Fabricating Religion

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195355687
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Manufacturing Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-19 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. As such, he charges, it has helped to create departments, jobs, and publication outlets for those who are comfortable with such a suspect construction, while establishing a disciplinary ethos of astounding theoretical naivete and a body of scholarship to match. Surveying the textbooks available for introductory courses in comparative religion, the author finds that they uniformly adopt the sui generis line and all that comes with it. As a result, he argues, they are not just uncritical (which helps keep them popular among the audiences for which they are intended, but badly disserve), but actively inhibit the emergence of critical perspectives and capacities. And on the geo-political scale, he contends, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.

Author : Richard Hagenston
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781598151466
Total Pages : 98 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fabricating Faith written by Richard Hagenston and published by . This book was released on 2014-07 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Hagenston, Jesus had such a hard edge when it came to Gentiles that he coined his own unflattering term for them-dogs. He limited what he was offering strictly to Jews. Yet the religion that began in his name quickly transformed into a predominantly Gentile movement centered on human sacrifice, a practice rejected by Judaism long before Jesus came on the scene. How did this happen? Hagenston exposes the roots of brutal justice underpinning traditional Christianity, but finds hope in a Jewish movement toward grace that preceded and influenced the historical Jesus.

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110559501
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fabricating Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised essays collected here, four of which are published for the first time, continue a longstanding argument made by McCutcheon and others: that the study of religion would benefit from self-conscious scrutiny of its tools, the interests that may drive them, and the effects that might follow their use. The chapters examine a variety of contemporary sites in the modern field where this thesis can be argued, whether involving the anachronistic use of of the category religion when studying the ancient world to current interest in so-called critical religion or critical realist approaches. Moreover – contrary to some past characterizations of such critiques – a constructive way forward for the field is once again recommended and, at several sites, exemplified in detail: redescribing not only religion as something ordinary but also our tendency to create the impression of exceptional and thus set-apart things, places, and people. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the book is an invitation to examine our own scholarly practices and thereby take a more active role in shaping the field in which we carry out our work as scholars of this thing we call religion.

Author : Andrew Lang
Publisher : IndyPublish.com
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Making of Religion written by Andrew Lang and published by IndyPublish.com. This book was released on 1909 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern Science of the History of Religion has attained conclusions which already possess an air of being firmly established. These conclusions may be briefly stated thus: Man derived the conception of 'spirit' or 'soul' from his reflections on the phenomena of sleep dreams death shadow and from the experiences of trance and hallucination.

Author : Timothy Keller
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0525954155
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Author : Randall Styers
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190287926
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making Magic written by Randall Styers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.

Author : S. Plate
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137100346
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Representing Religion in World Cinema written by S. Plate and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious traditions have provided a seemingly endless supply of subject matter for film, from the Ten Commandments to the Mahabharata . At the same time, film production has engendered new religious practices and has altered existing ones, from the cult following of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to the 2001 Australian census in which 70,000 people indicated their religion to be 'Jedi Knight'. Representing Religion in World Cinema begins with these mutual transformations as the contributors query the two-way interrelations between film and religion across cinemas of the world. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary by nature, this collection by an international group of scholars draws on work from religious studies, film studies, and anthropology, as well as theoretical impulses in performance, gender, ethnicity, colonialism, and postcolonialism.

Author : Yoshiko Ashiwa
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804758417
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making Religion, Making the State written by Yoshiko Ashiwa and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines the perspective of religion as a constructed category of modernity with the analytic focus and empirical grounding of institutional social science to develop a new approach to the study of state and religion in modern and contemporary China.

Author : Russell T. McCutcheon
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110560836
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fabricating Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revised essays collected here, four of which are published for the first time, continue a longstanding argument made by McCutcheon and others: that the study of religion would benefit from self-conscious scrutiny of its tools, the interests that may drive them, and the effects that might follow their use. The chapters examine a variety of contemporary sites in the modern field where this thesis can be argued, whether involving the anachronistic use of of the category religion when studying the ancient world to current interest in so-called critical religion or critical realist approaches. Moreover – contrary to some past characterizations of such critiques – a constructive way forward for the field is once again recommended and, at several sites, exemplified in detail: redescribing not only religion as something ordinary but also our tendency to create the impression of exceptional and thus set-apart things, places, and people. Aimed at scholars and students alike, the book is an invitation to examine our own scholarly practices and thereby take a more active role in shaping the field in which we carry out our work as scholars of this thing we call religion.

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004309187
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Making Religion written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Religion provides a unique overview of theoretical and practical aspects of the discursive study of religion. Leading scholars in the field discuss the opportunities and challenges of discourse analysis and its application in the study of religion.