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Religious Experience Reconsidered
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Book Synopsis Religious Experience Reconsidered by : Ann Taves
Download or read book Religious Experience Reconsidered written by Ann Taves and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-23 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation Ann Taves addresses the subject of religious experience directly and the problems of reductionism and humanistic fears of the sciences indirectly and by example. The orientation of this book is practical more than philosophical.
Book Synopsis Religious Experience Reconsidered by : Ann Taves
Download or read book Religious Experience Reconsidered written by Ann Taves and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims experience as a central concept while bridging the divide between religious studies and the sciences. Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across times and cultures? Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious.
Download or read book Revelatory Events written by Ann Taves and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading scholar sheds critical light on the seemingly revelatory events behind new religions and spiritual movements Unseen presences. Apparitions. Hearing voices. Although some people would find such experiences to be distressing and seek clinical help, others perceive them as transformative. Occasionally, these unusual phenomena give rise to new spiritual paths or religious movements. Revelatory Events provides fresh insights into what is perhaps the bedrock of all religious belief—the claim that otherworldly powers are active in human affairs. Ann Taves looks at Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, and A Course in Miracles—three cases in which insiders claimed that a spiritual presence guided the emergence of a new spiritual path. In the 1820s, Joseph Smith, Jr., reportedly translated the Book of Mormon from ancient gold plates unearthed with the help of an angel. Bill Wilson cofounded AA after having an ecstatic experience while hospitalized for alcoholism in 1934. Helen Schucman scribed the words of an inner voice that she attributed to Jesus, which formed the basis of her 1976 best-selling self-study course. In each case, Taves argues, the sense of a guiding presence emerged through a complex, creative interaction between a founding figure with unusual mental abilities and an initial set of collaborators who were drawn into the process by diverse motives of their own. A major work of scholarship, this compelling and accessible book traces the very human processes behind such events.
Book Synopsis Religious Experience by : Wayne Proudfoot
Download or read book Religious Experience written by Wayne Proudfoot and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987-09-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is religious experience to be identified, described, analyzed and explained? Is it independent of concepts, beliefs, and practices? How can we account for its authority? Under what conditions might a person identify his or her experience as religious? Wayne Proudfoot shows that concepts, beliefs, and linguistic practices are presupposed by the rules governing this identification of an experience as religious. Some of these characteristics can be understood by attending to the conditions of experience, among which are beliefs about how experience is to be explained.
Book Synopsis Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered by : Wanjiru M. Gitau
Download or read book Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered written by Wanjiru M. Gitau and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity Today 2019 Book of the Year Award, Missions/Global Church Building from a behind-the-scenes case study of Kenya's Nairobi Chapel and its "daughter" Mavuno Church, Wanjiru M. Gitau expands their story into a narrative that offers analysis of the rise, growth, and place of megachurches worldwide in the new millennium. In contexts experienced as deeply volatile, and on a continent reeling from the structural incoherence imposed in colonial times, megachurches provide a map of reality to navigate by, with the gospel as their primary compass. Gitau shows that recognizing the psychological, spiritual, and social destabilization of modernizing societies is the first step to valuing the place of megachurches in contemporary Christianity. Through analysis of social demography, theology, philosophy of ministry, leadership development, and strategy, Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered makes integral sense of the historical and social forces that give megachurches their growth opportunity, and reclaims them as a subject of serious theological conversation. This engaging account centers on the role of millennials in responding to the need for "a home for new generations" amid the dislocating transitions of globalization and postmodernity in postcolonial Africa and around the world. Gitau gleans practical wisdom for postdenominational churches everywhere (mega- and otherwise) from the lessons learned in Kenya's remarkable urban, evangelical renewal movement. Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.
Book Synopsis Fits, Trances, and Visions by : Ann Taves
Download or read book Fits, Trances, and Visions written by Ann Taves and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, possession. Believers have long viewed these and similar involuntary experiences as religious--as manifestations of God, the spirits, or the Christ within. Skeptics, on the other hand, have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics, or other natural causes. In this sweeping work of religious and psychological history, Ann Taves explores the myriad ways in which believers and detractors interpreted these complex experiences in Anglo-American culture between the mid-eighteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Taves divides the book into three sections. In the first, ranging from 1740 to 1820, she examines the debate over trances, visions, and other involuntary experiences against the politically charged backdrop of Anglo-American evangelicalism, established churches, Enlightenment thought, and a legacy of religious warfare. In the second part, covering 1820 to 1890, she highlights the interplay between popular psychology--particularly the ideas of "animal magnetism" and mesmerism--and movements in popular religion: the disestablishment of churches, the decline of Calvinist orthodoxy, the expansion of Methodism, and the birth of new religious movements. In the third section, Taves traces the emergence of professional psychology between 1890 and 1910 and explores the implications of new ideas about the subconscious mind, hypnosis, hysteria, and dissociation for the understanding of religious experience. Throughout, Taves follows evolving debates about whether fits, trances, and visions are natural (and therefore not religious) or supernatural (and therefore religious). She pays particular attention to a third interpretation, proposed by such "mediators" as William James, according to which these experiences are natural and religious. Taves shows that ordinary people as well as educated elites debated the meaning of these experiences and reveals the importance of interactions between popular and elite culture in accounting for how people experienced religion and explained experience. Combining rich detail with clear and rigorous argument, this is a major contribution to our understanding of Protestant revivalism and the historical interplay between religion and psychology.
