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Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural

Author : Matthias Egeler

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 353 pages

File Size : 43,25 MB

Release : 2024

Category : Architecture

ISBN : 0197747361

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Book Description

This book is the first study to tackle the relationship between landscape and religion in-depth. Author Matthias Egeler overviews previous theories of the relationship between landscape and religion and then pushes this theorizing further with a rich case study: the supernatural landscape of the Icelandic Westfjords. There, religion and the supernatural--from churches to elf hills--are ubiquitous in the landscape and, as Egeler shows, this example sheds entirely new light on core aspects of the relationship between landscape, religion, and the supernatural.



Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural

Author : Matthias Egeler

Publisher :

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 49,18 MB

Release : 2024

Category : Folk religion

ISBN : 9780197747377

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Book Description

"Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of "time and memory", "repeating patterns", "identity formation", "morality", "labor", "playfulness and adventure", "power and subversion", "sound", "emotions", "coping with contingency", "home and unhomeliness", as well as "nature and environment", the book engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary field of landscape theory and the study of religions. It brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been collected since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this rich heritage with the insights of landscape theory both in and beyond the study of religions allows important new contributions to theorizing landscape and religion, especially when it comes to considering the perspectives on landscape held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have stood in the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities, and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the urban perspectives of literature and the arts"--



The Paranormal and Popular Culture

Author : Darryl Caterine

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 449 pages

File Size : 21,24 MB

Release : 2019-02-18

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1351731815

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Book Description

Interest in preternatural and supernatural themes has revitalized the Gothic tale, renewed explorations of psychic powers and given rise to a host of social and religious movements based upon claims of the fantastical. And yet, in spite of this widespread enthusiasm, the academic world has been slow to study this development. This volume rectifies this gap in current scholarship by serving as an interdisciplinary overview of the relationship of the paranormal to the artefacts of mass media (e.g. novels, comic books, and films) as well as the cultural practices they inspire. After an introduction analyzing the paranormal’s relationship to religion and entertainment, the book presents essays exploring its spiritual significance in a postmodern society; its (post)modern representation in literature and film; and its embodiment in a number of contemporary cultural practices. Contributors from a number of discplines and cultural contexts address issues such as the shamanistic aspects of Batman and lesbianism in vampire mythology. Covering many aspects of the paranormal and its effect on popular culture, this book is an important statement in the field. As such, it will be of utmost interest to scholars of religious studies as well as media, communication, and cultural studies.



Supernatural Agents

Author : Iikka Pyysiainen

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 300 pages

File Size : 34,99 MB

Release : 2009-04-27

Category : Religion

ISBN : 019970175X

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Book Description

The cognitive science of religion is a rapidly growing field whose practitioners apply insights from advances in cognitive science in order to provide a better understanding of religious impulses, beliefs, and behaviors. In this book Ilkka Pyysiäinen shows how this methodology can profitably be used in the comparative study of beliefs about superhuman agents. He begins by developing a theoretical outline of the basic, modular architecture of the human mind and especially the human capacity to understand agency. He then goes on to discuss examples of supernatural agency in detail, arguing that the human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others forms the basis of conceptions of supernatural agents and of such social cognition in which supernatural agents are postulated as interested parties in social life. Beliefs about supernatural agency are natural, says Pyysiäinen, in the sense that such concepts are used in an intuitive and automatic fashion. Two dots and a straight line below them automatically trigger the idea of a face, for example. Given that the mind consists of a host of such modular mechanisms, certain kinds of beliefs will always have a selective advantage over others. Abstract theological concepts are usually elaborate versions of such simpler and more contagious folk conceptions. Pyysiäinen uses ethnographical and survey materials as well as doctrinal treatises to show that there are certain recurrent patterns in beliefs about supernatural agents both at the level of folk-religion and of formal theology.



In Gods We Trust

Author : Scott Atran

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 389 pages

File Size : 49,29 MB

Release : 2004-12-09

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 019988434X

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Book Description

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.



