Secular Spirituality

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Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age

Author : Ryan G. Duns, SJ
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268108153
Total Pages : 477 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age by : Ryan G. Duns, SJ

Download or read book Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age written by Ryan G. Duns, SJ and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, faced with contemporary challenges to belief, issues a call for “new and unprecedented itineraries” that might be capable of leading seekers to encounter God. In Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age, Ryan G. Duns demonstrates that William Desmond’s philosophy has the resources to offer a compelling response to Taylor. To show how, Duns makes use of the work of Pierre Hadot. In Hadot’s view, the point of philosophy is “not to inform but to form”—that is, not to provide abstract answers to abstruse questions but rather to form the human being such that she can approach reality as such in a new way. Drawing on Hadot, Duns frames Desmond’s metaphysical thought as a form of spiritual exercise. So framed, Duns argues, Desmond’s metaphysics attunes its readers to perceive disclosure of the divine in the everyday. Approached in this way, studying Desmond’s metaphysics can transform how readers behold reality itself by attuning them to discern the presence of God, who can be sought, and disclosed through, all things in the world. Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age offers a readable and engaging introduction to the thought of Charles Taylor and William Desmond, and demonstrates how practicing metaphysics can be understood as a form of spiritual exercise that renews in its practitioners an attentiveness to God in all things. As a unique contribution at the crossroads of theology and philosophy, it will appeal to readers in continental philosophy, theology, and religious studies broadly.

This Life

Author : Martin Hägglund
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 1101873736
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis This Life by : Martin Hägglund

Download or read book This Life written by Martin Hägglund and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.

Spirituality and the Secular Quest

Author : Peter Higbie Van Ness
Publisher : Herder & Herder
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 588 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Spirituality and the Secular Quest by : Peter Higbie Van Ness

Download or read book Spirituality and the Secular Quest written by Peter Higbie Van Ness and published by Herder & Herder. This book was released on 1996 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent scholars shed light on the beliefs and practices of large numbers of people who describe themselves as spiritual even though they acknowledge no strong bond of doctrine or community with any historical religion. Topics covered include feminism, environmentalism, gay liberation, 12-step programs, therapy, mountain climbing, chiropractic, painting, nature study, playing computer games.

Secular Spirituality

Author : Lynn L. Sharp
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 9780739113394
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (133 download)

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Book Synopsis Secular Spirituality by : Lynn L. Sharp

Download or read book Secular Spirituality written by Lynn L. Sharp and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secular Spirituality challenges the traditional dichotomy between Enlightenment reason and religion. It follows French romantic socialists' and spiritists' search for a new spirituality based on reincarnation as a path to progress for individuals and society. Leaders like Allan Kardec argued for social reform; spiritist groups strove for equality; and women mediums challenged gender roles. Lynn L. Sharp looks closely at what it meant to practice spiritism, analyszing the movement's social and political critique and explaining the popularity of the new belief. She explores points of convergence and conflict in the interplay between spiritism and science, spiritism and psychology, and spiritism and the Catholic church to argue that the nineteenth century was not as 'disenchanted' as has been thought. Secular Spirituality successfully places spiritism within a larger cultural conversation, going beyond the leaders of the movement to look at the way spiritism functioned for its followers.

The Religious, the Spiritual, and the Secular

Author : Robert Neil Minor
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791439913
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (399 download)

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Book Synopsis The Religious, the Spiritual, and the Secular by : Robert Neil Minor

Download or read book The Religious, the Spiritual, and the Secular written by Robert Neil Minor and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Religious, the Spiritual, and the Secular presents an account of Auroville, a city in contemporary southeast India, and the vision of founder and well-known guru Sri Aurobindo. Auroville's eventual takeover and the promotion of its goals by the Indian government leads to a thought-provoking discussion of the meaning of "secularism" in India.

The Secular Paradox

Author : Joseph Blankholm
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479809527
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis The Secular Paradox by : Joseph Blankholm

Download or read book The Secular Paradox written by Joseph Blankholm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.

