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Author: Professor Carole M Cusack Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 1409481034 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
Utilizing contemporary scholarship on secularization, individualism, and consumer capitalism, this book explores religious movements founded in the West which are intentionally fictional: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, and Jediism. Their continued appeal and success, principally in America but gaining wider audience through the 1980s and 1990s, is chiefly as a result of underground publishing and the internet. This book deals with immensely popular subject matter: Jediism developed from George Lucas' Star Wars films; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded by 26-year-old student Bobby Henderson in 2005 as a protest against the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools; Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius which retain strong followings and participation rates among college students. The Church of All Worlds' focus on Gaia theology and environmental issues makes it a popular focus of attention. The continued success of these groups of Invented Religions provide a unique opportunity to explore the nature of late/post-modern religious forms, including the use of fiction as part of a bricolage for spirituality, identity-formation, and personal orientation.
Author: Professor Carole M Cusack Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN: 1409481034 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
Utilizing contemporary scholarship on secularization, individualism, and consumer capitalism, this book explores religious movements founded in the West which are intentionally fictional: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, and Jediism. Their continued appeal and success, principally in America but gaining wider audience through the 1980s and 1990s, is chiefly as a result of underground publishing and the internet. This book deals with immensely popular subject matter: Jediism developed from George Lucas' Star Wars films; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded by 26-year-old student Bobby Henderson in 2005 as a protest against the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools; Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius which retain strong followings and participation rates among college students. The Church of All Worlds' focus on Gaia theology and environmental issues makes it a popular focus of attention. The continued success of these groups of Invented Religions provide a unique opportunity to explore the nature of late/post-modern religious forms, including the use of fiction as part of a bricolage for spirituality, identity-formation, and personal orientation.
Author: Steven J. Sutcliffe Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317373359 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
Invented religions have been described as modern religions which advertise their invented status and reject traditional strategies of authorisation. But what does it mean for a religious formation to be ‘made up’, and how might this status affect perceptions of its legitimacy or authenticity in wider society? Based in original fieldwork and archival sources, and in the secondary literature on invented and constructed formations, this volume explores the allure of, as well as the limits of, the invention of religion. Through a series of case studies, the contributors discuss strategies of mobilization and legitimation for new traditions at their point of emergence, as well as taking issue with simplistic interpretations of the phenomenon which neglect wider cultural and political dimensions. This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture and Religion.
Author: Jason Ānanda Josephson Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226412342 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.
Author: Brent Nongbri Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300154178 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 315
Book Description
Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.
Author: Daniel Dubuisson Publisher: Equinox Publishing (UK) ISBN: 9781781798133 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
For nearly thirty years, a scientific revolution has taken place in the religious studies departments of several North American and British universities--and the results are considerable, obliging us to envisage new ways of conceiving of this academic field. While the History of Religions tended to rest in the shade and guardianship of past authorities, this critical current has re-examined the discipline's a priori positions, its favourite arguments, its long prehistory within Euro/Christian culture, but also its numerous ethnocentric prejudices. The first part of the volume considers anew the origins and Christian history of the notion of religion. This starting point then allows us to identify dead ends and contradictions within the traditional History of Religions approach. The second part is dedicated to the synthetic presentation of the concepts, methods, and controversies, which distinguish this current. Following this are two related contributions devoted to two major case studies: "Colonialism and Cultural Imperialism" and "The Invention of Hinduism and Shintoism". Finally, in the third and last part of the book, this trend itself is critically examined. The author identifies some of the paradoxes, gaps, and aporias that this approach has already gathered during its short existence.
Author: Jan Assmann Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691203199 Category : Bibles Languages : en Pages : 412
Book Description
"The Book of Exodus may be the most consequential story ever told. But its spectacular moments of heaven-sent plagues and parting seas overshadow its true significance, says Jan Assmann, a leading historian of ancient religion. The story of Moses guiding the enslaved children of Israel out of captivity to become God's chosen people is the foundation of an entirely new idea of religion, one that lives on today in many of the world's faiths. The Invention of Religion sheds new light on ancient scriptures to show how Exodus has shaped fundamental understandings of monotheistic practice and belief." --
Author: Nicholas Ostler Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1620405172 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." So opens the Gospel of John, an ancient text translated into almost every language, at once a compelling and beguiling metaphor for the Christian story of the Beginning. To further complicate matters, the words we read now are in any number of languages that would have been unknown or unrecognizable at the time of their composition. The gospel may have been originally dictated or written in Aramaic, but our only written source for the story is in Greek. Today, as your average American reader of the New Testament picks up his or her Bible off the shelf, the phrase as it appears has been translated from various linguistic intermediaries before its current manifestation in modern English. How to understand these words then, when so many other translators, languages, and cultures have exercised some level of influence on them? Christian tradition is not unique in facing this problem. All religions--if they have global aspirations--have to change in order to spread their influence, and often language has been the most powerful agent thereof. Passwords to Paradise explores the effects that language difference and language conversion have wrought on the world's great faiths, spanning more than two thousand years. It is an original and intriguing perspective on the history of religion by a master linguistic historian.
Author: Brian K. Pennington Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198037295 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, Brian Pennington offers a fascinating portrait of the process by which "Hinduism" came into being. He argues against the common idea that the modern construction of religion in colonial India was simply a fabrication of Western Orientalists and missionaries. Rather, he says, it involved the active agency and engagement of Indian authors as well, who interacted, argued, and responded to British authors over key religious issues such as image-worship, sati, tolerance, and conversion.
Author: Tomoko Masuzawa Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226509893 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
The idea of "world religions" expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, "world religions" is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language. In this ambitious study, Tomoko Masuzawa examines the emergence of "world religions" in modern European thought. Devoting particular attention to the relation between the comparative study of language and the nascent science of religion, she demonstrates how new classifications of language and race caused Buddhism and Islam to gain special significance, as these religions came to be seen in opposing terms-Aryan on one hand and Semitic on the other. Masuzawa also explores the complex relation of "world religions" to Protestant theology, from the hierarchical ordering of religions typical of the Christian supremacists of the nineteenth century to the aspirations of early twentieth-century theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who embraced the pluralist logic of "world religions" and by so doing sought to reclaim the universalist destiny of European modernity.
Author: Timothy Fitzgerald Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195347153 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.
Author: Professor Carole M Cusack
Author: Professor Carole M Cusack
Author: Steven J. Sutcliffe
Author: Jason Ānanda Josephson
Author: Brent Nongbri
Author: Daniel Dubuisson
Author: Jan Assmann
Author: Nicholas Ostler
Author: Brian K. Pennington
Author: Tomoko Masuzawa
Author: Timothy Fitzgerald