Reinventing the Sacred

Reinventing the Sacred

Author: Stuart A. Kauffman

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-11-29

Total Pages: 534

ISBN-13: 1458722066

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Consider the complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awesome to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell at a stroke, or to realize that it evolved with no Almighty Hand, but arose on its own in the c...


Redefining the Sacred

Redefining the Sacred

Author: Elizabeth Frood

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503541044

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This launch volume of the series Contextualising the Sacred explores the changing social, religious, and political meanings of sacred space in the ancient Near East through bringing together the work of leading scholars of ancient history, Assyriology, classical archaeology, Egyptology and philology. Redefining the Sacred originates in an international European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop of the same name held at the University of Oxford in 2009, and is the launch volume for the series Contextualising the Sacred. It comprises eight studies written by leading scholars, each of whom investigates aspects of the diverse and changing meanings of sacred environments in the Near East and Egypt from c. 1000 BC to AD 300. This was a time of dramatic social, political, and religious transformation in the region, and religious architecture, which was central to ancient environments, is a productive interpretive lens through which implications of these changes can be examined across cultural borders. Analysis of the development of urban, sub-urban, and extra-urban sanctuaries, as well as the written sources associated with them, shows how the religious identities of individuals, groups, and societies were shaped, transformed, and interconnected. By bringing together ancient historians, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, archaeologists, and philologists, the volume highlights the immense potential of diachronic studies of sacred space, which the series will take forward.


Redefining Ancient Orphism

Redefining Ancient Orphism

Author: Radcliffe G. Edmonds III

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1107038219

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In a paradigm shift, this book redefines Orphism as a polemical label for extra-ordinary religion, good or bad.


Why Men Made God

Why Men Made God

Author: R a Fleming

Publisher: Redefining the Sacred (International)

Published: 2015-06-21

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780957261228

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Why do we have only one deity when there used to be so many? Where did the idea of marriage come from? What was so significant about grain? How did the disparity between rich and poor begin? When did we go from revering the Earth to treating it like a resource to be plundered? The answers are in our stories. We Humans have been telling stories since our earliest beginnings. The stories grew in the telling until they became the myths and legends that framed our cultural beliefs. They explained our world and taught us how to treat one another. The consequences, for better or worse, cannot easily be escaped. Why Men Made God coalesces the stories that led to modern Western culture into a chronological narrative. New insights and patterns emerge. Gradual changes in our attitudes toward gender and power, toward property and the earth become clear. These changes are mirrored in the supernatural deities that were worshipped in each cultural stage along the way. A global climate crisis threatens all of us. How we talk about it is affecting how we deal with it. Understanding what our stories were and how they evolved empowers us to change the story we tell now, and in so doing, change our future.


Ethics and the Future of Religion

Ethics and the Future of Religion

Author: W. Royce Clark

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2022-02-03

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 1978708653

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W. Royce Clark observes that humanity appears to be jeopardizing our own future in a chaos of mutual antagonism and hypocrisy. Religions have traditionally provided ethical guidance, but because their absolutized metaphysics are incompatible with each other, we cannot rely on any one of them in a religiously pluralistic culture. The ethics of various religions are also built on theocratic or authoritarian foundations which are incompatible with any democratic society. Finally, many of their premises are very ancient, so not relevant or appropriate in our modern scientific world. The Western Enlightenment brought challenges against religion’s singularity, exclusivity, heteronomy, and anti-scientific assumptions, all of which disrupted their ethics and the Absolute metaphysical grounds upon which those ethics rested, raising the question of whether a “freestanding” ethic was possible. Inasmuch as the primary claim of most religions was regarded as beyond challenge, but was a conflation of history and myth, modern historical method created more doubt than certainty about such allegedly certain doctrines as “Jesus is the Son of God.” By the end of the 20th century, the impossibility of validating suchprimary Christological claims from a historical approach became evident, despite the articulate attempts at credibility in the brilliant works of John Dominic Crossan and Wolfhart Pannenberg, which remained unconvincing in important ways. Between 1832 and 2014, innovative Christian theologians such as Schleiermacher, Hegel, Tillich, and Scharlemann took a detour from the futility of historical verification. This study examines their remarkable attempts at a form of “corroboration” of the basic Christological claim, even if their primary interests were more in Christology than ethics. The question Clark takes up here is whether or not these figures have thereby provided a base for a universal ethic, or the only answer is for principles “freestanding” from any religion?


Redefining Religious Education

Redefining Religious Education

Author: S. Gill

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-10-18

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 113737389X

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This book is a unique collection of interdisciplinary articles that argue for religious education to be directed primarily towards the spiritual insofar as it is part of a flourishing human life. The articles address this issue from the perspectives of theory, different religious traditions and innovative teaching and learning practices.


Redefining the Sacred

Redefining the Sacred

Author: Daniel Schönpflug

Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783631572184

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"The revolutions of 1789 and 1917 were defining moments for religious history in France, Russia, and even in Europe as a whole. Drawing on self-portrayals of some of the most radical actors, historians have presented revolutionaries as enemies of the church, and men of the church either as counter-revolutionaries or as victims of revolution. Revolution and religion have appeared as antagonistic forces, representing struggle of modernity against tradition. Only recently have these conventional patterns of interpretation been questioned. Historians explore the religious origins of revolutions, look at clergymen and churches as revolutionary actors and analyze how revolutionary movements appropriate religious patterns of thought and behavior. In the French and in the Russian context, revolutions are seen as moments in which the sacred was redefined." --Publisher's website.


Art of Estrangement

Art of Estrangement

Author: Pamela Anne Patton

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0271053836

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"Examines the influential role of visual images in reinforcing the efforts of Spain's Christian-ruled kingdoms to renegotiate the role of their Jewish minority following the territorial expansions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries"--Provided by publisher.


Housing the Chosen

Housing the Chosen

Author: Inge Nielsen

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503544373

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The architecture of ancient religious spaces has the potential to offer a deeper understanding of the religious groups who used the spaces and the activities they performed there. However, the large corpus of recent scholarship has for the most part overlooked architecture. This book investigates the spatial and architectural settings of mystery cults and religious assemblies from the eighth century bc to the fourth century ad and shows how architecture can illuminate the contents and societal functions of ancient religions. It examines deities whose cults included mysteries and/or were served by religious associations in the ancient world. Chapters treat the old Greek mystery cults of Demeter in Eleusis and the Great Gods in Samothrace as well as those of Dionysos, and the 'foreign' deities Isis/Serapis, Cybele/Attis, and Mithras. The book also treats religions and cults that did not include mysteries but were served by special religious groups, such as those belonging to the Syrio-Phoenician gods, the Jewish god in the diaspora, and the Christian god. The last section of the book combines the typological results from the first section on architecture with the presentation of the cultic functions of religious groups in the second section. This comparative analysis seeks to understand the social and spatial context for the activities of cults with a main focus on the Hellenistic and Roman periods, in particular through distinguishing the differences and similarities in the use of specific room-types.