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Lardas examines the new visions of the three artists and their Beat religiosity, wherein they lived their "religion" of real-life experience rather than faith. By rejecting the cultural tenets of postwar America, each man took on the discourse of the public theology, created physical enactments of a religious representation of the world, and through literature changed the interpretation of modern religion.
"The story Modern tells ranges from eighteenth-century brain anatomies to the MRI; from the spread of phrenological cabinets and mental pieties in the nineteenth century to the discovery of the motor cortex and the emergence of the brain wave as a measurable manifestation of cognition; from cybernetic research into neural networks and artificial intelligence to the founding of brain-centric religious organizations such as Scientology; from the deployments of cognitive paradigms in electric shock treatment to the work of Barbara Brown, a neurofeedback pioneer who promoted the practice of controlling one's own brainwaves in the 1970s. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the 'religion' it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. Nowhere are science and religion closer than when they try to exclude each other, at their own peril"--
Ghosts, railroads, Sing Sing, sex machines - these are just a few of the phenomena that appear in this pioneering account of religion and society in 19th-century America.
"Paul's epistles are central to nearly every variation of Christianity, and there are as many different readings of Paul as there are sects of Christianity. Paul has also been co-opted by influential contemporary thinkers such as Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek. Religious scholar Cavan Concannon, however, has other plans. Taking as his starting point the language of excrement, refuse, and waste in Paul's letters, he reads these passages to think about the textual and material uses of garbage and excrement, and, ultimately, whether Paul's writings can be redeemed. Concannon presses on the tension between the evils that have been wrought through Paul's letters and the sacralizing effects of his p...
Focused on the intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system, Jennifer Graber explores evangelical Protestants' efforts to make religion central to emerging practices and philosophies of prison discipline from the 1790s thr
ÒIÕm not perfect,Ó Mateo confessed. ÒNobody is. But I try.Ó Secure the Soul shuttles between the life of Mateo, a born-again ex-gang member in Guatemala and the gang prevention programs that work so hard to keep him alive. Along the way, this poignantly written ethnography uncovers the Christian underpinnings of Central American security. In the streets of Guatemala CityÑamid angry lynch mobs, overcrowded prisons, and paramilitary death squadsÑmillions of dollars empower church missions, faith-based programs, and seemingly secular security projects to prevent gang violence through the practice of Christian piety. With Guatemala increasingly defined by both God and gangs, Secure the Soul details an emerging strategy of geopolitical significance: regional security by way of good Christian living.
This study explodes prevailing myths about the Phoenix Program, the CIA's top-secret effort to destroy the Viet Cong by neutralizing its “civilian” leaders. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese sources, Mark Moyar examines the attempts to eradicate the Viet Cong infrastructure and analyzes their effectiveness. He addresses misconceptions about these efforts and provides an accurate, complete picture of the allies’ decapitation of the Viet Cong shadow government. Combining social and political history with a study of military operations, Moyar offers a fresh interpretation of the crucial role the shadow government played in the Viet Cong's ascent. Detailed accounts of intelligence operations provide an insider’s view of their development and reveal what really happened in the safe havens of the Viet Cong. Filled with new information, Moyar’s study sets the record straight about one of the last secrets of the Vietnam War and offers poignant lessons for dealing with future Third World insurgencies. This Bison Books edition includes a new preface and chapter by the author.
How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen G...
"Christopher White's Unsettled Minds makes clear how important new psychologies of religion were for those Protestants navigating their way out of Calvinism and evangelical revivalism. Just as his religious liberals remapped mind and spirit, White has remapped the historical terrain of religion and psychology in American culture. He spotlights not a cultural world absorbed with ecstasy, altered states, or mythic depths, but instead one riveted on measured stages of spiritual growth and effective habits of self-discipline."—Leigh Eric Schmidt, Princeton University "An important contribution to the growing literature on the history of religious experience and of the distinctive dynamics of Christian interiority in the modern U.S."—Robert Orsi, Northwestern University "Today, when brain researchers and psychologists are again attempting to explain religion, this remarkable study suggests that we should not be surprised to see religious believers creatively embracing new scientific findings and making use of them for religious purposes unexpected by scientists."—Ann Taves, author of Fits, Trances, and Visions
In Faith in the New Millennium, Matthew Avery Sutton and Darren Dochuk bring together a collection of essays from renowned historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars that address the future of religion and American politics. The contributors discuss questions related to issues such as religion and immigration reform, civil rights, gay marriage, race, ethnicity, foreign policy, popular culture, nationalism, and the environment, investigating how faith, in the age of Obama, has been transformed.