “With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints and other divine–human encounters, Orsi constructs a theory of presence for the study of contemporary religion and history. Many interviews with individuals devoted to particular saints and relics are included in this fascinating study of how people process what they believe.” —Catholic Herald
Book Synopsis The Western Construction of Religion by : Daniel Dubuisson
Download or read book The Western Construction of Religion written by Daniel Dubuisson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-06-18 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Western Construction of Religion not only provides a critical assessment of the whole history of religionas it is understood in the West but offers better ways of constructing the study of this central part of human experience.
Book Synopsis More Than Belief by : Manuel A. Vasquez
Download or read book More Than Belief written by Manuel A. Vasquez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the centrality of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion.
Book Synopsis Secular Translations by : Talal Asad
Download or read book Secular Translations written by Talal Asad and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Secular Translations, the anthropologist Talal Asad reflects on his lifelong engagement with secularism and its contradictions. He draws out the ambiguities in our concepts of the religious and the secular through a rich consideration of translatability and untranslatability, exploring the circuitous movements of ideas between histories and cultures. In search of meeting points between the language of Islam and the language of secular reason, Asad gives particular importance to the translations of religious ideas into nonreligious ones. He discusses the claim that liberal conceptions of equality represent earlier Christian ideas translated into secularism; explores the ways that the language and practice of religious ritual play an important but radically transformed role as they are translated into modern life; and considers the history of the idea of the self and its centrality to the project of the secular state. Secularism is not only an abstract principle that modern liberal democratic states espouse, he argues, but also a range of sensibilities. The shifting vocabularies associated with each of these sensibilities are fundamentally intertwined with different ways of life. In exploring these entanglements, Asad shows how translation opens the door for—or requires—the utter transformation of the translated. Drawing on a diverse set of thinkers ranging from al-Ghazālī to Walter Benjamin, Secular Translations points toward new possibilities for intercultural communication, seeking a language for our time beyond the language of the state.
Book Synopsis Guide to the Study of Religion by : Willi Braun
Download or read book Guide to the Study of Religion written by Willi Braun and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 2000 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is religion? Can it be defined at all? Or is it too easily defined in far too many ways so as to make a "religion" a drifting signifier or whatever one's pleasure is? Does the study of religion require special, perhaps religious, tools of analysis and explanation? What is the difference between a knowledge of religion derived from practicing it and a knowledge about religion derived from nonreligious modes of inquiry? Sooner or later, any serious student of religion must face these questionsif religious practices are to be investigated in the light of the terms and aims of the social and human sciences in the modern university."The Guide to the Study of Religion" provides a map of the key concepts and thought-structures for imagining and studying religion as a class of everyday social practices that lend themselves to no more or less difficult explanation than any other class of social phenomena.
Download or read book Christian Moderns written by Webb Keane and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-03 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
Book Synopsis Spiritual Despots by : J. Barton Scott
Download or read book Spiritual Despots written by J. Barton Scott and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiritual Despots by historian of religion J. Barton Scott zeroes in on the quaint term "priestcraft" to track anticlerical polemics in Britain and South Asia during the colonial period. Scott's aim is to show how anticlerical rhetoric spread through the colonies alongside ideas about modern secular subjectivity. Through close readings of texts in English, Hindi, and Gujarati, he shows in compelling detail how the critique of priestly conspiracy gave rise to a new ideal of the self-disciplining subject and a vision of modern Hinduism that was based on unmediated personal experience and self-regulation rather than priestly tutelary power. Spiritual Despots offers a new perspective on what some scholars have called "Protestant Hinduism," and, more broadly, contributes to the emerging field of "post-secular" studies by shedding light on the colonial genealogy of secular subjectivity.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History by : Kathryn Gin Lum
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History written by Kathryn Gin Lum and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview for those interested in the role of religion and race in American history. Thirty-four scholars from the fields of History, Religious Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and more investigate the complex interdependencies of religion and race from pre-Columbian origins to the present. The volume addresses the religious experience, social realities, theologies, and sociologies of racialized groups in American religious history, as well as the ways that religious myths, institutions, and practices contributed to their racialization. Part One begins with a broad introductory survey outlining some of the major terms and explaining the intersections of race and religions in various traditions and cultures across time. Part Two provides chronologically arranged accounts of specific historical periods that follow a narrative of religion and race through four-plus centuries. Taken together, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History provides a reliable scholarly text and resource to summarize and guide work in this subject, and to help make sense of contemporary issues and dilemmas.
Book Synopsis Genealogical Fictions by : María Elena Martínez
Download or read book Genealogical Fictions written by María Elena Martínez and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genealogical Fictions examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) over time and how the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology by : Edward Howells
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology written by Edward Howells and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology provides a guide to the mystical element of Christianity as a theological phenomenon. It differs not only from psychological and anthropological studies of mysticism, but from other theological studies, such as more practical or pastorally-oriented works that examine the patterns of spiritual progress and offer counsel for deeper understanding and spiritual development. It also differs from more explicitly historical studies tracing the theological and philosophical contexts and ideas of various key figures and schools, as well as from literary studies of the linguistic tropes and expressive forms in mystical texts. None of these perspectives is absent, but the method here is more deliberately theological, working from within the fundamental interests of Christian mystical writers to the articulation of those interests in distinctively theological forms, in order, finally, to permit a critical theological engagement with them for today. Divided into four parts, the first section introduces the approach to mystical theology and offers a historical overview. Part two attends to the concrete context of sources and practices of mystical theology. Part three moves to the fundamental conceptualities of mystical thought. The final section ends with the central contributions of mystical teaching to theology and metaphysics. Students and scholars with a variety of interests will find different pathways through the Handbook.
Download or read book New Worlds written by John Lynch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-26 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extraordinary book encompasses the time period from the first Christian evangelists' arrival in Latin America to the dictators of the late twentieth century. With unsurpassed knowledge of Latin American history, John Lynch sets out to explore the reception of Christianity by native peoples and how it influenced their social and religious lives as the centuries passed. As attentive to modern times as to the colonial period, Lynch also explores the extent to which Indian religion and ancestral ways survived within the new Christian culture.The book follows the development of religious culture over time by focusing on peak periods of change: the response of religion to the Enlightenment, the emergence of the Church from the wars of independence, the Romanization of Latin American religion as the papacy overtook the Spanish crown in effective control of the Church, the growing challenge of liberalism and the secular state, and in the twentieth century, military dictators' assaults on human rights. Throughout the narrative, Lynch develops a number of special themes and topics. Among these are the Spanish struggle for justice for Indians, the Church's position on slavery, the concept of popular religion as distinct from official religion, and the development of liberation theology.
