Secular Devotion

Secular Devotion PDF

Author: Timothy Brennan

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1789604214

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Popular music in the Americas, from jazz, Cuban and Latin salsa to disco and rap, is overwhelmingly neo-African. Created in the midst of war and military invasion, and filtered through a Western worldview, these musical forms are completely modern in their sensibilities: they are in fact the very sound of modern life. But the African religious philosophy at their core involved a longing for earlier eras-ones that pre-dated the technological discipline of labor forced on captive populations by the European occupiers. In this groundbreaking new book, Timothy Brennan shows how the popular music of the Americas-the music of entertainment, nightlife, and leisure-is involved in a devotion to an African religious worldview that survived the ravages of slavery and found its way into the rituals of everyday listening. In doing so he explores the challenge posed by Afro-Latin music to a world music system dominated by a few wealthy countries and the processes by which Afro-Latin music has been absorbed into the imperial imagination.

The Flower of Paradise

The Flower of Paradise PDF

Author: David J. Rothenberg

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2011-10-05

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0195399714

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In spite of their widely disparate uses, Marian prayers and courtly love songs from the Middle Ages and Renaissance often show a stylistic similarity. This book examines the convergence of these two styles in polyphonic music and its broader poetic, artistic, and devotional context from c.1200-c.1500.

This Life

This Life PDF

Author: Martin Hägglund

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1101873736

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Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.

Healing Secular Life

Healing Secular Life PDF

Author: Christopher Dole

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-08-16

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0812206355

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In contemporary Turkey—a democratic, secular, and predominantly Muslim nation—the religious healer is a controversial figure. Attracting widespread condemnation, religious healers are derided as exploiters of the sick and vulnerable, discredited forms of Islamic and medical authority, and superstitious relics of a pre-modern era. Yet all sorts of people, and not just the desperately ill, continue to seek them out. After years of research with healers and their patients in working-class neighborhoods of urban Turkey, anthropologist Christopher Dole concludes that the religious healer should be regarded not as an exception to Turkey's secular modern development but as one of its defining figures. Healing Secular Life demonstrates that religious healing and secularism in fact have a set of common stakes in the ordering of lives and the remaking of worlds. Linking the history of medical reforms and scientific literacy campaigns to contemporary efforts of Qur'anic healers to treat people afflicted by spirits and living saints through whom deceased political leaders speak, Healing Secular Life approaches stories of healing and being healed as settings for examining the everyday social intimacies of secular political rule. This ethnography of loss, care, and politics reveals not only that the authority of the religious healer is deeply embedded within the history of secular modern reform in Turkey but also that personal narratives of suffering and affliction are inseparable from the story of a nation seeking to recover from the violence of its own secular past.

The Secular Religion of Franklin Merrell-Wolff

The Secular Religion of Franklin Merrell-Wolff PDF

Author: Dave Vliegenthart

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9004361251

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In The Secular Religion of Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Dave Vliegenthart investigates the life and teachings of a twentieth-century American mystic, with implications for the socio-historical background of the ongoing grand narrative that asserts a widespread anti-intellectualism in modern American culture.

Landscapes of the Secular

Landscapes of the Secular PDF

Author: Nicolas Howe

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-09-05

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022637680X

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“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.

Religion and the Secular

Religion and the Secular PDF

Author: Timothy Fitzgerald

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-12-05

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1317491009

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Religion has dominated colonialism since the 16th century. 'Religion and the Secular' critically examines how religion has been used to subject indigenous concepts to the needs of colonial powers. Essays present the colonial relationship from the perspective of colonized cultures - including Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Japan, South Africa and Canada - and colonizing powers, namely England, Germany and the United States. The volume offers a historical and ethnographical analysis of the relationship between the sacred and the secular, examining religion in relation to politics, economics and civil power.

Secular Cosmopolitanism, Hospitality, and Religious Pluralism

Secular Cosmopolitanism, Hospitality, and Religious Pluralism PDF

Author: Andrew Fiala

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1134849265

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This book explores the idea of religious pluralism while defending the norms of secular cosmopolitanism, which include liberty, tolerance, civility, and hospitality. The secular cosmopolitan ideal requires us to be more tolerant and more hospitable toward religious believers and non-believers from diverse traditions in our religiously pluralistic world. Some have argued that the world’s religions can be united around a common core. This book argues that it is both impossible and inadvisable either to reduce religion to one thing or to deny religion. Instead, the book affirms non reductive pluralism and seeks to understand how we should live in a pluralistic world. Building on work in the sociology of religion and philosophy of religion, the book examines the grown of religious diversity (and the spread of nonreligion) in the contemporary world. It argues that religious toleration, hospitality, and compassion must be extended in a global direction. Secular cosmopolitanism recognizes that each person has a right to his or her deepest beliefs and that the diversity of the world’s religious and non-religious traditions cannot be reduced or eliminated.

Secular States, Religious Politics

Secular States, Religious Politics PDF

Author: Sumantra Bose

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-05-03

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108611494

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Secular States, Religious Politics is a pioneering comparative study of the two major attempts to build secular states - where the constitutional identity and fundamental character of the state are not based on or derived from any religious faith - in the non-Western world. This book explains the political transformations of India and Turkey with deep insight and exceptional clarity. It shows the similarity of the two non-Western secular states in not being based on a Western-style principle of separation of church and state, but rather on an operational doctrine of state intervention in and regulation of the religious sphere. At the same time, the author highlights the very different motives behind the establishment of secular states in the two cases, and demonstrates that while state-secularism took a culturally deracinated and deeply authoritarian form in Turkey, it assumed a culturally rooted and democratic form in India.

Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire

Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire PDF

Author: Rebekka Habermas

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2019-03-27

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1789201527

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With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany’s secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.