Religion and Its Monsters

Religion and Its Monsters
Author: Timothy Beal
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1135283486

Religion's great and powerful mystery fascinates us, but it also terrifies. So too the monsters that haunt the stories of the Judeo-Christian mythos and earlier traditions: Leviathan, Behemoth, dragons, and other beasts. In this unusual and provocative book, Timothy K. Beal writes about the monsters that lurk in our religious texts, and about how monsters and religion are deeply entwined. Horror and faith are inextricable. Ans as monsters are part of religious texts and traditions, so religion lurks in the modern horror genre, from its birth in Dante's Inferno to the contemporary spookiness of H.P. Lovecraft and the Hellraiser films. Religion and Its Monsters is essential reading for students of religion and popular culture, as well as any readers with an interest in horror.

Religion and Its Monsters

Religion and Its Monsters
Author: Timothy Kandler Beal
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2002
Genre: Monsters
ISBN: 9780415925884

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous

Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous
Author: Joseph P. Laycock
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2021-02-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1793640254

Religion, Culture, and the Monstrous: Of Gods and Monsters explores the intersection of the emerging field of “monster theory” within religious studies. With case studies from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary valleys of the Himalayas to ghost tours in Savannah, Georgia, the volume examines the variegated nature of the monstrous as well as the cultural functions of monsters in shaping how we see the world and ourselves. In this, the authors constructively assess the state of the two fields of monster theory and religious studies, and propose new directions in how these fields can inform each other. The case studies included illuminate the ways in which monsters reinforce the categories through which a given culture sees the world. At the same time, the volume points to how monsters appear to question, disrupt, or challenge those categories, creating an ‘unsettling’ or surplus of meaning.

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques
Author: Michael E. Heyes
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2018-08-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498550770

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of the volume—running from the medieval to the Early Modern period—focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of the volume attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.

Spectacles of Empire

Spectacles of Empire
Author: Christopher A. Frilingos
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2004-10-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812238222

The author reads the Book of Revelation as a text firmly situated in the world of imperial Roman Asia Minor, where it was written. He argues that Revelation is a Christian version of that world, complete with its own gladiatorial combats and other public spectacles.

Television, Religion, and Supernatural

Television, Religion, and Supernatural
Author: Erika Engstrom
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2014-02-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0739184768

This book examines the text of the CW network television series Supernatural, a program based in the horror genre that offers viewers myriad religious-based antagonists, through the portrayals of monsters which its two main characters “hunt” and destroy, as well as storylines based in the Bible. Even as the series’ producers claim a non-religious perspective, we contend that story arcs and outcomes of episodes actually forward a hegemonic portrayal of Christianity that portrays a good-versus-evil motif regarding the superiority of Christianity. The depiction of its protagonist brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester of Lawrence, Kansas, forwards a pro-American perspective to a more generalized fight against evil in contemporary times.

Theory for Religious Studies

Theory for Religious Studies
Author: William E. Deal
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2004
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780415966382

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Roadside Religion

Roadside Religion
Author: Timothy Beal
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2006-05-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9780807010631

In the summer of 2002, Timothy K. Beal loaded his family into a twenty-nine-foot-long motor home and hit the rural highways of America in search of roadside religious attractions-sites like the World's Largest Ten Commandments and Precious Moments Chapel. Roadside Religion tells of his attempts to understand the meaning of these places as expressions of religious imagination and experience, and to encounter faith in all its awesome absurdity.

Pantheologies

Pantheologies
Author: Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231548346

Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical—that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and—with striking regularity—monstrosity. In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”—at once repellent and seductive—is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources—medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms—Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.

On Monsters and Phantoms

On Monsters and Phantoms
Author: H G Roberts
Publisher:
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre:
ISBN:

Harrison Roberts, like most of us, is good at hiding things, especially from himself. At six years old, still hurting from his father's abandonment, he is left in the care of a Monster who does the unthinkable, then threatens death if he ever reveals the truth. Harrison turns to Jesus for protection from his fears, real and imagined. As he grows, Jesus's voice drowns out the Monster's old threats. A new life emerges: one of love, music and ministry. For a while, Harrison buries the darkest demons from his traumatic past-the ones only God knows about. But when the blessings stop flowing and catastrophe strikes, Harrison spirals into an emotional crisis, questioning his sanity, mortality and his God. He must now navigate the threats from a new Monster: his own faith. What will he risk losing in order to know the truth and become who he is meant to be? On Monsters and Phantoms lifts the veil on a life forged by trauma, which sculpted a man into the image of someone not himself. A bold and honest look into adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and religious trauma, it peers into the soul of Christian fundamentalism, challenging you to question everything, and daring you to seek the answers.