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Evil
  • Language: en

Evil

Evil: A Critical Primer begins with the claim that evil is a concept that is contextually bound. This means that we should not expect to find shared or similar notions of evil across cultures. Addressing evil in a way that is at once contextually specific and applicable to cross-cultural settings, this primer breaks with moral conceptions of evil by redescribing it within a new framework of dangers and aversions (i.e., things that cause harm and things to avoid). Doing so provides an empirical and heuristic framework as a new starting point for the study of religion, deemphasizing things associated with evil (like the devil, wickedness, or a diabolic will) and focusing instead on attitudes and practices (like rituals of purity and impurity, notions of clean and dirty, or expressions of disgust). Introducing and reflecting on cultural and cognitive aspects of classification, myth, ritual, emotions, and morality, Evil: A Critical Primer argues that our colloquial conception of evil, as related exclusively to the moral domain, is usefully illuminated by attending to historical and cultural context and cross-cultural comparison.

Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 419

Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2006-08-01
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  • Publisher: BRILL

The Sociology of Religion has had several frameworks guiding its analysis including functionalism, interpretive sociology, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and now rational choice theory. Marxism has tended to ignore religion assuming it is something that would eventually disappear even though it retained theological elements. This collection of essays brings together a group of scholars who use frameworks provided by Marx and Critical Theory in analyzing religion. It's goal is to establish a critical theory of religion within the sociology of religion as an alternative to rational choice. In doing so, it engages in a critique of the positivism, uncritical praise of the market (neoconservativism) and one dimensional conception of rationality of the rational choice theory of religion.

Reading Chuck Palahniuk
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 246

Reading Chuck Palahniuk

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2009-10-11
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  • Publisher: Routledge

This collection examines how Chuck Palahniuk pushes through a variety of boundaries to shape fiction and to interrogate American cultures in powerful and important ways. His innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and these new essays insightfully discuss Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Club through Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.

Encyclopedia of Postmodernism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 480

Encyclopedia of Postmodernism

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2002-06-01
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism provides comprehensive and authoritative coverage of academic disciplines, critical terms and central figures relating to the vast field of postmodern studies. With three cross-referenced sections, the volume is easily accessible to readers with specialized research agendas and general interests in contemporary cultural, historical, literary and philosophical issues. Since its inception in the 1960s, postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual force that many scholars would argue defines our era. Postmodernism, in its various configurations, has consistently challenged concepts of selfhood, knowledge formation, aesthetics,...

The Ethics of Need
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 224

The Ethics of Need

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2013-03-01
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs but to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest.

The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 224

The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2014-05-08
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  • Publisher: BRILL

The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter examines the role of Protestantism in the Danish colonization of Greenland and shows how the process of colonization entails a process of subjectification where the identity of indigenous population is transformed. The figure of the hunter, commonly regarded as quintessential Inuit figure is traced back to the efforts of the Greenlandic intelligentsia to distance themselves from the hunting lifestyle by producing an abstract hunter identity in Greenlandic literature.

The Mystical in Wittgenstein's Early Writings
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 272

The Mystical in Wittgenstein's Early Writings

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2009-03-23
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The aim of this book is to consider what reasonably follows from the hypothesis that the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus can be interpreted from a mystical point of view. Atkinson intends to elucidate Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the mystical in his early writings as they pertain to a number of topics such as, God, the meaning of life, reality, the eternal and the solipsistic self.

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 545

The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2010-05-26
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  • Publisher: Routledge

Drawing on the work of Foucault and Western confessional writings, this book challenges the transhistorical and commonsense views of confession as an innate impulse resulting in the psychological liberation of the confessing subject. Instead, confessional desire is argued to be contingent and constraining, and alternatives to confessional subjectivity are explored.

The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 554

The Dialectical Tradition in South Africa

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2009-06-16
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  • Publisher: Routledge

This book brings into view the most enduring and distinctive philosophical current in South African history—one often obscured or patronized as Afrikaner liberalism. It traces this current of thought from nineteenth-century disputes over Dutch liberal theology through Stellenbosch existentialism to the prison writings of Breyten Breytenbach, and examines related themes in the work of Olive Schreiner, M. K. Gandhi, and Richard Turner. At the core of this tradition is a defence of free speech in its classical sense, as a virtue necessary for a good society, rather than in its modern liberal sense as an individual right. Out of this defence of free speech, conducted in the face of charges of heresy, treason, and immorality, a range of philosophical conceptions developed—of the self constituted in dialogue with others, of freedom as transcendence of the given, and of a dialectical movement of consciousness as it is educated through debate and action. This study shows the Socratic commitment to "following the argument where it leads," sustained and developed in the storm and stress of a peculiar modernity.

The Underground Church
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 364

The Underground Church

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2012-03-02
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  • Publisher: BRILL

Since the 1970s, liberal American Catholics have sustained a Reform Movement to counteract the conservative drift of the Vatican and to preserve and expand on the reforms of Vatican II. This book draws on a range of theory to analyze and interpret this movement, which is intent on creating a model of church, that examples Vatican II's open, receptive attitude toward the modern world. In response to backlash from church officials, the movement has increasingly abandoned effort to reform Roman Catholicism from within, and has moved in a sectarian direction by creating independent worship communities. The movement faces a precarious future due to its rapidly aging membership and the unstable nature of its newly-formed communities.