Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms PDF full book. Access full book title Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Gerard Russell Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1471114724 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 470
Book Description
Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities. Historically a tolerant faith, Islam has, since the early 20th century, witnessed the rise of militant, extremist sects. This development, along with the rippling effects of Western invasion, now pose existential threats to these minority faiths. And as more and more of their youth flee to the West in search of greater freedoms and job prospects, these religions face the dire possibility of extinction. Drawing on his extensive travels and archival research, Russell provides an essential record of the past, present, and perilous future of these remarkable religions.
Author: Gerard Russell Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1471114724 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 470
Book Description
Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities. Historically a tolerant faith, Islam has, since the early 20th century, witnessed the rise of militant, extremist sects. This development, along with the rippling effects of Western invasion, now pose existential threats to these minority faiths. And as more and more of their youth flee to the West in search of greater freedoms and job prospects, these religions face the dire possibility of extinction. Drawing on his extensive travels and archival research, Russell provides an essential record of the past, present, and perilous future of these remarkable religions.
Author: Jeremy H. Kidwell Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253068495 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 398
Book Description
Human-caused extinctions have never been so prominent in our political and cultural landscape. Extinction and Religion is a collection of wide-ranging chapters that explore the implications for religious faith and experience as it relates to a "sixth mass extinction" in Earth's history. Further it seeks to answer the question as to how religious and spiritual practices are shaping responses to the crisis? Edited by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire, this collection aims to set a new postsecular agenda, articulating the questions, challenges, and ways forward for thinking about religion in an age of mass extinction rather than provide responses from world religions in isolation. It covers subjects such as the multitude of challenges posed by mass extinction to beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life. Wide ranging and incisive, Extinction and Religion amply demonstrates the many ways in which the threat of extinction profoundly affects our faith and religious life worlds.
Author: Jeremy H. Kidwell Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 9780253068460 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Human-caused extinctions have never been so prominent in our political and cultural landscape. Extinction and Religion is a collection of wide-ranging chapters that explore the implications for religious faith and experience as it relates to a "sixth mass extinction" in Earth's history. Further it seeks to answer the question as to how religious and spiritual practices are shaping responses to the crisis? Edited by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire, this collection aims to set a new postsecular agenda, articulating the questions, challenges, and ways forward for thinking about religion in an age of mass extinction rather than provide responses from world religions in isolation. It covers subjects such as the multitude of challenges posed by mass extinction to beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life. Wide ranging and incisive, Extinction and Religion amply demonstrates the many ways in which the threat of extinction profoundly affects our faith and religious life worlds.
Author: Evan Berry Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253059070 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
How does our faith affect how we think about and respond to climate change? Climate Politics and the Power of Religion is an edited collection that explores the diverse ways that religion shapes climate politics at the local, national, and international levels. Drawing on case studies from across the globe, it stands at the intersection of religious studies, environment policy, and global politics. From small island nations confronting sea-level rise and intensifying tropical storms to high-elevation communities in the Andes and Himalayas wrestling with accelerating glacial melt, there is tremendous variation in the ways that societies draw on religion to understand and contend with climate change. Climate Politics and the Power of Religion offers 10 timely case studies that demonstrate how different communities render climate change within their own moral vocabularies and how such moral claims find purchase in activism and public debates about climate policy. Whether it be Hindutva policymakers in India, curanderos in Peru, or working-class people's concerns about the transgressions of petroleum extraction in Trinidad—religion affects how they all are making sense of and responding to this escalating global catastrophe.
Author: Robert N. McCauley Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199341540 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
A comparison of the cognitive foundations of religion and science and an argument that religion is cognitively natural and that science is cognitively unnatural.
Author: David L. Haberman Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253056012 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change? Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges. People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.
Author: Edward O. Wilson Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 087140480X Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 159
Book Description
New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the National Book Award (Nonfiction) How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham.
