Marketplace Of The Gods

Author : Larry Witham
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199750718
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Marketplace of the Gods written by Larry Witham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two centuries after Adam Smith illuminated the workings of the marketplace, a new movement among economists and social scientists is expanding his insights into a groundbreaking "economics of religion." Using cutting edge ideas from the behavioral sciences, and a deep knowledge of religious history, this new approach is making sense not only of past beliefs, but of religion today. In Marketplace of the Gods, award-winning journalist Larry Witham tells the inside story of this expanding "economic approach" to religion, the puzzles it tries to solve, the controversies it has stirred, and the people who are making it happen. He shows that the economic approach, while evoking images of stock markets or accounting ledgers, actually begins with a simple idea about human beings as rational actors, judging costs and benefits in life. Every life has limits, so human experience is a series of trade-offs, balancing resources to make choices for the best possible benefits. As the economics of religion shows, this model can be applied to the rich story of the human race and its gods. Beginning with the individual, the choices in religion shape households, groups, movements, and entire "religious economies" of nations. On the one hand, this mixing of the profane and the sacred, the economic and the religious, is an exciting exchange of ideas between economics, sociology, psychology, history, and theology. On the other, it has spurred a lively protest. Indeed, for some, the economic approach seems to transform our good angels into grubby consumers. As Witham shows, however, the economic approach to religion has insights for everyone, believers and skeptics alike. He illuminates this approach in a volume rich with ideas, history, contemporary events, and the insights of some of our sharpest modern-day thinkers.

Author : Larry Witham
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780199777372
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Marketplace of the Gods written by Larry Witham and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Marketplace of the Gods', Larry Witham tells the inside story of the ground-breaking & controversial 'economic approach' to religion, a story rich with history, contemporary thought & the colorful people who are using economic ideas to solve the puzzles of religious beliefs & behaviors.

Author : Ellie Mackin Roberts
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351273701
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion written by Ellie Mackin Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a case for how and why people in archaic and classical Greece worshipped Underworld gods. These gods are often portrayed as malevolent and transgressive, giving an impression that ancient worshippers derived little or no benefit from developing ongoing relationships with them. In this book, the first book-length study that focuses on Underworld gods as an integral part of the religious landscape of the period, Mackin Roberts challenges this view and shows that Underworld gods are, in many cases, approached and ‘befriended’ in the same way as any other kind of god. Underworld Gods in Ancient Greek Religion provides a fascinating insight into the worship of these deities, and will be of interest to anyone working on ancient Greek religion and cult.

Author : P. Shankar.
Publisher : Author House
ISBN 13 : 1491897937
Total Pages : 477 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Where Gods Die written by P. Shankar. and published by Author House. This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the Land of Plenty where the events of the novel take place, but they are presented in such a way that they indicate worldly happenings. These events have the global phenomena of the so-called Modernity and Progress which left humanity far behind while itself proceeding miles and miles ahead. The story of the novel contains the bunch of events that depict Man, Money and Market. Here money symbolizes the Power and Market the progress. Man is the Common Man who is openly harassed and exploited. The events are mostly set on Satire, which is the backbone of the book. Satire makes the theme extraordinarily effective and appealing. By nature Fantasy makes satire more pleasing and convincing. The novel for that matter pasteurizes the fantasy of various forms depicting different anomalies of the progressive world. Besides Satire and Fantasy one more thing to mention. This novel has a touch of Philosophy. The Philosophy that would not bore but add a dimension to the reader's thinking.

Author : Susan NAQUIN
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004516417
Total Pages : 554 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gods of Mount Tai written by Susan NAQUIN and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the intersection of art and religious history, Susan Naquin’s richly illustrated history presents a fresh method for studying Chinese gods and sacred places as it tells the full story of Mount Tai and the premier female deity of North China.

Author : Anthony Steinhoff
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9047432444
Total Pages : 534 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Gods of the City written by Anthony Steinhoff and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-03-31 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has criticized the assumption that European modernity was inherently secular. Yet, we remain poorly informed about religion's fate in the nineteenth-century big city, the very crucible of the modern condition. Drawing on extensive archival research and investigations into Protestant ecclesiastical organization, church-state relations, liturgy, pastoral care, associational life, and interconfessional relations, this study of Strasbourg following Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 shows how urbanization not only challenged the churches, but spurred them to develop new, forward-looking, indeed, urban understandings of religious community and piety. The work provides new insights into what it meant for Imperial Germany to identify itself as "Protestant" and it provocatively identifies the European big city as an agent for sacralization, and not just secularization.

