The Question of the Animal and Religion PDF Download

Author: Aaron S. Gross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538375
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Through an absorbing investigation into recent, high-profile scandals involving one of the largest kosher slaughterhouses in the world, located unexpectedly in Postville, Iowa, Aaron S. Gross makes a powerful case for elevating the category of the animal in the study of religion. Major theorists have almost without exception approached religion as a phenomenon that radically marks humans off from other animals, but Gross rejects this paradigm, instead matching religion more closely with the life sciences to better theorize human nature. Gross begins with a detailed account of the scandals at Agriprocessors and their significance for the American and international Jewish community. He argues that without a proper theorization of "animals and religion," we cannot fully understand religiously and ethically motivated diets and how and why the events at Agriprocessors took place. Subsequent chapters recognize the significance of animals to the study of religion in the work of Ernst Cassirer, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Jacques Derrida and the value of indigenous peoples' understanding of animals to the study of religion in our daily lives. Gross concludes by extending the Agribusiness scandal to the activities at slaughterhouses of all kinds, calling attention to the religiosity informing the regulation of "secular" slaughterhouses and its implications for our relationship with and self-imagination through animals.

Author: Paul Waldau
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231136439
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 721

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Book Description
A Communion of Subjects is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of the conceptualization of animals in world religions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry (cultural history), Wendy Doniger (study of myth), Elizabeth Lawrence (veterinary medicine, ritual studies), Marc Bekoff (cognitive ethology), Marc Hauser (behavioral science), Steven Wise (animals and law), Peter Singer (animals and ethics), and Jane Goodall (primatology) consider how major religious traditions have incorporated animals into their belief systems, myths, rituals, and art. Their findings offer profound insights into the relationship between human beings and animals, and a deeper understanding of the social and ecological web in which we all live.

Author: Andrew Linzey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429953119
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
The ethical treatment of non-human animals is an increasingly significant issue, directly affecting how people share the planet with other creatures and visualize themselves within the natural world. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics is a key reference source in this area, looking specifically at the role religion plays in the formation of ethics around these concerns. Featuring thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the handbook is divided into two parts. The first gives an overview of fifteen of the major world religions’ attitudes towards animal ethics and protection. The second features five sections addressing the following topics: Human Interaction with Animals Killing and Exploitation Religious and Secular Law Evil and Theodicy Souls and Afterlife This handbook demonstrates that religious traditions, despite often being anthropocentric, do have much to offer to those seeking a framework for a more enlightened relationship between humans and non-human animals. As such, The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, theology, and animal ethics as well as those studying the philosophy of religion and ethics more generally.

Author: Julia Kindt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429754590
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book provides the first systematic study of the role of animals in different areas of the ancient Greek religious experience, including in myth and ritual, the literary and the material evidence, the real and the imaginary. An international team of renowned contributors shows that animals had a sustained presence not only in the traditionally well-researched cultural practice of blood sacrifice but across the full spectrum of ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices. Animals played a role in divination, epiphany, ritual healing, the setting up of dedications, the writing of binding spells, and the instigation of other ‘magical’ means. Taken together, the individual contributions to this book illustrate that ancient Greek religion constituted a triangular symbolic system encompassing not just gods and humans, but also animals as a third player and point of reference. Animals in Ancient Greek Religion will be of interest to students and scholars of Greek religion, Greek myth, and ancient religion more broadly, as well as for anyone interested in human/animal relations in the ancient world.

Author: Lisa Kemmerer
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199790671
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Despite increasing public attention to animal suffering, human beings continue to exploit billions of animals in factory farms medical laboratories, and elsewhere. This wide-ranging study shows how spiritual teachings in seven major religious traditions can help people consider their ethical obligations towards other creatures.

Author: Barbara Allen
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780236050
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
Animals in Religion explores the role of animals within a wide range of religious traditions. Exploring countless stories and myths passed down orally and in many religious texts, Barbara Allen—herself a practicing minister—offers a fascinating history of the ways animals have figured in our spiritual lives, whether they have been Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any number of lesser-known religions. Some of the figures here will be familiar, such as St. Francis of Assisi, famous for his accord with animals, or that beloved remover of obstacles, Ganesha, the popular elephant god in the Hindu pantheon. Delving deeper, Allen highlights the numerous ways that our religious practices have honored and relied upon our animal brethren. She examines the principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence, which has Jains sweeping the pathways before them so as not to kill any insects, as well as the similar principle in Judaism of ts’ar ba’alei chayim and the notion in some sects of Islam that all living creatures are Muslim. From ancient Egypt to the Druids to the indigenous cultures of North America and Australia, Allen tells story after story that emphasizes the same message: all species are spiritually connected.

