Between Community and Seclusion
Between Community and Seclusion

Author: Mirko Breitenstein

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2021-04

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 3643148755

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The fact that certain cultures and religions produced a way of life which, for the sake of self-perfection, expected its adherents to withdraw from various obligations to the world and to enter into the organisational structure of a monastic community obviously represents a constant anthropological foundation. The spectrum of monastic life within these various cultures was extremely diverse in its manifestations. It was the result of a high degree of flexibility in the face of constantly changing ideas about piety, social needs and concepts of community and individuality. However, an interreligious study with the aim of a scholarly analysis of comparable key elements across different monastic cultures does not exist yet. The editors as well as the authors of this volume are particularly interested in how monastic life was realised communally in many ways according to fixed norms and rules, how it shaped the understanding of community and civilisation and therefore made a decisive contribution to the formation of our cultural identity.

Focused and Fearless
Focused and Fearless

Author: Shaila Catherine

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-07-16

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1458783642

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Now ordinary meditators (and non-meditators) can understand how to attain non-ordinary states with relative ease. Blended with contemporary examples, pragmatic exercises, and ''how to'' instructions that anyone can try, Focused and Fearless provides a wealth of tools to cultivate non-distracted attention in daily life and on retreat. Shaila Catherine has a friendly, wise approach to the meditative states (jhanas) that lead to liberating insight. Focused and Fearless is about much more than merely meditation or concentration. It offers a complete path towards bliss, fearlessness, and true awakening.

The Intelligible Ode
The Intelligible Ode

Author: Graham Davidson

Publisher: Lutterworth Press

Published: 2023-03-30

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0718896467

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From its first publication, what is now known as the Immortality Ode has been praised for the magnificence of its verse and disparaged for its paucity of meaning - the 'immortality' of the subtitle unsubstantiated, and the 'recollections' insubstantial. Yet Wordsworth's idea of immortality has clear precedents in the seventeenth century, and recollections of childhood are Traherne's starting point for the recovery of a lost vision comparable to Wordsworth's. Via the power of the imagination, or reason, they believed they could experience a renewed vision that both termed variously Paradise, or infinity, or immortality. Graham Davidson traces the origins of Wordsworth's poetic impetus to his resistance to the Cartesian division between mind and nature, first adumbrated by the Cambridge Platonists. If reunited, Paradise was regained, but this personal trajectory was tempered by a deep sympathy for the woes of mortal life. Davidson explores the consequent dialogue through some of Wordsworth's best-known poems, at the heart of which is the Ode. In the last section, he demonstrates how Wordsworth's publishing history led the Victorians and modernists to misinterpret his work; if one considers Eliot's Four Quartets as odes, facing several of the same problems as did Wordsworth, there is some irony in Eliot's dismissal of the Immortality Ode as 'verbiage'.

The Seclusion
The Seclusion

Author: Jacqui Castle

Publisher: Inkshares

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1947848518

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A dystopian coming of age which will appeal to fans of Hunger Games and the Divergent novels. In the year 2090, America is walled off from the rest of the world. When her father is arrested by the totalitarian Board, a young woman sets out to escape the only country she’s ever known.

Hard, Hard Religion
Hard, Hard Religion

Author: John Hayes

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 146963533X

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In his captivating study of faith and class, John Hayes examines the ways folk religion in the early twentieth century allowed the South's poor--both white and black--to listen, borrow, and learn from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a world of severe struggle. Beneath the well-documented religious forms of the New South, people caught in the region's poverty crafted a distinct folk Christianity that spoke from the margins of capitalist development, giving voice to modern phenomena like alienation and disenchantment. Through haunting songs of death, mystical tales of conversion, grassroots sacramental displays, and an ethic of neighborliness, impoverished folk Christians looked for the sacred in their midst and affirmed the value of this life in this world. From Tom Watson and W. E. B. Du Bois over a century ago to political commentators today, many have ruminated on how, despite material commonalities, the poor of the South have been perennially divided by racism. Through his excavation of a folk Christianity of the poor, which fused strands of African and European tradition into a new synthesis, John Hayes recovers a historically contingent moment of interracial exchange generated in hardship.

The Gospel of John Marrant
The Gospel of John Marrant

Author: Alphonso F. Saville IV IV

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2024-07-26

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1478059427

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The Reverend John Marrant (1755–91) was North America’s first Black ordained minister and one of America’s earliest Black authors and preachers. In The Gospel of John Marrant, Alphonso F. Saville IV examines how Protestantism and West African indigenous religious practices deeply informed his life and ministry. Saville follows Marrant from his time evangelizing the Cherokee in Georgia to meeting with Black Freemasons in Boston to engaging with diasporic communities along the Eastern Seaboard and in England. Using the Black folk magic tradition of conjure as a lens for understanding Marrant’s religious imagination, Saville outlines the importance of Africana religious and cultural themes, symbols, and cosmologies in the biblical interpretation and ritual culture of early Black North American Christian communities. Marrant’s life and work, Saville contends, reveal the diverse religious cultures that contributed to the formation of African American Christianity and its evolution into a prominent institution during the colonial and early history of the United States. In so doing, he demonstrates the need to recenter both religion and Africa in the study of African American cultural and intellectual history.

Understanding the Religions of the World
Understanding the Religions of the World

Author: Willoughby Deming

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 1118767578

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Understanding the Religions of the World offers a new approach to the study of religion which moves away from the purely descriptive and instead helps students understand how religions actually ‘work’. Covering all the main faith traditions, it combines historical context, contemporary beliefs and practices, and original theory, with numerous study features and valuable overviews. A major new student-focused textbook concentrating on contemporary practices and beliefs of world religions Brings together a team of experts to provide a uniquely comprehensive coverage of religious traditions, including African religions and the religions of Oceania, which are rarely covered in detail Integrates original theory by arguing that each religion operates according to its own logic and order, and that they fulfill our need for a point of orientation Incorporates extensive student features including chapter introductions, ‘did you know?’ sections, boxed examples/material, numerous images and maps, conclusions, study questions and teaching plans, available on publication at www.wiley.com/go/deming