The Natural and the Supernatural

Author : John Oman

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 523 pages

File Size : 18,18 MB

Release : 2014-08-21

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1107426944

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Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive discussion regarding the sacred aspects of human existence in their relationship with the material world.



The Rise of Network Christianity

Author : Brad Christerson

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 201 pages

File Size : 24,62 MB

Release : 2017-02-01

Category : Religion

ISBN : 019063569X

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Book Description

Why, when traditionally organized religious groups are seeing declining membership and participation, are networks of independent churches growing so explosively? Drawing on in-depth interviews with leaders and participants, The Rise of Network Christianity explains the social forces behind the fastest-growing form of Christianity in the U.S., which Brad Christerson and Richard Flory have labeled "Independent Network Charismatic." This form of Christianity emphasizes aggressive engagement with the supernatural-including healing, direct prophecies from God, engaging in "spiritual warfare" against demonic spirits--and social transformation. Christerson and Flory argue that macro-level social changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital revolution, have given competitive advantages to religious groups organized as networks rather than traditionally organized congregations and denominations. Network forms of governance allow for experimentation with controversial supernatural practices, innovative finances and marketing, and a highly participatory, unorthodox, and experiential faith, which is attractive in today's unstable religious marketplace. Christerson and Flory hypothesize that as more religious groups imitate this type of governance, religious belief and practice will become more experimental, more orientated around practice than theology, more shaped by the individual religious "consumer," and authority will become more highly concentrated in the hands of individuals rather than institutions. Network Christianity, they argue, is the future of Christianity in America.



History and the Supernatural in Medieval England

Author : C. S. Watkins

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 0 pages

File Size : 29,17 MB

Release : 2010-11-25

Category : History

ISBN : 9780521154819

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Book Description

This is a fascinating study of religious culture in England from 1050 to 1250. Drawing on the wealth of material about religious belief and practice that survives in the chronicles, Carl Watkins explores the accounts of signs, prophecies, astrology, magic, beliefs about death, and the miraculous and demonic. He challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about religious belief, questioning in particular the attachment of many historians to terms such as 'clerical' and 'lay', 'popular' and 'elite', 'Christian' and 'pagan' as explanatory categories. The evidence of the chronicles is also set in its broader context through explorations of miracle collections, penitential manuals, exempla and sermons. The book traces shifts in the way the supernatural was conceptualized by learned writers and the ways in which broader patterns of belief evolved during this period. This original account sheds important light on belief during a period in which the religious landscape was transformed.



Space, Place and Religious Landscapes

Author : Darrelyn Gunzburg

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 291 pages

File Size : 40,24 MB

Release : 2020-10-01

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1350079901

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Book Description

Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.



Landscapes of Power, Landscapes of Conflict

Author : Tina L. Thurston

Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media

Page : 334 pages

File Size : 38,60 MB

Release : 2005-12-11

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0306471841

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Book Description

Tina Thurston’s Landscapes of Power; Landscapes of Conflict is a thi- generation processual analysis of sociopolitical evolution during the Iron Age in southern Scandinavia. Several red flags seem to be raised at once. Are not archaeologists now postprocessual, using new interpretive approaches to - derstand human history? Is not evolution a discredited concept in which - cieties are arbitrarily arranged along a unilinear scheme? Should not modern approaches be profoundly historical and agent-centered? In any event, were not Scandinavians the ultimate barbarian Vikings parasitizing the complex civilized world of southern and central Europe? Tina Thurston’s book focuses our attention on the significant innovations of anthropological archaeology at the end of the twentieth century. A brief overview of processual archaeology can set the context for - preciating Landscapes ofPower; Landscapes of Conflict. During the 1960s the emergent processual archaeology (a. k. a. the New Archaeology) cryst- lized an evolutionary paradigm that framed research with the comparative ethnography of Service and Fried. It was thought that human societies p- gressed through stages of social development and that the goal was to d- cover the evolutionary prime movers (such as irrigation, warfare, trade, and population) that drove social and cultural change. By the 1970s prime movers had fallen from favor and social evolution was conceived as complicated flows of causation involving many variables.