Download or read book What Matters? written by Courtney Bender and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines religious, secular, and spiritual distinctions in society.
Book Synopsis Muhammad Reconsidered by : Anna Bonta Moreland
Download or read book Muhammad Reconsidered written by Anna Bonta Moreland and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-03-30 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Muhammad Reconsidered rectifies the failures of scholarly attempts to understand Islam in the West and to take Islamic theology seriously. Engaging Islam from deep within the Christian tradition by addressing the question of the prophethood of Muhammad, Anna Bonta Moreland calls for a retrieval of Thomistic thought on prophecy. Without either appropriating the prophet as an unwitting Christian or reducing both Christianity and Islam to a common denominator, Moreland studies Muhammad within a Christian theology of revelation. This lens leads to a more sophisticated understanding of Islam, one that honors the integrity of the Catholic tradition and argues for the possibility in principle of Muhammad as a religious prophet. Moreland sets the stage for this inquiry through an intertextual reading of the key Vatican II documents on Islam and on Christian revelation. She then uses Aquinas's treatment of prophecy to address the case of whether Muhammad is a prophet in Christian terms. Muhammad Reconsidered examines the work of several Christian theologians, including W. Montgomery Watt, Hans Küng, Kenneth Cragg, David Kerr, and Jacques Jomier, O.P., and then draws upon the practice of analogical reasoning in the theology of religious pluralism to show that a term in one religion—in this case “prophecy”—can have purchase in another religious tradition. Muhammad Reconsidered not only is a constructive contribution to Catholic theology but also has enormous potential to help scholars reframe and comprehend Christian-Muslim relations.
Book Synopsis An Ethology of Religion and Art by : Bryan Rennie
Download or read book An Ethology of Religion and Art written by Bryan Rennie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from sources including the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion this book proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behaviors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and religion as closely related, but not identical, behaviors a more coherent definition of religion can be formed that avoids pitfalls such as the Eurocentric characterization of religion as belief or the dismissal of the category as nothing more than false belief or the product of scholarly invention. The book integrates highly relevant insights from the ethology and anthropology of art, particularly the identification of "the special" by Ellen Dissanayake and art as agency by Alfred Gell, with insights from, among others, Ann Taves, who similarly identified "specialness" as characteristic of religion. It integrates these insights into a useful and accurate understanding and explanation of the relationship of art and religion and of religion as a human behavior. This in turn is used to suggest how art can contribute to the development and maintenance of religions. The innovative combination of art, science, and religion in this book makes it a vital resource for scholars of Religion and the Arts, Aesthetics, Religious Studies, Religion and Science and Religious Anthropology.
Book Synopsis Punjab Reconsidered by : Anshu Malhotra
Download or read book Punjab Reconsidered written by Anshu Malhotra and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is Punjabiyat? What are the different notions of Punjab? This volume analyses these ideas and explores the different aspects that constitute Punjab as a region conceptually in history, culture, and practice. Each essay examines a different Punjabi culture—language-based and literary; religious and those that define a 'community'; rural, urban, and middle class; and historical, contemporary, and cosmopolitan. Together, these essays unravel the complex foundations of Punjabiyat. The volume also shows how the recent history of Punjab—partition, aspirations of statehood, and a large and assertive diaspora—has had a discernible impact on the region's scholarship. Departing from conventional studies on Punjab, this book presents fresh perspectives and new insights into its regional culture.
Book Synopsis Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered by : Sarah Shortall
Download or read book Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered written by Sarah Shortall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first global examination of the historical relationship between Christianity and human rights in the twentieth century. Leading historians, anthropologists, political theorists, legal scholars, and scholars of religion develop fresh approaches to issues such as human dignity, personalism, religious freedom, the role of ecumenical and transatlantic networks, and the relationship between Christian and liberal rights theories. In doing so they move well beyond the temporal and geographical limits of the existing scholarship, exploring the connection between Christianity and human rights, not only in Europe and the United States, but also in Africa, Latin America, and China. They offer alternative chronologies and bring to light overlooked aspects of this history, including the role of race, gender, decolonization, and interreligious dialogue. Above all, these essays foreground the complicated relationship between global rights discourses - whether Christian, liberal, or otherwise - and the local contexts in which they are developed and implemented.
Book Synopsis How Religion Works by : Ilkka Pyysiäinen
Download or read book How Religion Works written by Ilkka Pyysiäinen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent findings in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology provide important insights to the processes which make religious beliefs and behaviors such efficient attractors in and across various cultural settings. The specific salience of religious ideas is based on the fact that they are 'counter-intuitive': they contradict our intuitive expectations of how entities normally behave. Counter-intuitive ideas are only produced by a mind capable of crossing the boundaries that separate such ontological domains as persons, living things, and solid objects. The evolution of such a mind has only taken place in the human species. How certain kinds of counter-intuitive ideas are selected for a religious use is discussed from varying angles. Cognitive considerations are thus related to the traditions of comparative religion. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.
