Heaven In The American Imagination

Author : Gary Scott Smith
Publisher : OUP USA
ISBN 13 : 0199738955
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Heaven in the American Imagination written by Gary Scott Smith and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-06 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gary Scott Smith examines how Americans from the Puritans to the present have imagined heaven -- Publisher description.

Author : Gary Scott Smith
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780199830701
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Heaven in the American Imagination written by Gary Scott Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does heaven exist? If so, what is it like? And how does one get in? Throughout history, painters, poets, philosophers, pastors, and many ordinary people have pondered these questions. Perhaps no other topic captures the popular imagination quite like heaven. Gary Scott Smith examines how Americans from the Puritans to the present have imagined heaven. He argues that whether Americans have perceived heaven as reality or fantasy, as God's home or a human invention, as a source of inspiration and comfort or an opiate that distracts from earthly life, or as a place of worship or a perpetual playground has varied largely according to the spirit of the age. In the colonial era, conceptions of heaven focused primarily on the glory of God. For the Victorians, heaven was a warm, comfortable home where people would live forever with their family and friends. Today, heaven is often less distinctively Christian and more of a celestial entertainment center or a paradise where everyone can reach his full potential. Drawing on an astounding array of sources, including works of art, music, sociology, psychology, folklore, liturgy, sermons, poetry, fiction, jokes, and devotional books, Smith paints a sweeping, provocative portrait of what Americans-from Jonathan Edwards to Mitch Albom-have thought about heaven.

Author : Glenn Packiam
Publisher : InterVarsity Press
ISBN 13 : 0830849327
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Worship and the World to Come written by Glenn Packiam and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christians sing because we are people of hope. Yet our hope is unlike other kinds of hope. We are not optimists; nor are we escapists. Christian hope is uniquely shaped by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and by the promise of our own future resurrection. How is that hope both expressed and experienced in contemporary worship? In this volume in the Dynamics of Christian Worship series, pastor, theologian, and songwriter Glenn Packiam explores what Christians sing about when they sing about hope and what kind of hope they experience when they worship together. Through his analysis and reflection, we find that Christian worship is crucial to both the proclamation and the formation of Christian hope. The Dynamics of Christian Worship series draws from a wide range of worshiping contexts and denominational backgrounds to unpack the many dynamics of Christian worship—including prayer, reading the Bible, preaching, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, music, visual art, architecture, and more—to deepen both the theology and practice of Christian worship for the life of the church.

Author : Mark Kingwell
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300126129
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nearest Thing to Heaven written by Mark Kingwell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new perspective on a beloved cultural icon, its place in our history, and its meaning in the American imagination This elegantly written appreciation of the Empire State Building opens up the building's richness and importance as an icon of America. The book leads us through the facts surrounding the skyscraper's conception and construction, then enters into a provocative theoretical discussion of its function as an icon, its representation in pictures, literature, and film, and the implications of its iconic status as New York's most important architectural monument to ambition and optimism. The Empire State Building literally cannot be seen in its totality, from any perspective. And paradoxically, this building of unmistakable solidity has been made invisible by familiarity and reproduction through imagery. Mark Kingwell encourages us to look beneath the strong physical presence of the building, to become aware of its evolving layers of meaning, and to see how the building lives within a unique imaginative space in the landscape of the American consciousness. He offers new ways of understanding the Empire State Building in all its complexity and surprising insights into its special role as an American icon.

Author : Kevin O'Neill
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Afterlife in Popular Culture written by Kevin O'Neill and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Afterlife in Popular Culture: Heaven, Hell, and the Underworld in the American Imagination gives students a fresh look at how Americans view the afterlife, helping readers understand how it's depicted in popular culture. What happens to us when we die? The book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by more than 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entry topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing. This book is unique in marrying a historical overview of the afterlife with detailed analyses of particular cultural products, such as films and novels. In addition, it covers these topics in nonspecialist language, written with a student audience in mind. The book provides historical context for contemporary depictions of the afterlife addressed in the entries, which deal specifically with work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Author : Patricia Storace
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0375707557
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Book of Heaven written by Patricia Storace and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the acclaimed Dinner with Persephone comes a radically original novel about four women who invite us to imagine the divine anew: what if “a woman’s point of view” were also God’s? Patricia Storace’s Eve begins by telling us her version of what happened in Eden, and by revealing that our familiar constellations conceal other heavens we have never allowed ourselves to see. Each of the four subsequent chapters is the story of one of these new zodiacs, featuring images central to women: a knife, a cauldron, a garden, a pair of embracing lovers. The four women whose stories they tell are Job’s daughter, the Queen of Sheba, a polytheistic cook, and a transformed Sarah, wife of Abraham. Storace brilliantly reimagines the worlds of these women, freeing them from the old tales in which they were trapped and putting them in the foreground of their stories and of the Old Testament itself.

Author : Dan W. Clanton, Jr.
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019046142X
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and American Popular Culture written by Dan W. Clanton, Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the reciprocal relationship between the Bible and popular culture has blossomed in the past few decades, and the time seems ripe for a broadly-conceived work that assesses the current state of the field, offers examples of work in that field, and suggests future directions for further study. This Handbook includes a wide range of topics organized under several broad themes, including biblical characters (such as Adam, Eve, David and Jesus) and themes (like Creation, Hell, and Apocalyptic) in popular culture; the Bible in popular cultural genres (for example, film, comics, and Jazz); and "lived" examples (such as museums and theme parks). The Handbook concludes with a section taking stock of methodologies and the impact of the field on teaching and publishing. The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and American Popular Culture represents a major contribution to the field by some of its leading practitioners, and will be a key resource for the future development of the study of both the Bible and its role in American popular culture.

Author : Neal Gabler
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 030726596X
Total Pages : 882 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Walt Disney written by Neal Gabler and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-10-31 with total page 882 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history: Walt Disney. Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films–most notably Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi. In his superb biography, Neal Gabler shows us how, over the course of two decades, Disney revolutionized the entertainment industry. In a way that was unprecedented and later widely imitated, he built a synergistic empire that combined film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandise. Walt Disney is a revelation of both the work and the man–of both the remarkable accomplishment and the hidden life. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and USA Today Biography of the Year

Author : Kathryn Gin Lum
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199843112
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Damned Nation written by Kathryn Gin Lum and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world. Kathryn Gin Lum poses a number of vital questions: Why did the fear of hell survive Enlightenment critiques in America, after largely subsiding in Europe and elsewhere? What were the consequences for early and antebellum Americans of living with the fear of seeing themselves and many people they knew eternally damned? How did they live under the weighty obligation to save as many souls as possible? What about those who rejected this sense of obligation and fear? Gin Lum shows that beneath early Americans' vaunted millennial optimism lurked a pervasive anxiety: that rather than being favored by God, they and their nation might be the object of divine wrath.

Author : Edward J. Ingebretsen
Publisher : M.E. Sharpe
ISBN 13 : 9781563248719
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell written by Edward J. Ingebretsen and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 1996 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ingebretsen (English, Georgetown U.) poses an interesting question in his introduction, "Why does Milton's Satan have all the best lines?" A glance at the bestsellers list shows that king of horror Stephen King tops the charts with five books. Americans obviously love to be scared out of their wits because, the author argues, our puritanical theology demands fear to attain conversion, and the writings of Cotton Mather, Hawthorne, Frost, and King are the relics of this collective memory. Tracing themes of captivity, expiation, self-loss, and possession, the volume provides an entertaining analysis of American literature and cultural identity. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR