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Charts the development of progressive Christianity’s engagement with modern science, historical criticism, and liberal humanism Christians who have doubts about the existence of God? Who do not believe in the divinity of Jesus? Who reject the accuracy of the Bible? The New Heretics explores the development of progressive Christianity, a movement of Christians who do not reject their identity as Christians, but who believe Christianity must be updated for today’s times and take into consideration modern science, historical criticism, and liberal humanism. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in North America, Rebekka King focuses on testimonies of deconversion, collective read...
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Bec...
Key Categories in the Study of Religion builds upon the groundwork laid by previous NAASR Working Papers titles in order to bring us full circle to the symbiotic relationship between context and critique. This volume assembles diverse sets of data to consider pertinent categories in which critique occurs. By looking at intentionally disparate case studies, the volume centers on four key contextual categories which stand at the heart of the academic study of religion: Citizenship and Politics, Class and Economy, Gender and Sexuality, and Race and Ethnicity. The contributors to this volume explore questions concerning how scholars construct such categories and/or critique scholars who do? Who ...
A rigourous analysis of context in transitional justice, examining the successes and failures of truth and reconciliation commissions in post-conflict settings.
An important and respected voice for liberal American Christianity for the past twenty years, Bishop John Shelby Spong integrates his often controversial stands on the Bible, Jesus, theism, and morality into an intelligible creed that speaks to today's thinking Christian. In this compelling and heartfelt book, he sounds a rousing call for a Christianity based on critical thought rather than blind faith, on love rather than judgment, and that focuses on life more than religion.
A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion introduces the key concepts and theories from religious studies that are necessary for a full understanding of the complex relations between religion and society. The aim is to provide readers with an arsenal of critical concepts for studying religious ideologies, practices, and communities. This thoroughly revised second edition has been restructured to clearly emphasize key topics including: Essentialism Functionalism Authority Domination. All ideas and theories are clearly illustrated, with new and engaging examples and case studies throughout, making this the ideal textbook for students approaching the subject area for the first time.
This is the remarkable story of the unlikely origins of modern media culture. In the early 19th century, a few entrepreneurs decided the time was right to launch a true mass media in America. Though they were savvy businessmen, their publishing enterprises were not commercial businesses but nonprofit religious organizations.
Theory and Method are two words that cause considerable consternation in the academic study of religion. Although everyone claims to be aware of and to engage them, the fact of the matter is that they remain poorly understood. Some see the terms as irritants that get in the way of data interpretation and translation. Others may invoke them sporadically to appear in vogue but then return quickly and myopically to their material and with little concern for the larger issues that such terms raise. To contribute to these debates, the present volume reproduces select articles from Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (MTSR) from the first 25 volumes of the journal, and allows a group of younger scholars to introduce and review them, asking if the issues raised are still relevant to the field. Contributors include: Matt Sheedy, Robert A. Segal, James B. Apple, Neil McMullin, Rebekka King, Russell McCutcheon, Craig Martin, Donal Wiebe, Emma Cohen, Robert N. McCauley, E. Thomas Lawson, Steven Engler, Mark Q. Gardiner, Bruce Lincoln, Sarah E. Rollens, Burton Mack, Yasmin Merchant, Herb Bergh, Jennifer Hall, Darlene Juschka, Ella Paldam, and Armin Geertz.
The contributors to this volume treat pluralism as a concept that is historically and ideologically produced or, put another way, as a doctrine that is embedded within a range of political, civic, and cultural institutions. Their critique considers how religious difference is framed as a problem that only pluralism can solve. Working comparatively across nations and disciplines, the essays in After Pluralism explore pluralism as a "term of art" that sets the norms of identity and the parameters of exchange, encounter, and conflict. Contributors locate pluralism's ideals in diverse sites--Broadway plays, Polish Holocaust memorials, Egyptian dream interpretations, German jails, and legal theor...
This haunting question, in all of its variations and interpretations, has echoed through the annals of time. Since the dawn of philosophy, the world’s intellectual titans have grappled valiantly with this enigma, and many of them dedicated entire lifetimes to unearthing answers in religion, aesthetics, love, personal convictions, and myriad other realms, but to no avail. How has this ineluctable conundrum come to signify everything and nothing? To term it “the Holy Grail of philosophy” is almost to insultingly undersell its gravitas; the meaning of life remains maddeningly elusive, mocking our most desperate curiosities. Despite over 2,500 years of introspection, debate, and countless ...