Gods And Demons Priests And Scholars

Author : Bruce Lincoln
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226035166
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-09 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude. The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian. Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.

Author : Hugh Urban
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190911964
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Irreverence and the Sacred written by Hugh Urban and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irreverence and the Sacred brings together some of the most cutting edge, interdisciplinary, and international scholars working today in order to debate key issues in the critical and comparative study of religion. The project is inspired in large part by the work of Bruce Lincoln, whose influential and wide-ranging scholarship has consistently posed challenging, provocative, and often-irreverent questions that have really pushed the boundaries of the field of religious studies in important, sometimes controversial ways. Retracing the history of the discipline of religious studies, Lincoln argues that the field has tended to champion a "validating, feel-good" approach to religion, rather than posing more critical questions about religious claims to authority and their role in history, politics, and social change. A critical approach to the history of religions, he suggests, would focus on the human, temporal, and material aspects of phenomena that are claimed to have a superhuman, eternal, or transcendent status. This volume takes up Lincoln's challenge to "do better," by engaging in critical analyses of four key themes in the study of religion: myth, ritual, gender, and politics. The book also interrogates the "politics of scholarship" itself, critically examining the relations of power and material interests at work in the study as well as the practice of religion. The scholars involved in this project include not only some of the most important figures in the American study of religion--such as Wendy Doniger, Russell McCutcheon, Ivan Strenski, and Lincoln himself--but also European scholars whose work is hugely influential overseas but not as well known in the U.S.--such as Stefan Arvidsson, Claude Calame, Nicolas Meylan, and others.

Author : Bruce Lincoln
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226481999
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Death, War, and Sacrifice written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991-08-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the world's leading specialists in Indo-European religion and society, Bruce Lincoln expresses in these essays his severe doubts about the existence of a much-hypothesized prototypical Indo-European religion. Written over fifteen years, the essays—six of them previously unpublished—fall into three parts. Part I deals with matters "Indo-European" in a relatively unproblematized way, exploring a set of haunting images that recur in descriptions of the Otherworld from many cultures. While Lincoln later rejects this methodology, these chapters remain the best available source of data for the topics they address. In Part II, Lincoln takes the data for each essay from a single culture area and shifts from the topic of dying to that of killing. Of particular interest are the chapters connecting sacrifice to physiology, a master discourse of antiquity that brought the cosmos, the human body, and human society into an ideologically charged correlation. Part III presents Lincoln's most controversial case against a hypothetical Indo-European protoculture. Reconsidering the work of the prominent Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil, Lincoln argues that Dumézil's writings were informed and inflected by covert political concerns characteristic of French fascism. This collection is an invaluable resource for students of myth, ritual, ancient societies, anthropology, and the history of religions. Bruce Lincoln is professor of humanities and religious studies at the University of Minnesota.

Author : Bruce Lincoln
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226482022
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Theorizing Myth written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces the way scholars and others have used the category of "myth" to fetishize or deride certain kinds of stories, usually those told by others. He begins by showing that mythos yielded to logos not as part of a (mythic) "Greek miracle," but as part of struggles over political, linguistic, and epistemological authority occasioned by expanded use of writing and the practice of Athenian democracy. Lincoln then turns his attention to the period when myth was recuperated as a privileged type of narrative, a process he locates in the political and cultural ferment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, he connects renewed enthusiasm for myth to the nexus of Romanticism, nationalism, and Aryan triumphalism, particularly the quest for a language and set of stories on which nation-states could be founded. In the final section of this wide-ranging book, Lincoln advocates a fresh approach to the study of myth, providing varied case studies to support his view of myth—and scholarship on myth—as ideology in narrative form.

Author : Haraldur Hreinsson
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004449574
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Force of Words: A Cultural History of Christianity and Politics in Medieval Iceland (11th- 13th Centuries) written by Haraldur Hreinsson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haraldur Hreinsson examines the social and political significance of the Christian religion as the Roman Church was taking hold in medieval Iceland in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries.

Author : Cecilia Wassen
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004358382
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Apocalyptic Thinking in Early Judaism written by Cecilia Wassen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-02-12 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Apocalyptic Thinking leading experts critically engage with John Collins’ seminal study The Apocalyptic Imagination and advance the debate on ancient Jewish apocalyptic with articles on current topics with a special focus on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Author : Bruce Lincoln
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022656407X
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Apples and Oranges written by Bruce Lincoln and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparison is an indispensable intellectual operation that plays a crucial role in the formation of knowledge. Yet comparison often leads us to forego attention to nuance, detail, and context, perhaps leaving us bereft of an ethical obligation to take things correspondingly as they are. Examining the practice of comparison across the study of history, language, religion, and culture, distinguished scholar of religion Bruce Lincoln argues in Apples and Oranges for a comparatism of a more modest sort. Lincoln presents critiques of recent attempts at grand comparison, and enlists numerous theoretical examples of how a more modest, cautious, and discriminating form of comparison might work and what it can accomplish. He does this through studies of shamans, werewolves, human sacrifices, apocalyptic prophecies, sacred kings, and surveys of materials as diverse and wide-ranging as Beowulf, Herodotus’s account of the Scythians, the Native American Ghost Dance, and the Spanish Civil War. Ultimately, Lincoln argues that concentrating one's focus on a relatively small number of items that the researcher can compare closely, offering equal attention to relations of similarity and difference, not only grants dignity to all parties considered, it yields more reliable and more interesting—if less grandiose—results. Giving equal attention to the social, historical, and political contexts and subtexts of religious and literary texts also allows scholars not just to assess their content, but also to understand the forces, problems, and circumstances that motivated and shaped them.

Author : Sara Ronis
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520386175
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Demons in the Details written by Sara Ronis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Babylonian Talmud is full of stories of demonic encounters, and it also includes many laws that attempt to regulate such encounters. In this book, Sara Ronis takes the reader on a journey across the rabbinic canon, exploring how late antique rabbis imagined, feared, and controlled demons. Ronis contextualizes the Talmud's thought within the rich cultural matrix of Sasanian Babylonia, placing rabbinic thinking in conversation with Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Syriac Christian, Zoroastrian, and Second Temple Jewish texts about demons to delve into the interactive communal context in which the rabbis created boundaries between the human and the supernatural, and between themselves and other religious communities. Demons in the Details explores the wide range of ways that the rabbis participated in broader discussions about beliefs and practices with their neighbors, out of which they created a profoundly Jewish demonology.

Author : Joshua M. Cragle
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000969215
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Converting the Saxons written by Joshua M. Cragle and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utilizing a “crusading ethos,” from 772 to 804 AD, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, waged war against the continental Saxons to integrate them within the growing Frankish Empire and facilitate their conversion to Christianity. While substantial research has been produced concerning various components of Carolingian history, this work offers a unique examination of Charlemagne’s Saxon Wars as a case study for understanding methods of conversion used in the Christianization of Europe, as well as their significance for subsequent conversion strategies employed around the globe. Converting the Saxons builds on prior scholarly research, is grounded in primary sources, and is contextualized with a robust historical introduction. Throughout the text, particular emphasis is given to Christian encounters with paganism and the way paganism was interpreted, confronted, and transformed. Within those encounters, we observe myriad forces of coercion and incentivization used in societal religious conversion, demonstrating the need for a serious reconsideration of the standard narratives surrounding Christian missions. This book provides a scholarly and accessible resource for students and researchers interested in transhistorical methods of conversion, the history of Christianity, Early Medieval paganism, Colonial religious encounters, and the nature of religious conversion.

Author : Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119251486
Total Pages : 483 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa written by Roy Richard Grinker and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.