Politics and the Sacred PDF Download

Author: Harald Wydra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107075378
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Argues that practices of the sacred have shaped the frames of modern secular politics.

Author: Harald Wydra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This path-breaking book argues that practices of the sacred are constitutive of modern secular politics. Following a tradition of enquiry in anthropology and political theory, it examines how limit situations shape the political imagination and collective identity. As an experiential and cultural fact, the sacred emerges within, and simultaneously transcends, transgressive dynamics such as revolutions, wars or globalisation. Rather than conceive the sacred as a religious doctrine or a metaphysical belief, Wydra examines its adaptive functions as origins, truths and order which are historically contingent across time and transformative of political aspirations. He suggests that the brokenness of political reality is a permanent condition of humanity, which will continue to produce quests for the sacred, and transcendental political frames. Working in the spirit of the genealogical mode of enquiry, this book examines the secular sources of political theologies, the democratic sacred, the communist imagination, European political identity, the sources of human rights and the relationship of victimhood to new wars.

Author: Thomas Steven Molnar
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Author: Pippa Norris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139499661
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.

Author: Anthony Squiers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319688707
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the political dimensions of civil religion in the United States. By employing an original social-psychological theory rooted in semiotics, it offers a qualitative and quantitative empirical examination of more than fifty years of political rhetoric. Further, it presents two in-depth case studies that examine how the cultural, totemic sign of ‘the Founding Fathers’ and the signs of America’s sacred texts (the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) are used in attempts to link partisan policy positions with notions that the country collectively holds sacred. The book’s overarching thesis is that America’s civil religion serves as a discursive framework for the country’s politics of the sacred, mediating the demands of particularistic interests and social solidarity through the interaction of social belief and institutional politics like elections and the Supreme Court. The book penetrates America’s unique political religiosity to reveal and unravel the intricate ways in which politics, political institutions, religion and culture intertwine in the United States.

Author: Michele F. Margolis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655581X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
One of the most substantial divides in American politics is the “God gap.” Religious voters tend to identify with and support the Republican Party, while secular voters generally support the Democratic Party. Conventional wisdom suggests that religious differences between Republicans and Democrats have produced this gap, with voters sorting themselves into the party that best represents their religious views. Michele F. Margolis offers a bold challenge to the conventional wisdom, arguing that the relationship between religion and politics is far from a one-way street that starts in the church and ends at the ballot box. Margolis contends that political identity has a profound effect on social identity, including religion. Whether a person chooses to identify as religious and the extent of their involvement in a religious community are, in part, a response to political surroundings. In today’s climate of political polarization, partisan actors also help reinforce the relationship between religion and politics, as Democratic and Republican elites stake out divergent positions on moral issues and use religious faith to varying degrees when reaching out to voters.

Author: Adrian J. Ivakhiv
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253108388
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Claiming Sacred Ground Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona Adrian J. Ivakhiv A study of people and politics at two New Age spiritual sites. In this richly textured account, Adrian Ivakhiv focuses on the activities of pilgrim-migrants to Glastonbury, England and Sedona, Arizona. He discusses their efforts to encounter and experience the spirit or energy of the land and to mark out its significance by investing it with sacred meanings. Their endeavors are presented against a broad canvas of cultural and environmental struggles associated with the incorporation of such geographically marginal places into an expanding global cultural economy. Ivakhiv sees these contested and "heterotopic" landscapes as the nexus of a complex web of interestes and longings: from millennial anxieties and nostalgic re-imaginings of history and prehistory; to real-estate power grabs; contending religious visions; and the free play of ideas from science, pseudo-science, and popular culture. Looming over all this is the nonhuman life of these landscapes, an"otherness" that alternately reveals and conceals itself behind a pagenant of beliefs, images, and place-myths. A significant contribution to scholarship on alternative spirituality, sacred space, and the politics of natural landscapes, Claiming Sacred Ground will interest scholars and students of environmental and cultural studies, and the sociology of religious movements and pilgrimage. Non-specialist readers will be stimulated by the cultural, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of extraordinary natural landscapes. Adrian Ivakhiv teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, and is President of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada. April 2001 384 pages, 24 b&w photos, 2 figs., 9 maps, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append. cloth 0-253-33899-9 $37.40 s / £28.50 Contents I DEPARTURES 1 Power and Desire in Earth's Tangled Web 2 Reimagining Earth 3 Orchestrating Sacred Space II Glastonbury 4 Stage, Props, and Players of Avalon 5 Many Glastonburys: Place-Myths and Contested Spaces III SEDONA 6 Red Rocks to Real Estate 7 New Agers, Vortexes, and the Sacred Landscape IV ARRIVALS 8 Practices of Place: Nature and Heterotopia Beyond the New Age

Author: William Arnal
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199757119
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
The Sacred is the Profane collects nine essays by William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon that advance current scholarly debates on secularism-debates. The essays return, again and again, to the question of what "religion"—word and concept—accomplishes, now, for those who employ it, whether at the popular, political, or scholarly level. The focus here is on the efficacy, costs, and the tactical work carried out by dividing the world between religious and political, church and state, sacred and profane.

Author: Sipra Mukherjee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429880081
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This book analyses the power that religion wields upon the minds of individuals and communities and explores the predominance of language in the actual practice of religion. Through an investigation of the diverse forms of religious language available — oral traditions, sacred texts, evangelical prose, and national rhetoric used by ‘faith-insiders’ such as missionaries, priests, or religious leaders who play the communicator’s role between the sacred and the secular — the chapters in the volume reveal the dependence of religion upon language, demonstrating how religion draws strength from a past that is embedded in narratives, infusing the ‘sacred’ language with political power. The book combines broad theoretical and normative reflections in contexts of original, detailed and closely examined empirical case studies. Drawing upon resources across disciplines, the book will be of interest to scholars of religion and religious studies, linguistics, politics, cultural studies, history, sociology, and social anthropology.

Author: William Safran
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135762104
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
What is the place of religion in modern political systems? This volume addresses that question by focusing on ten countries across several geographic areas: Western and East-Central Europe, North America, the Middle East and South Asia. These countries are comparable in the sense that they are committed to constitutional rule, have embraced a more or less secular culture, and have formal guarantees of freedom of religion. Yet in all the cases examined here religion impinges on the political system in the form of legal establishment, semi-legitimation, subvention, and/or selective institutional arrangements and its role is reflected in cultural norms, electoral behaviour and public policies. The relationship between religion and politics comes in many varieties in differing countries, yet all are faced with three major challenges: modernity, democracy and the increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of their societies.