Ritual

Ritual
Author: Catherine Bell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2009-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199739471

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

Erin's Heirs

Erin's Heirs
Author: Dennis Clark
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813150515

"They will melt like snowflakes in the sun," said one observer of nineteenth-century Irish emigrants to America. Not only did they not melt, they formed one of the most extensive and persistent ethnic subcultures in American history. Dennis Clark now offers an insightful analysis of the social means this group has used to perpetuate its distinctiveness amid the complexity of American urban life. Basing his study on family stories, oral interviews, organizational records, census data, radio scripts, and the recollections of revolutionaries and intellectuals, Clark offers an absorbing panorama that shows how identity, organization, communication, and leadership have combined to create the Irish-American tradition. In his pages we see gifted storytellers, tough dockworkers, scribbling editors, and colorful actresses playing their roles in the Irish-American saga. As Clark shows, the Irish have defended and extended their self-image by cultivating their ethnic identity through transmission of family memories and by correcting community portrayals of themselves in the press and theatre. They have strengthened their ethnic ties by mutual association in the labor force and professions and in response to social problems. And they have created a network of communications ranging from 150 years of Irish newspapers to America's longest-running ethnic radio show and a circuit of university teaching about Irish literature and history. From this framework of subcultural activity has arisen a fascinating gallery of leadership that has expressed and symbolized the vitality of the Irish-American experience. Although Clark draws his primary material from Philadelphia, he relates it to other cities to show that even though Irish communities have differed they have shared common fundamentals of social development. His study constitutes a pathbreaking theoretical explanation of the dynamics of Irish-American life.

Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States

Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States
Author: Catherine O'Donnell
Publisher: Brill Research Perspectives in
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2020
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9789004428102

From Eusebio Kino to Daniel Berrigan, and from colonial New England to contemporary Seattle, Jesuits have built and disrupted institutions in ways that have fundamentally shaped the Catholic Church and American society. As Catherine O'Donnell demonstrates, Jesuits in French, Spanish, and British colonies were both evangelists and agents of empire. John Carroll envisioned an American church integrated with Protestant neighbors during the early years of the republic; nineteenth-century Jesuits, many of them immigrants, rejected Carroll's ethos and created a distinct Catholic infrastructure of schools, colleges, and allegiances. The twentieth century involved Jesuits first in American war efforts and papal critiques of modernity, and then (in accord with the leadership of John Courtney Murray and Pedro Arrupe) in a rethinking of their relationship to modernity, to other faiths, and to earthly injustice. O'Donnell's narrative concludes with a brief discussion of Jesuits' declining numbers, as well as their response to their slaveholding past and involvement in clerical sexual abuse.00Also available in Open Access.

United States Catholic Historical Magazine

United States Catholic Historical Magazine
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 510
Release: 1887
Genre: Catholics
ISBN:

[Vol. 2, no. 8] is a monograph with title: The history of ancient Vinland, by Thormod Torfason. Translated from the Latin of 1705, by Prof. Charles G. Herbermann ... with an introduction by J. G. Shea. 1888. 83 p.

Pioneering Ideas for the Physical and Chemical Sciences

Pioneering Ideas for the Physical and Chemical Sciences
Author: W. Fleischhacker
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2013-11-11
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1489902686

This volume presents the contributions delivered at the "Josef-Loschmidt-Sympo sium," which took place in Vienna, June 25-27, 1995. The symposium was arranged to honor Josef Loschmidt one hundred years after his death (8 July 1895), to evaluate the sig nificance of his contributions to chemistry and physics from a modem point of view and to trace the development of scientific fields in which he had done pioneering work. Loschmidt is widely known for the first calculation of the size of molecules (1865/66), which also led to values for the number of molecules in unit gas volume and for the mass of molecules. With critical analyses of problems in statistical physics he made important contributions to the development of that field, "Loschmidt's paradoxon" continuing to be a point of departure for present day studies and discussions. For decades there was little awareness that Loschmidt was a pioneer in organic struc tural chemistry. Only in recent years has Loschmidt's first scientific publication "Chemis che Studien I", published in 1861, become more widely known and it is now recognized that with his ideas on the structure of organic molecules he was greatly ahead of the chemists of that time. The papers in these proceedings are arranged in three sections: l. Organic structural chemistry (Chapters 1-12). 2. Physics and physical chemistry (Chapters 13-26). 3. Loschmidt's biography, Loschmidt's world (Chapters 27-33).

Kentucky Archaeology

Kentucky Archaeology
Author: R. Barry Lewis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813159431

Kentucky's rich archaeological heritage spans thousands of years, and the Commonwealth remains fertile ground for study of the people who inhabited the midcontinent before, during, and after European settlement. This long-awaited volume brings together the most recent research on Kentucky's prehistory and early history, presenting both an accurate descriptive and an authoritative interpretation of Kentucky's past. The book is arranged chronologically—from the Ice Age to modern times, when issues of preservation and conservation have overtaken questions of identification and classification. For each time slice of Kentucky's past, the contributors describe typical communities and settlement patterns, major changes from previous cultural periods, the nature of the economy and subsistence, artifacts, the general health and characteristics of the people, and regional cultural differences. Sites discussed include the Green River shell mounds, the Central Kentucky Adena mounds and enclosures, Eastern Kentucky rockshelters, the important Wickliffe site at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, Fort Ancient culture villages, and the fortified towns of the Mississippian period in Western Kentucky. The authors draw from a wealth of unpublished material and offer the detailed insights and perspectives of specialists who have focused much of their professional careers on the scientific investigation of Kentucky's prehistory. The book's many graphic elements—maps, artifact drawings, photographs, and village plans—combined with a straightforward and readable text, provide a format that will appeal to the general reader as well as to students and specialists in other fields who wish to learn more about Kentucky's archaeology.