Author: Mark I. Wallace Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 0823281337 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
2019 NAUTILUS GOLD WINNER In a time of rapid climate change and species extinction, what role have the world’s religions played in ameliorating—or causing—the crisis we now face? Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, appears to bear a disproportionate burden for creating humankind’s exploitative attitudes toward nature through unearthly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins. In this regard, Christianity has become an otherworldly religion that views the natural world as “fallen,” as empty of signs of God’s presence. And yet, buried deep within the Christian tradition are startling portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit – the “animal God,” as it were, of historic Christian witness. Through biblical readings, historical theology, continental philosophy, and personal stories of sacred nature, this book recovers the model of God in Christianity as a creaturely, avian being who signals the presence of spirit in everything, human and more-than-human alike. Mark Wallace’s recovery of the bird-God of the Bible signals a deep grounding of faith in the natural world. The moral implications of nature-based Christianity are profound. All life is deserving of humans’ care and protection insofar as the world is envisioned as alive with sacred animals, plants, and landscapes. From the perspective of Christian animism, the Earth is the holy place that God made and that humankind is enjoined to watch over and cherish in like manner. Saving the environment, then, is not a political issue on the left or the right of the ideological spectrum, but, rather, an innermost passion shared by all people of faith and good will in a world damaged by anthropogenic warming, massive species extinction, and the loss of arable land, potable water, and breathable air. To Wallace, this passion is inviolable and flows directly from the heart of Christian teaching that God is a carnal, fleshy reality who is promiscuously incarnated within all things, making the whole world a sacred embodiment of God’s presence, and worthy of our affectionate concern. This beautifully and accessibly written book shows that “Christian animism” is not a strange oxymoron, but Christianity’s natural habitat. Challenging traditional Christianity’s self-definition as an other-worldly religion, Wallace paves the way for a new Earth-loving spirituality grounded in the ancient image of an animal God.
Author: Celia E. Deane-Drummond Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1498291929 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 332
Book Description
This book charts a new direction in humanities scholarship through serious engagement with the geopolitical concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on religious stwhatudies, theology, social science, history and philosophy, and can be broadly termed the environmental humanities, this collection represents a groundbreaking critical analysis of diverse narratives on the Anthropocene. The contributors to this volume recognize that the Anthropocene began as a geological concept, the age of the humans, but that its implications are much wider than this. Will the Anthropocene have good or bad ethical outcomes? Does the Anthropocene idea challenge the possibility of a sacred Nature, which shores up many religious approaches to environmental ethics? Or is the Anthropocene a secularized theological anthropology more properly dealt with through traditional concepts from Catholic social teaching on human ecology? Do theological traditions, such as Christology, reinforce negative aspects of the Anthropocene? Not all contributors in this volume agree with the answers to these different questions. Readers will be challenged, provoked, and stimulated by this book.
Author: Phillip Hoose Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) ISBN: 0374301964 Category : Young Adult Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
The tragedy of extinction is explained through the dramatic story of a legendary bird, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and of those who tried to possess it, paint it, shoot it, sell it, and, in a last-ditch effort, save it. A powerful saga that sweeps through two hundred years of history, it introduces artists like John James Audubon, bird collectors like William Brewster, and finally a new breed of scientist in Cornell's Arthur A. "Doc" Allen and his young ornithology student, James Tanner, whose quest to save the Ivory-bill culminates in one of the first great conservation showdowns in U.S. history, an early round in what is now a worldwide effort to save species. As hope for the Ivory-bill fades in the United States, the bird is last spotted in Cuba in 1987, and Cuban scientists join in the race to save it. All this, plus Mr. Hoose's wonderful story-telling skills, comes together to give us what David Allen Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds calls "the most thorough and readable account to date of the personalities, fashions, economics, and politics that combined to bring about the demise of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker." The Race to Save the Lord God Bird is the winner of the 2005 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2005 Bank Street - Flora Stieglitz Award.
Author: Gerard Russell
Author: Gerard Russell
Author: Jeremy H. Kidwell
Author: Jeremy H. Kidwell
Author: Evan Berry
Author: Robert N. McCauley
Author: David L. Haberman
Author: Edward O. Wilson
Author: Mark I. Wallace
Author: Celia E. Deane-Drummond
Author: Phillip Hoose