Author : Joanne Punzo Waghorne
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 0195156633
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Diaspora of the Gods written by Joanne Punzo Waghorne and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Hindus today are urban middle-class people with many religious values in common with their professional counterparts in America or Europe. Just as so many modern professionals continue to build new churches, synagogues, and mosques, contemporary Hindus attend to the construction and maintenance of their religious institutions wherever their work and life takes them. In Diaspora of the Gods, Joanne Punzo Waghorne traces the changing religious sensibilities of the Hindu middle class. Waghorne leads her readers on a journey through the world of the new Hindu middle-class, focusing on their efforts to build and support places of worship. She invites the reader into the neighborhoods of Chennai to view often-innovative new and renovated temples constructed in a sometimes seemingly incongruous urban environment. Her journey, however, does not end there. The cousins and brothers--literal and figurative--of temple patrons and devotees in Chennai are constructing divine houses abroad that are remaking the religious panorama of the United Kingdom and the United States. Waghorne leads us into the London neighborhood of Tooting, climbing upstairs in a former warehouse to see a Goddess temple constructed from plywood painted in trompe l'oeuil to create all of the features of a proper temple. Elsewhere in London, we meet the God Murugan in an almost hidden temple immured within the stone shell of a former Church and another Goddess whose temple is tucked inside a lovely white church on a quiet street. In Washington, a multiplicity of Gods shares a glorious white temple in an otherwise ordinary suburban neighborhood. Waghorne offers detailed comparisons of these temples, and interviews temple priests, devotees, and patrons. In the process, she illuminates the interrelationships between ritual worship and religious edifices, the rise of the modern world economy, and the ascendancy of the great middle class. This is the first comprehensive portrait of Hinduism as lived today by so many both in India and throughout the world.

Author : Jacob Olupona
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520948548
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book City of 201 Gods written by Jacob Olupona and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a study that challenges familiar Western modes of thought, Jacob K. Olupona focuses on one of the most important religious centers in Africa and in the world: the Yorùbá city of Ilé-Ifè in southwest Nigeria. The spread of Yorùbá traditions in the African diaspora has come to define the cultural identity of millions of black and white people in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the United States. Seen through the eyes of a native, this first comprehensive study of the spiritual and cultural center of the Yorùbá religion tells how the city went from great prominence to near obliteration and then rose again as a contemporary city of gods. Throughout, Olupona corroborates the indispensable linkages between religion, cosmology, migration, and kinship as espoused in the power of royal lineages, hegemonic state structure, gender, and the Yorùbá sense of place, offering the fullest portrait to date of this sacred African city.

Author : Peter Nynas
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1412846374
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Post-Secular Society written by Peter Nynas and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we still secular? If not, what can one possibly mean by “post-secular”? The answers depend on what one considers secular as well as the people, societies, and institutions that one considers. Post-Secular Society argues for the experience of living in a secular world and a secular age and the experience of living without religion as a normal condition. Religion in the Western world is often described as being marked to some degree by both innovation and disarray. The past couple of decades have seen the emergence of reformulated versions of theories of secularization, variants of rational choice and supply-side models of religion, and new theoretical perspectives on de-secularization of religion. In spite of these different approaches and perspectives, a majority of scholars agree that the West is experiencing a general “resurgence” of religion and that the public visibility of religious actors and discourses is on the rise across most Western societies. Post-Secular Society discusses the changes in religion related to globalization, as well as New Age and other forms of popular religion. The contributors review religion that is rooted in the globalized political economy, and the relationship of post-secularism to popular and consumer culture. They also detail current innovative discourse as a religious belief system; discuss theories of the post-secular, religious, and spiritual well-being; and consider healing practices in Finland and environmentalism.

Author : David J. Hawkin
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791484610
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Twenty-first Century Confronts Its Gods written by David J. Hawkin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book penetrates the assumptions of Western technological society and exposes the powers that govern it. The contributors argue that it is a mistake to think that religion and belief have been relegated to the private sphere and are no longer important in the public and political domains. They assert that the twenty-first century has a set of new godsthe powers of globalization, technology, the market, and military mightthat reign alongside those of traditional religions. These are the forces to which the modern era has granted ultimacy. This book looks at how major religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism play an important role in politics and society on both the global and local levels. The new gods of technology, globalization, and war are shown to exacerbate the existing cultural divisions and religious strife that mark our time. By understanding the importance of that which is held sacred, whether traditional belief or modern practice not acknowledged as belief, the contributors help us to comprehend our present situation and challenges.