Author: David Aftandilian
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572334724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
In What Are the Animals to Us? scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines explore the diverse meanings of animals in science, religion, folklore, literature, and art.

Author: Linda Kalof
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199927146
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
Part I. Animals in the landscape of law, politics, and public policy. Animal rights / Gary Francione and Anna Charlton -- Animals in political theory / Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka --,Animals as living property / David Favre -- The human-animal bond / James Serpell -- Animal sheltering / Leslie Irvine -- Roaming dogs / Arnold Arluke and Kate Atema -- Misothery : contempt for animals and nature, its origins, purposes, and repercussions / James B. Mason -- Continental approaches to animals and animality / Ralph Acampora -- Animals as legal subjects / Paul Waldau -- The struggle for compassion and justice through critical animal studies / Carol Gigliotti -- Interspecies dialogue and animal ethics : the feminist care perspective / Josephine Donovan -- Part II. Animal intentionality, agency, and reflexive thinking. Cetacean cognition / Lori Marino -- History and animal agencies / Chris Pearson -- Animals as sentient commodities / Rhoda WilPart I.kie -- Animal work / Jocelyne Porcher -- Animals as reflexive thinkers : the Aponoian paradigm / Mark Rowlands and Susana Monsó -- Part III. Animals as objects in science, food, spectacle, and sport. The ethics of animal research / Bernard Rollin -- The ethics of food animal production / Paul Thompson -- Animals as scientific objects / Mike Michael -- The problem with zoos / Randy Malamud -- Wolf hunting and the ethics of predator control / John Vucetich and Michael P. --Nelson -- Part IV. Animals in cultural representations. Practice and ethics of the use of animals in contemporary art /Joe Zammit-Lucia -- Animals in folklore / Boria Sax -- Part V. Animals in ecosystems. Archaeozoology / Juliet Cluton-Brock -- Animals and ecological science / Anita Guerrini -- Staging privilege, proximity, and "extreme animal tourism" / Jane Desmond -- Commensal species / Terry O'Connor -- Lively cities : people, animals, and urban ecosystems / Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch -- Animals in religion / Stephen R.L. Clark.

Author: Patricia A. Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144389821X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
This volume brings together a variety of approaches to the different ways in which the role of animals was understood in ancient Greco-Roman myth and religion, across a period of several centuries, from Preclassical Greece to Late Antique Rome. Animals in Greco-Roman antiquity were thought to be intermediaries between men and gods, and they played a pivotal role in sacrificial rituals and divination, the foundations of pagan religion. The studies in the first part of the volume examine the role of the animals in sacrifice and divination. The second part explores the similarities between animals, on the one hand, and men and gods, on the other. Indeed, in antiquity, the behaviour of several animals was perceived to mirror human behaviour, while the selection of the various animals as sacrificial victims to specific deities often was determined on account of some peculiar habit that echoed a special attribute of the particular deity. The last part of this volume is devoted to the study of animal metamorphosis, and to this end a number of myths that associate various animals with transformation are examined from a variety of perspectives.

Author: Donovan O. Schaefer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374900
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In Religious Affects Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. Drawing on affect theory, evolutionary biology, and poststructuralist theory, Schaefer builds on the recent materialist shift in religious studies to relocate religious practices in the affective realm—an insight that helps us better understand how religion is lived in conjunction with systems of power. To demonstrate religion's animality and how it works affectively, Schaefer turns to a series of case studies, including the documentary Jesus Camp and contemporary American Islamophobia. Placing affect theory in conversation with post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Schaefer explores the extent to which nonhuman animals have the capacity to practice religion, linking human forms of religion and power through a new analysis of the chimpanzee waterfall dance as observed by Jane Goodall. In this compelling case for the use of affect theory in religious studies, Schaefer provides a new model for mapping relations between religion, politics, species, globalization, secularism, race, and ethics.