Freedom of Religion and the Secular State

Author : Russell Blackford
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0470674032
Total Pages : 219 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (76 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom of Religion and the Secular State by : Russell Blackford

Download or read book Freedom of Religion and the Secular State written by Russell Blackford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the relationship between religion and the state Focusing on the intersection of religion, law, and politics in contemporary liberal democracies, Blackford considers the concept of the secular state, revising and updating enlightenment views for the present day. Freedom of Religion and the Secular State offers a comprehensive analysis, with a global focus, of the subject of religious freedom from a legal as well as historical and philosophical viewpoint. It makes an original contribution to current debates about freedom of religion, and addresses a whole range of hot-button issues that involve the relationship between religion and the state, including the teaching of evolution in schools, what to do about the burqa, and so on.

Spiritual Living in a Secular World

Author : Ajith Fernando
Publisher : Monarch Books
ISBN 13 : 9781854245786
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (457 download)

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Book Synopsis Spiritual Living in a Secular World by : Ajith Fernando

Download or read book Spiritual Living in a Secular World written by Ajith Fernando and published by Monarch Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Christian norms vanish, Christians find themselves squeezed into the world's mould. This text shows how to share a seecular society without losing integrity. It uses the experience of a young Israelite, Daniel, to show how the traps of isolation and accommodation can be avoided.

Landscapes of the Secular

Author : Nicolas Howe
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022637680X
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

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Book Synopsis Landscapes of the Secular by : Nicolas Howe

Download or read book Landscapes of the Secular written by Nicolas Howe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.

Inventing God

Author : Jon Mills
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317218442
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis Inventing God by : Jon Mills

Download or read book Inventing God written by Jon Mills and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value. After demonstrating the lack of any empirical evidence and the logical impossibility of God, Mills explains the psychological motivations underlying humanity’s need to invent a supreme being. In a highly nuanced analysis of unconscious processes informing the psychology of belief and institutionalized social ideology, he concludes that belief in God is the failure to accept our impending death and mourn natural absence for the delusion of divine presence. As an alternative to theistic faith, he offers a secular spirituality that emphasizes the quality of lived experience, the primacy of feeling and value inquiry, ethical self-consciousness, aesthetic and ecological sensibility, and authentic relationality toward self, other, and world as the pursuit of a beautiful soul in search of the numinous. Inventing God will be of interest to academics, scholars, lay audiences and students of religious studies, the humanities, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines. It will also appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

A Secular Age

Author : Charles Taylor
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674986911
Total Pages : 889 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis A Secular Age by : Charles Taylor

Download or read book A Secular Age written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

A Religion of One's Own

Author : Thomas Moore
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0698148592
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (981 download)

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Book Synopsis A Religion of One's Own by : Thomas Moore

Download or read book A Religion of One's Own written by Thomas Moore and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author and trusted spiritual adviser offers a follow-up to his classic Care of the Soul. Something essential is missing from modern life. Many who’ve turned away from religious institutions—and others who have lived wholly without religion—hunger for more than what contemporary secular life has to offer but are reluctant to follow organized religion’s strict and often inflexible path to spirituality. In A Religion of One’s Own, bestselling author and former monk Thomas Moore explores the myriad possibilities of creating a personal spiritual style, either inside or outside formal religion. Two decades ago, Moore’s Care of the Soul touched a chord with millions of readers yearning to integrate spirituality into their everyday lives. In A Religion of One’s Own, Moore expands on the topics he first explored shortly after leaving the monastery. He recounts the benefits of contemplative living that he learned during his twelve years as a monk but also the more original and imaginative spirituality that he later developed and embraced in his secular life. Here, he shares stories of others who are creating their own path: a former football player now on a spiritual quest with the Pueblo Indians, a friend who makes a meditative practice of floral arrangements, and a well-known classical pianist whose audiences sometimes describe having a mystical experience while listening to her performances. Moore weaves their experiences with the wisdom of philosophers, writers, and artists who have rejected materialism and infused their secular lives with transcendence. At a time when so many feel disillusioned with or detached from organized religion yet long for a way to move beyond an exclusively materialistic, rational lifestyle, A Religion of One’s Own points the way to creating an amplified inner life and a world of greater purpose, meaning, and reflection.

Culture and Redemption

Author : Tracy Fessenden
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400837308
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Culture and Redemption by : Tracy Fessenden

Download or read book Culture and Redemption written by Tracy Fessenden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.

