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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.

Critical Theory After Habermas
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 360

Critical Theory After Habermas

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2004-01-01
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  • Publisher: BRILL

The essays in this book engage with the broad range of Jürgen Habermas' work including politics and the public sphere, nature, aesthetics, the linguistic turn and the paradigm of intersubjectivity. Each essay responds to particular difficulties with Habermas' approach to these topics. Each contributor also draws on different theoretical and philosophical traditions in order to explore recent developments in critical theory.

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.

Dark Matter
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 369

Dark Matter

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2020-08-04
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  • Publisher: Verso Books

Unravelling the thought of Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt Collaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical Theory precisely because their respective disciplines think so differently. Dark Matter argues that what makes their contributions to the Frankfurt School so remarkable is how they think together in spite of these differences. Kluge and Negt's "gravitational thinking" balances not only the abstractions of theory with the concreteness of the aesthetic, but also their allegiances to Frankfurt School mentors with their fascination for other German, F...

The Sacred Is the Profane
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 261

The Sacred Is the Profane

The Sacred Is the Profane collects nine essays written over several years by William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon that share a convergent perspective: not simply that both the category and concept "religion" is a construct, something that we cannot assume to be "natural" or universal, but also that the ability to think and act "religiously" is, quite specifically, a modern, political category in its origins and effects, the mere by-product of the modern state. These collected essays, substantially rewritten for this volume, advance current scholarly debates on secularism-debates which, the authors argue, insufficiently theorize the sacred/secular, church/state, and private/public binaries...

The Myth Awakens
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 197

The Myth Awakens

The trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens made a strong impression on fans. Many were excited by what they saw as a return to the spirit of George Lucas’s 1977 creation. Others—including several white supremacy groups—were upset and offended by key differences, most notably the shift away from a blond, blue-eyed, male protagonist. When the film was finally released, reactions similarly seemed to hinge on whether or not The Force Awakens renewed the “mythic” aspects of the original trilogy in ways that fans approved of. The Myth Awakens examines the religious implications of this phenomenon, considering the ways in which myth can function to reinforce “traditional” social and political values. In their analyses the authors of this book reflect on fan responses in relation to various elements of (and changes to) the Star Wars canon—including toys, video games, and novels, as well as several of the films. They do so using a variety of critical tools, drawing from studies of gender, race, psychology, politics, authority, music, ritual, and memory.

The Discipline of Religion
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 342

The Discipline of Religion

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2003-12-08
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The Discipline of Religion is a lively critical journey through religious studies today, looking at its recent growth as an academic discipline, and its contemporary political and social meanings. Focusing on the differences between religious belief and academic religious discourse, Russell T. McCutcheon argues that the invention of religion as a discipline blurs the distinction between criticism and doctrine in its assertion of the relevance of faith as a credible object of study. In the leap from disciplinary criticism to avowal of actual cosmic and moral meaning, schools of religious studies extend their powers far beyond universities and into the everyday lives of those outside, managing and curtailing specific types of speech and dissent.

Religion at Ground Zero
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 234

Religion at Ground Zero

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2011-07-14
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  • Publisher: A&C Black

'The world will never be the same!' How many times have human beings uttered this cry after a tragic event? This book analyzes how such emotive reactions impact on the way religion is understood, exploring theological responses to human tragedy and cultural shock by focusing on reactions to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, the two World Wars and the Holocaust, the 2004 South-East Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. It discusses themes such as the theodicy question, the function of religious discourse in the face of tragedy, and the relationship between religion and politics. The book explores the tension between religion's capacity to both cause and enhance the suffering and destruction surrounding historical tragedies, but also its potential to serve as a powerful resource for responding to such disasters. Analyzing this dialectic, it engages with the work of Slavoj Žižek, Karl Barth, Theodor Adorno, Emil Fackenheim and Rowan Williams, examining the role of belief, difficulties of overcoming the influence of ideology, and the significance of trust and humility.

Jesus and the Village Scribes
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 306

Jesus and the Village Scribes

Sets the early Jesus movement and Q within the context of the socio-economic crisis in Galilee.

Preaching the Headlines
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 155

Preaching the Headlines

Preachers often feel stuck when met with quickly shifting and dense media topics that flood the headlines. If and when they determine it is appropriate to address issues that arise in the news cycle, they are often at a loss for how to speak about them from the pulpit. When preachers understand that a responsibility to sustain life is embedded in the purposes of preaching, they discover greater fluidity between the everyday world, the biblical text, and preaching itself. Preaching the Headlines reframes preaching as an ongoing conversation between the modern world and the world of the Bible, exploring where the divides between the two may be less rigid than we often acknowledge. The preacher...