Is Nothing Sacred?

Is Nothing Sacred?
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Group
Total Pages: 24
Release: 1990
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

The Sacred and the Profane

The Sacred and the Profane
Author: Mircea Eliade
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1959
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780156792011

Famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also emcompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence. -- P. [4] of cover.

Strange Gods

Strange Gods
Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2017-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400096391

In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush and Mike Pence—Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.

Holy Ignorance

Holy Ignorance
Author: Roy Olivier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2014-01-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190257431

Olivier Roy, world-renowned authority on Islam and politics, finds in the modern disconnection between faith communities and socio-cultural identities a fertile space for fundamentalism to grow. Instead of freeing the world from religion, secularization has encouraged a kind of holy ignorance to take root, an anti-intellectualism that promises immediate, emotional access to the sacred and positions itself in direct opposition to contemporary pagan culture. The secularization of society was supposed to free people from religion, yet individuals are converting en masse to fundamentalist faiths, such as Protestant evangelicalism, Islamic Salafism, and Haredi Judaism. These religions either reconnect adherents to their culture through casual referents, like halal fast food, or maintain their momentum through purification rituals, such as speaking in tongues, a practice that allows believers to utter a language that is entirely their own. Instead of a return to traditional religious worship, we are now witnessing the individualisation of faith and the disassociation of faith communities from ethnic and national identities. Roy explores the options now available to powers that hope to integrate or control these groups; and whether marginalisation or homogenisation will further divide believers from their culture.

Amorous Initiation

Amorous Initiation
Author: O. V. de L. Milosz
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1993-11-01
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780892814183

Count Pinamonte tells the narrator, a Danish nobleman, how a failed love affair led him to search for the spiritual meaning of love

Baseball as a Road to God

Baseball as a Road to God
Author: John Sexton
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2013-03-07
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1101609737

The president of New York University offers a love letter to America’s most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality. For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other. Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others. Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball’s most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.

Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images

Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images
Author: Gabriele Paleotti
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 160606116X

In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna, wrote a remarkable treatise on art during a time when the Church feared rampant abuse in the arts. Paleotti's 'Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images' argues that art should address a broad audience and explains the painter's responsibility to his spectators.

The First Great Awakening

The First Great Awakening
Author: John Howard Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611477158

The First Great Awakening, an unprecedented surge in Protestant Christian revivalism in the Eighteenth Century, sparked enormous of controversy at the time and has been a source of scholarly debate ever since. Few historians have sought to write a synthetic history of the First Great Awakening, and in recent decades it has been challenged as having happened at all, being either an exaggeration or an “invention.” The First Great Awakening expands the movement’s geographical, theological, and sociopolitical scope. Rather than focus exclusively on the clerical elites, as earlier studies have done, it deals with them alongside ordinary people, and includes the experiences of women, African Americans, and Indians as the observers and participants they were. It challenges prevailing scholarly opinion concerning what the revivals were and what they meant to the formation of American religious identity and culture. Cover image: NPG 131, George Whitefield by John Wollaston, oil on canvas, circa 1742. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Original Prin

Original Prin
Author: Randy Boyagoda
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1771962461

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family. Following a cancer diagnosis, forty-year old Prin vows to become a better man and a better Catholic. He’s going to spend more time with his kids and better time with his wife, care for his recently divorced and aging parents, and also expand his cutting-edge research into the symbolism of the seahorse in Canadian literature. But when his historic college in downtown Toronto faces a shutdown and he meets with the condominium developers ready to take it over—including a foul-mouthed young Chinese entrepreneur and Wende, his sexy ex-girlfriend from graduate school—Prin hears the voice of God. Bewildered and divinely inspired, he goes to the Middle East, hoping to save both his college and his soul. Wende is coming, too. The first book in a planned trilogy, Original Prin is an entertaining and essential novel about family life, faith, temptation, and fanaticism. It’s a timely story about timeless truths, told with wise insight and great humour, confirming Randy Boyagoda’s place as one of Canada’s funniest and most provocative writers.

The Spirit Moves West

The Spirit Moves West
Author: Rebecca Y. Kim
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199942129

The Spirit Moves West examines the phenomena of Korean missionaries in America. It delves into why and how Korean missionaries pursued missions in the United States and evangelized Americans and illuminates how a non-western mission movement evolves over time in the West.