Religious Experience and New Materialism

Religious Experience and New Materialism PDF

Author: Joerg Rieger

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1137568445

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In this groundbreaking volume, theologians and scholars of religion criticize and refine new materialist views, to advance debate about the role of religious experience in social and political change.

Entangled Worlds

Entangled Worlds PDF

Author: Catherine Keller

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2017-08-08

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0823276236

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Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.

Religion, Politics, and the Earth

Religion, Politics, and the Earth PDF

Author: C. Crockett

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-10-19

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 113726893X

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"Following Vattimo's postmodern philosophy, Badiou's postmetaphysical ontology, and i ek's revolutionary style, the authors of this marvelous book invites us to reactivate our politics of resistance against our greatest enemy: corporate capitalism. The best solution to the ecological, energy, and financial crisis corporate capitalism has created, as Crockett Clayton and Jeffrey Robbins suggest, is a new theological materialism where Being is conceived as energy both subjectively and objectively. All my graduate students will have to read this book carefully if they want to become philosophers." - Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona "This is a book of an extraordinary timeliness, written in an accessible and strikingly informative way. It is excellently poised to become a synthetic and agenda setting statement about the implications of a new materialism for the founding of a new radical theology, a new kind of spirituality. I consider this therefore quite a remarkable book which will be influential in ongoing discussions of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology. Moreover, it will be, quite simply, the best book about spirituality and the new materialism on the market today. While all of the work of the new materialists engage at one level or another the question of a new spirituality, I do not think there is anything comparable in significance to what Crockett and Robbins have provided here." - Ward Blanton, University of Kent "This book will perhaps be most appreciated by the reader with an intuitive cast of mind, able to recognize the force of an argument in its imaginative suggestiveness . . . New Materialism is about energy transformation, we are told, energy which cannot be reduced to matter because it resonates with spirit and life . . . Yet the book strikes a fundamental note of hard reality: 'if we want our civilization to live on earth a little longer we will have to recognize our coexistence with and in earth'." - Christian Ecology Link

Derrida after the End of Writing

Derrida after the End of Writing PDF

Author: Clayton Crockett

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0823277852

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What are we to make of Jacques Derrida’s famous claim that “every other is every other,” if the other could also be an object, a stone or an elementary particle? Derrida’s philosophy is relevant not just for human ethical language and animality, but to profound developments in the physical and natural sciences, as well as ecology. Derrida After the End of Writing argues for the importance of reading Derrida’s later work from a new materialist perspective. In conversation with Heidegger, Lacan, and Deleuze, and critically engaging newer philosophies of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, Crockett claims that Derrida was never a linguistic idealist. Furthermore, something changes in his later philosophy something that cannot be simply described as a “turn.” In Catherine Malabou’s terms, there is a shift from a motor scheme of writing to a motor scheme of plasticity. Crockett explores some of the implications of interpreting Derrida through the new materialist lens of technicity or plasticity, attending to the significance of ethics, religion, and politics in his later work. By reading Derrida from a new materialist perspective, Crockett provides fresh readings of his ideas of sovereignty, religion, responsibility, and mourning. These new readings produce fruitful engagements with the thinkers who have followed Derrida, including Malabou, Timothy Morton, John D. Caputo, and Karen Barad. Here is a new reading of Derrida that moves beyond conventional understandings of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a reading that is responsive to and critical of some of the crucial developments shaping the humanities today.

A Philosophy of Christian Materialism

A Philosophy of Christian Materialism PDF

Author: Revd Dr John Reader

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2015-05-28

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1472427327

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Baker, James and Reader offer new religious engagement with the public sphere via means of interdisciplinary analysis and empirical examples, developing what we call a Relational Christian Realism building upon interaction with contemporary Philosophy of Religion. This book represents an exciting contribution to philosophy and practice of religion on both sides of the Atlantic and aspires to be sufficiently interdisciplinary to also appeal to readerships engaged in the study of modern political and social trends.

The Varieties of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience PDF

Author: William James

Publisher: The Floating Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 824

ISBN-13: 1877527467

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Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."

Things:

Things: PDF

Author: Dick Houtman

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2012-09-12

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 0823239454

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The relation between religion and things has long been conceived in antagonistic terms, privileging spirit above matter, belief above ritual and objects, meaning above form and 'inward' contemplation above 'outward' action. This book addresses these issues.

Theology and New Materialism

Theology and New Materialism PDF

Author: John Reader

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 3319545116

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This book argues that identified weaknesses in recent theological engagement with New Materialism can be successfully addressed by incorporating insights from Relational Christian Realism. Central themes are those of the relational and the apophatic as they represent different but essential strands of a materialist theology. The relational refers to the work of Deleuze and its influence upon key New Materialist thinkers such as De Landa, Bryant, and Braidotti but supplemented from Relational Christian Realism by Latour and Badiou and with reference to the concept of the apophatic as found in Keller and Kearney. Examining the concepts of transcendence, human agency, and a New Enlightenment, the book moves into more practical areas of aesthetics and technology concluding with a response to the contemporary apocalyptic of climate change. Being “beyond in the midst” requires developing spaces of faithful dissent and holding the tension between the relational and the apophatic in theology.

More Than Belief

More Than Belief PDF

Author: Manuel A. Vasquez

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-08

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0197541682

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This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the centrality of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion.

New Materialism and Theology

New Materialism and Theology PDF

Author: Sam Mickey

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-05-16

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 9004520309

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Juxtaposing theological inquiry with the philosophical movement of new materialism, Sam Mickey reflects on questions of human embodiment, nonhuman agency, technological innovation, and possible futures for humankind. New Materialism and Theology opens several pathways for thinking about what really matters.