Religion as a Chain of Memory


Book Description

Thus, religion may be perceived as a shared understanding with a collective memory that enables it to draw from the well of its past for nourishment in the increasingly secular present."--BOOK JACKET.




Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective


Book Description

The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular. This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history.




The Location of Religion


Book Description

The ways in which humans interact with their location is an important topic within sociological studies of religion. It is integral to the place of religion in secular society. 'The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis' offers an overview of the ways in which religion can be located within social, cultural and physical space. It examines contemporary spatial theory - notably the work of the influential sociologist Henri Lefebvre - and the many disciplines that have contributed to the spatial study of religion. This volume will be invaluable to all those interested in the role of religion in spatial analysis.




Theories of Religion


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive selection of readings that relate to and explore the definition of religion. The texts come from a wide range of approaches, unified both by the questions they are addressing and their broadly social scientific perspective. The disciplines covered include anthropology, phenomenology, psychology and sociology. The editors have also included some key texts relating to the feminist approach to and critique of religion. The first section of the book includes some of the foundational texts, such as materials by Marx, Freud, and Durkheim. The remaining sections look at more recent discussions of the issues from the different disciplinary perspectives. Each reading is introduced by a biographical sketch of the author. The book also includes introductory discussions to each section that both raise the key issues developed in a particular discipline and address the disciplinary approaches from a more critical stance. Theories of Religion: A Reader is an invaluable critical resource, accessible to a broad audience as well as students of theology and religious studies.




Religious Complexity in the Public Sphere


Book Description

This book is an empirical comparative study of the complexity of religion in the public spheres of the five Nordic countries. The result of a five-year collaborative research project, the work examines how increasingly religiously diverse Nordic societies regulate, debate, and negotiate religion in the state, the polity, the media, and civil society. The project finds that there are seemingly contradictory religious trends at different social levels: a growing secularization at the individual level, and a deprivatization of religion in politics, the media, and civil society. It offers a critique of the current theories of secularization and the return of religion, introducing religious complexity as an alternative concept to understand these paradoxes. This book is for scholars, students, and readers with an interest in understanding the public role of religion in the West.




Restoring the Chain of Memory


Book Description

Restoring the Chain of Memory describes and analyses the writings and records compiled by the notable linguist, T.G.H. Strehlow (1908-1978), on Australian Aboriginal Religions, particularly as practised by the Arrernte of Central Australia.During numerous research trips between 1932 and 1966, the local Indigenous Arrernte Elders entrusted him with sacred objects, allowed him to film their secret rituals and record their songs, partly because he was regarded as one of them, an 'insider', who they believed would help preserve their ancient traditions in the face of threats posed by outside forces.Strehlow characterized Arrernte society as 'personal monototemism in a polytotemic community'. This concept provides an important insight into understanding how Arrernte society was traditionally organized and how the societal structure was re-enforced by carefully organized rituals. Strehlow's research into this complex societal system is here examined both in terms of its meaning and current application and with reference to how the societal structure traditionally was interwoven into religious understandings of the world. It exemplifies precisely how the 'insider-outsider' problem is embodied in one individual: he was accepted by the Arrernte people as an insider who used this knowledge to interpret Arrernte culture for non-Indigenous audiences (outsiders).This volume documents how Strehlow's works are contributing to the current repatriation by Australian Aboriginal leaders of rituals, ancient songs, meanings associated with sacred objects and genealogies, much of which by the 1950s had been lost through the processes of colonization, missionary influences and Australian governmental interference in the lives of Indigenous societies.




The Politics of Religious Literacy


Book Description

The Politics of Religious Literacy challenges popular understandings of religious literacy as an inclusive framework for navigating religious diversity in the public sphere. Offering a new model, this book provides insights into the often-overlooked feelings and practices informing our questionably secular age.




Religious Reading


Book Description

What social conditions and intellectual practices are necessary in order for religious cultures to flourish? Paul Griffiths finds the answer in "religious reading" --- the kind of reading in which a religious believer allows his mind to be furnished and his heart instructed by a sacred text, understood in the light of an authoritative tradition. He favorably contrasts the practices and pedagogies of traditional religious cultures with those of our own fragmented and secularized culture and insists that religious reading should be preserved.




Religious Intolerance, America, and the World


Book Description

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence. Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.




Moses the Egyptian


Book Description

Moses is at the foundation of monotheism, and so of Western culture. Here the factual and fictional events and characters in religious beliefs are studied. It traces monotheism back to the Egyptian king Akhenaten and shows how Moses's followers established truth by denouncing all others as false.