Listening, Religion, and Democracy in Contemporary Boston

Listening, Religion, and Democracy in Contemporary Boston
Author: William W. Young
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498576095

This book is a study of religious practices of listening in the Boston area. Through ethnographic study of a variety of religious communities, with an extensive focus on Quaker listening, it argues that religious practice shapes our habits of listening by creating a plurality of regimes of listening across Boston’s landscape. These practices, moreover, cultivate specific dispositions, as well as distinct patterns of religious and democratic virtues. Through these dispositions and virtues, religious listening facilitates a diverse range of forms of democratic engagement, and varied contributions to the pursuit of social justice. William Young provides an innovative interpretation of these religious practices. It argues that insofar as religious listening helps practitioners to extend and amplify their listening, and makes them more responsive to their communities, it creates a social mode of embodied receptivity and agency. Through both their listening and their actions, these groups express their conceptions of divinity, embodying divine attributes and activity within the sociopolitical realm—serving as God’s ears within the world. It is by interpreting their practices as creating modes of social discipline, reception, and agency that the book explicates the full significance of religious listening, in its adaptations and extensions of our aural capacities, and their implications for sociopolitical life.

New Religious Movements in Modern Asian History

New Religious Movements in Modern Asian History
Author: David W. Kim
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1793634033

This book provides evidence that the emergence of Asian new religious movements (NRMs) was predominantly the result of anti-colonial ideology from local religious groups or individuals. The contributors argue that when traditional religions were powerless to maintain their cultural heritage, the leadership of NRMs adduced alternative principles, and the new teachings of each NRM attracted the local people enough for them to change their beliefs. The contributors argue that, as a whole, the Asian new religious movements overall were very ardent and progressive in transmitting their new ideologies. The varied viewpoints in this volume attest to the consistent development of Asian NRMs from domestic and international dimensions by replacing old, traditional religions.

Building Beloved Community in a Wounded World

Building Beloved Community in a Wounded World
Author: Jacob L. Goodson
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2022-10-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1666710245

Is the beloved community local, national, global, or universal? What kind of love is required for the beloved community? Is such a community only an ideal, or can it be actualized in the here and now? Tracing the phrase beloved community from Josiah Royce through Martin Luther King Jr. to a variety of contemporary usages, Goodson, Kuehnert, and Stone debate answers to the above questions. The authors agree about the importance of beloved community but disagree on the details. These differences come out through arguments over the local vs. the universal, the type of love the beloved community calls for, and what it means to conceptualize community. Ultimately, they argue, the purpose of beloved community involves responding to the cries of the wounded and those who suffer in the wounded world.

Introducing Philosophy Through Pop Culture

Introducing Philosophy Through Pop Culture
Author: William Irwin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1119757185

Can Wonder Woman help us understand feminist philosophy? How Does Wakandan technology transcend anti-Blackness? What can Star Trek teach us about the true nature of reality? Introducing Philosophy Through Pop Culture makes important philosophical concepts and the work of major philosophers relevant, fun, and exciting. Using engaging examples from film and television, this easy-to-read book covers everything from basic metaphysics and epistemology to abstract and complex philosophical ideas about ethics and the meaning of life. You don’t have to be a pop culture expert to benefit from this book—even a general awareness of cultural icons like Superman or Harry Potter will be more than enough for you to learn about a wide range of philosophical notions, thinkers, and movements. The expanded second edition offers timely coverage of important topics such as race, gender, personal identity, social justice, and environmental ethics. New essays explore the philosophical underpinnings of The Good Place, Game of Thrones, Black Panther, Star Wars, The Avengers, South Park, The Lego Movie, The Big Bang Theory, and more. This edition is supported by a new website with links to primary philosophical texts, information about all the popular culture discussed, and additional resources for teachers, students, and general readers alike. Features a selection of key essays from the bestselling Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series Draws on examples from popular media including The Matrix, Lost, Doctor Strange, The Hobbit, Westworld, and Star Trek Explains philosophical concepts such as relativism, skepticism, existentialist ethics, logic, social contract theory, utilitarianism, and mind-body dualism Discusses the ideas of Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Mill, Kierkegaard, and other important thinkers Introducing Philosophy Through Pop Culture is an excellent supplementary textbook for introductory philos for introductory philosophy courses and a valuable resource for general readers wanting to learn about philosophy and its connections with pop culture.

Listening to the Spirit

Listening to the Spirit
Author: Aaron Stauffer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2024
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0197755526

People organize to protect and fight for what they hold most dear. Using auto-ethnography from over a decade of interfaith Broad-based Community Organizing (BBCO) experiences, Listening to the Spirit makes a case for the political role of sacred values in BBCO, especially as they show up in two organizing practices: the "listening campaign" and the "relational meeting." Aaron Stauffer argues that by centering sacred values in democratic politics, these organizing practices can be seen as religious practices, and that BBCO can build deeper solidarity through sacred values and relational power. Stauffer offers a social ethical, social practical account of religion and grounds democracy in our diverse religious values.

Public Religions in the Modern World

Public Religions in the Modern World
Author: José Casanova
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1994-06-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780226095356

Acknowledgements 1: Secularization, Enlightenment, and Modern Religion 2: Private and Public Religions 3: Spain: From State Church to Disestablishment 4: Poland: From Church of the Nation to Civil Society 5: Brazil: From From Oligarchie Church to People's Church 6: Evangelical Protestantism: From Civil Religion to Fundamentalist Sect to New Christian Right 7: Catholicism in the United States: From Private to Public Denomination 8: The Deprivatization of Modern Religion Notes Index.

Listening Publics

Listening Publics
Author: Kate Lacey
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745665209

In focusing on the practices, politics and ethics of listening, this wide-ranging book offers an important new perspective on questions of media audiences, publics and citizenship. Listening is central to modern communication, politics and experience, but is commonly overlooked and underestimated in a culture fascinated by the spectacle and the politics of voice. Listening Publics restores listening to media history and to theories of the public sphere. In so doing it opens up profound questions for our understanding of mediated experience, public participation and civic engagement. Taking a cross-national and interdisciplinary approach, the book explores how listening publics have been constituted in relation to successive media technologies from the invention of writing to the digital age. It asks how new practices of listening associated with sound and audiovisual media transform a public world forged in the age of print. Through detailed histories and sophisticated theoretical analysis, Listening Publics demonstrates the embodied and critical activity of listening to be a rich concept with which to rethink the practices, politics and ethics of media communication.