Book Synopsis Reality’s Fugue by : F. Samuel Brainard
Download or read book Reality’s Fugue written by F. Samuel Brainard and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science, religion, philosophy: these three categories of thought have organized humankind’s search for meaning from time immemorial. Reality’s Fugue presents a compelling case that these ways of understanding, often seen as competing, are part of a larger puzzle that cannot be rendered by one account of reality alone. This book begins with an overview of the concept of reality and the philosophical difficulties associated with attempts to account for it through any single worldview. By clarifying the differences among first-person, third-person, and dualist understandings of reality, F. Samuel Brainard repurposes the three predominant ways of making sense of those differences: exclusionist (only one worldview can be right), inclusivist (viewing other worldviews through the lens of one in order to incorporate them all, and thus distorting them), and pluralist or relativist (holding that there are no universals, and truth is relative). His alternative mode of understanding uses Douglas Hofstadter’s metaphor of a musical fugue that allows different “voices” and “melodies” of worldviews to coexist in counterpoint and conversation, while each remains distinct, with none privileged above the others. Approaching reality in this way, Brainard argues, opens up the possibility for a multivoiced perspective that can overcome the skeptical challenges that metaphysical positions face. Engagingly argued by a lifelong scholar of philosophy and global religions, this edifying and accessible exploration of the nature of reality addresses deeply meaningful questions about belief, reconciliation, and being.
Book Synopsis Religion in Museums by : Gretchen Buggeln
Download or read book Religion in Museums written by Gretchen Buggeln and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars and practitioners from North America, Europe, Russia, and Australia, this pioneering volume provides a global survey of how museums address religion and charts a course for future research and interpretation. Contributors from a variety of disciplines and institutions explore the work of museums from many perspectives, including cultural studies, religious studies, and visual and material culture. Most museums throughout the world – whether art, archaeology, anthropology or history museums – include religious objects, and an increasing number are beginning to address religion as a major category of human identity. With rising museum attendance and the increasingly complex role of religion in social and geopolitical realities, this work of stewardship and interpretation is urgent and important. Religion in Museums is divided into six sections: museum buildings, reception, objects, collecting and research, interpretation of objects and exhibitions, and the representation of religion in different types of museums. Topics covered include repatriation, conservation, architectural design, exhibition, heritage, missionary collections, curation, collections and display, and the visitor's experience. Case studies provide comprehensive coverage and range from museums devoted specifically to the diversity of religious traditions, such as the State Museum of the History of Religion in St Petersburg, to exhibitions centered on religion at secular museums, such as Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, at the British Museum.
Book Synopsis Religion Explained by : Pascal Boyer
Download or read book Religion Explained written by Pascal Boyer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-21 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, are no longer mysteries. We are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where it comes from.
Book Synopsis The Religion of the Future by : Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Download or read book The Religion of the Future written by Roberto Mangabeira Unger and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new philosophy of religion for a secular world How can we live in such a way that we die only once? How can we organize a society that gives us a better chance to be fully alive? How can we reinvent religion so that it liberates us instead of consoling us? These questions stand at the center of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Religion of the Future: an argument for both spiritual and political revolution. It proposes the content of a religion that can survive without faith in a transcendent God or in life after death. According to this religion—the religion of the future—human beings can be more human by becoming more godlike, not just later, in another life or another time, but right now, on Earth and in their own lives. They can become more godlike without denying the irreparable flaws in the human condition: our mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability.
Book Synopsis Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief by : Terry F. Godlove
Download or read book Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief written by Terry F. Godlove and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often different religious traditions offer very different pictures of the world. In fact, religions are so fascinating partly because they present alternative pictures of the nature of time, space, persons, food, community, life, death, and so on. How are we to make sense of this radical diversity of belief? The most common response is to say that religions are alternative conceptual frameworks or schemes, whose categories organize experience in sometimes diverse ways. On this view of the framework model of religious belief we cannot map religious frameworks onto a single, comprehensive grid because they themselves function as the maps. In this sense, the Buddhist and Baptist are sometimes said to live in different worlds.Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief traces the history of the framework model from Kant to Durkheim, and then argues for its replacement. Rather than seeing religions as all-encompassing grids, we must recognize that they themseleves are constrained in at least two unavoidable ways: first, by the formal rules that make human experience possible at all, and second, by the fact that as language users we must presuppose that we hold the vast bulk of our beliefs in common. Given these constraints, we can then see religious differences, however dramatic, as relatively limited and largely theoretical.The framework model is deeply entrenched in those disciplines central to the study of religion, especially so in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and theology. The negative thrust of this is to suggest this allegiance needs to be reconsidered. Positively, the book sketches a picture of linguistic interpretation on which our differences, religious or otherwise, stand out against the background of what we have in common