Encountering the Secular

Author : J. Heath Atchley
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813930413
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Encountering the Secular by : J. Heath Atchley

Download or read book Encountering the Secular written by J. Heath Atchley and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2009-02-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Encountering the Secular, J. Heath Atchley proposes an alternative to the understanding of the secular as that which opposes the religious, and he turns to American and Continental philosophy to support his critique. Drawing from thinkers as disparate as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gilles Deleuze, and engaging with contemporary literature and film, Atchley shows how the division of experience (individual, cultural, political) into the distinct realms of the religious and the secular overlooks the subtle ways in which value can emerge. Far from arguing that the religious and the secular are the same, he means instead to suggest that the dogmatic separation between these two realms gets in the way of experiencing an immanent value, a kind of value tied neither to a transcendent reality (e.g., a god or an ideal) nor to a self-centered reality (e.g., pleasure or knowledge). Each chapter cultivates a particular concept that challenges the breach between the secular and the religious, rendering that breach ambiguous. Such ambiguity, the author affirms, is relevant to a time when rigid and simplistic notions of religion and secularity are used to justify thoughtlessness and even violence. All too often the secular is thought of either as a triumph in "overcoming" the presumed irrationality and oppression of religion, or as lament in "losing" the meaning religion is thought once to have offered. Atchley suggests a view of the secular as an opportunity to experience an immanent value that is neither controlled by the human self nor conferred by a divine entity. Written in a prose that is lucid, lively, and provocative, Encountering the Secular shows how a philosophical endeavor might be understood as a spiritual practice.

The Spirit of Secular Art

Author : Robert Nelson
Publisher : Monash University ePress
ISBN 13 : 0980361613
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis The Spirit of Secular Art by : Robert Nelson

Download or read book The Spirit of Secular Art written by Robert Nelson and published by Monash University ePress. This book was released on 2007 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SPIRIT OF SECULAR ART explains the spiritual prestige of art. Various theorists have discussed how art has an aura or indefinable magic. This book explains how, when and why it gained its spiritual properties. The idea that all art is somehow spiritual (even though not religious) is often assumed; this book, while narrating the historical trajectory of art in the most accessible language, reveals how the mysteries of religious practice are abstracted and saved through all stages of secularisation in European culture. THE SPIRIT OF SECULAR ART presents a coherent theory defining the sacred basis of Western aesthetics. It evocatively describes the afterlife of the holy from Ancient Greece to the present, and outlines how the mysterious institution of art can be explained in material terms. Unlike other books in the genre, THE SPIRIT OF SECULAR ART radically deconstructs traditional art history in terms of 'prestige' and the value of the non-material. The book functions as: an alternative critical history of art, integrated with the histories of literature and belief; a philosophical essay on the fundamental values of art and religion; and a critique of the spiritual conceits of contemporary aesthetics and art appreciation.

America's Secular Challenge

Author : Herbert London
Publisher : ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN 13 : 1458763552
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (587 download)

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Book Synopsis America's Secular Challenge by : Herbert London

Download or read book America's Secular Challenge written by Herbert London and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely and wide-ranging book, one of America's leading public intellectuals argues that the rise of radical secularism in the United States is a flaccid response to the challenge presented by the fanaticism of radical Islam. In the so-call...

(Un)Believing in Modern Society

Author : Jörg Stolz
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134800126
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (348 download)

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Book Synopsis (Un)Believing in Modern Society by : Jörg Stolz

Download or read book (Un)Believing in Modern Society written by Jörg Stolz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark study in the sociology of religion sheds new light on the question of what has happened to religion and spirituality since the 1960s in modern societies. Exposing several analytical weaknesses of today's sociology of religion, (Un)Believing in Modern Society presents a new theory of religious-secular competition and a new typology of ways of being religious/secular. The authors draw on a specific European society (Switzerland) as their test case, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to show how the theory can be applied. Identifying four ways of being religious/secular in a modern society: 'institutional', 'alternative', 'distanced' and 'secular' they show how and why these forms have emerged as a result of religious-secular competition and describe in what ways all four forms are adapted to the current, individualized society.