The Landscape of Belief

The Landscape of Belief
Author: John Davis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1996
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780691043739

An exploration of the many ways in which American travellers, and American society, perceived the Holy Land during the 19th century.

Religion and Belief

Religion and Belief
Author: Malcolm Heath
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Belief and doubt
ISBN: 9781443856539

Religion and Belief: A Moral Landscape is a collection of essays from the 4th Annual Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Conference at the Department of Classics, University of Leeds. The book collates a wide range of issues and initiates a discussion on the nuances and multifaceted concepts of religion and belief. The topics range from ancient Greek religion and philosophy, through the Roman world and early Judeo-Christian beliefs, to modern burial practices and 21st century â ~New-Atheismâ (TM). By presenting religion and belief in this macrocosmic landscape, simple conceptions and caricatures of religion and belief are shown to be mis-leading and ultimately redundant. This book engages with the complex and multi-faceted nature of religion and belief across time.

Religion and Place

Religion and Place
Author: Peter Hopkins
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-09-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9400746857

This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

In Gods We Trust

In Gods We Trust
Author: Scott Atran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 748
Release: 2004-12-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019988434X

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.

Sacred Mobilities

Sacred Mobilities
Author: Dr Tim Gale
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2015-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1472420071

This collection draws on the Mobilities approach to look afresh at notions of the sacred where they intersect with people, objects and other things on the move. Consideration of a wide range of spiritual meanings and practices also sheds light on the motivations and experiences associated with particular mobilities. Drawing on rich, situated, case studies, this multi-disciplinary collection discusses what mobility in the social sciences, arts and humanities can tell us about movements and journeys prompted by religious, more broadly ‘spiritual’ and 'secular-sacred' practices and priorities. Problematizing the fixity of sacred places and times as territorially and temporally bounded entities that exist in opposition to ‘profane’ everyday life, this collection looks at the intersection between the embodied-emotional-spiritual experience of places, travel, belief-practices and communities. It is this geographically-informed perspective on the interleaving of religious/ spiritual/ secular notions of the sacred with the material and more-than-representational attributes of associated mobilities and related practices which constitutes this volume’s original contribution to the field.

The Reformation of the Landscape

The Reformation of the Landscape
Author: Alexandra Walsham
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 654
Release: 2011-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199243557

The Reformation of the Landscape is a richly detailed and original study of the relationship between the landscape of Britain and Ireland and the tumultuous religious changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Old Faith and the Russian Land

The Old Faith and the Russian Land
Author: Douglas Rogers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2010-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801457955

The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical—in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities—about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation—have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

The Moral Landscape

The Moral Landscape
Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2011-09-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 143917122X

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

Landscapes of the Jihad

Landscapes of the Jihad
Author: Faisal Devji
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2011-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801459788

What are the motives behind Osama bin Laden's and Al-Qaeda's jihad against America and the West? Innumerable attempts have been made in recent years to explain that mysterious worldview. In Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji focuses on the ethical content of this jihad as opposed to its purported political intent. Al-Qaeda differs radically from such groups as Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which aim to establish fundamentalist Islamic states. In fact, Devji contends, Al-Qaeda, with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action, actually has more in common with multinational corporations, antiglobalization activists, and environmentalist and social justice organizations. Bin Laden and his lieutenants view their cause as a response to the oppressive conditions faced by the Muslim world rather than an Islamist attempt to build states.Al-Qaeda culls diverse symbols and fragments from Islam's past in order to legitimize its global war against the "metaphysical evil" emanating from the West. The most salient example of this assemblage, Devji argues, is the concept of jihad itself, which Al-Qaeda defines as an "individual duty" incumbent on all Muslims, like prayer. Although medieval Islamic thought provides precedent for this interpretation, Al-Qaeda has deftly separated the stipulation from its institutional moorings and turned jihad into a weapon of spiritual conflict. Al-Qaeda and its jihad, Devji suggests, are only the most visible manifestations of wider changes in the Muslim world. Such changes include the fragmentation of traditional as well as fundamentalist forms of authority. In the author's view, Al-Qaeda represents a new way of organizing Muslim belief and practice within a global landscape and does not require ideological or institutional unity.Offering a compelling explanation for the central purpose of Al-Qaeda's jihad against the West, the meaning of its strategies and tactics, and its moral and aesthetic dimensions, Landscapes of the Jihad is at once a sophisticated work of historical and cultural analysis and an invaluable guide to the world's most prominent terrorist movement.

Emerging Geographies of Belief

Emerging Geographies of Belief
Author: Catherine Brace
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2010-10-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 144382593X

This interdisciplinary book presents new research from international scholars that explores questions of belief, faith, and religion. Focusing on theoretically informed cultural, geographical and historical analyses of faith, belief, religion, society and space, the book presents new and revised theoretical approaches and methodologies, grounded in rigorous empirical research both contemporary and historical. The volume takes a deliberately eclectic approach, reflecting the complex interactions of the political and poetic dimensions of sacredness in contemporary societies. Taking this research agenda forward, this book explores how religious beliefs inform and construct social identities, public knowledge and modes of governance. In particular, the book meets an urgent need for a critical understanding of how terms such as “religion,” “faith,” “fundamentalism” and “secularism,” for example, inform public debates and foster constructive engagements both between faith groups and between people of faith and people of no faith. The essays in Emerging Geographies of Belief also show that religion cannot be mapped neatly onto faith or belief. We attempt to tease out the different circumstances in which—for example—belief can operate without religious adherence or faith can inspire social action in geographies of hope. The geography of the title relates to an overarching concern with space and spatiality rather than describing a single disciplinary approach. Our concern with belief, faith and religion operates at different temporal and spatial scales in different localities, from the contemporary appeal to a more global sense of responsibility to a historically situated account of faith-led educational practices. This reflects, more generally, the so-called spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities. But despite this wide historical and geographical sweep, the authors share some key concerns. This collection is unique in combining theoretical, conceptual and discursive approaches to the emerging geographies of belief with substantive examples of the intersection of belief, faith and religion with aspects of everyday life. Discussions of the potential subversive and prophetic capacities of faith, belief and religion sit alongside consideration of how these have become implicated in the spaces and performances of hope. It provides a critique of the situationist and substantive approaches to religion along with insights into the role of faith in education, community and social work. It considers the practices of remembrance, representation and pilgrimage and the place of religion in contemporary identity politics. In sum, the book problematises the seemingly simple categories of faith, religion, and belief, calling attention to how these are mobilised and implicated differently in different circumstances. In addressing these themes, the book provides a key theoretical resource, but crucially, goes on to show how multiple perspectives on belief, however defined, can be applied in practice. Whilst there has been much contemporary work on the individual areas covered by the book, they have not been bought together before to provide a dynamic insight into issues of the most pressing relevance.