This book uses the mutual interactions between Chinese and Western culture as a point of departure in order to concisely introduce the origins and evolution of Chinese culture at the aspects of constitution, thinking, values and atheistic. This book also analyzes utensil culture, constitution culture and ideology culture, which were perfected by absorbing classic arguments from academia. As such, the book offers an essential guide to understanding the development, civilization and key ideologies in Chinese history, and will thus help to promote Chinese culture and increase cultural awareness.

This book offers a philosophical analysis of what it is to be a human being in all her aspects. It analyses what is meant by the self and the I and how this feeling of a self or an I is connected to the brain. It studies specific cases of brain disorders, based on the idea that in order to understand the common, one has to study the specific. The book shows how the self is thought of as a three-fold emergent self, comprising a relationship between an objective neural segment, a subjective neural segment and a subjective transcendent segment. It explains that the self in the world tackles philosophical problems such as the problem of free will, the problem of evil, the problem of human uniqueness and empathy. It demonstrates how the problem of time also has its place here. For many people, the world includes ultimate reality; hence the book provides an analysis and evaluation of different relationships between human beings and Ultimate Reality (God). The book presents an answer to the philosophical problem of how one could understand divine action in the world.

This book comprehensively examines religious faith in China from the perspective of cultural philosophy and cultural history. It explores the social, political, cultural and spiritual meanings of religions, tracing their historical development and related paradigm shifts. It also analyzes the characteristics of the country's local religions and the process of indigenization of world religions, and describes the peaceful co-existence and harmonious confluence of multiple religions in Chinese spiritual life, revealing the vibrant and diverse colors of its religious culture. Examining these religions' social and cultural functions in contemporary Chinese society, the book demonstrates the rich and complex intertwinement of religious faith, cultural spirit and national disposition among the Chinese people.

Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, this latest volume in the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry series focuses on how Jewry has been studied in the social science disciplines. Its symposium consists of essays that discuss sources, approaches, and debates in the complementary fields of demography, sociology, economics, and geography. The social sciences are central for the understanding of contemporary Jewish life and have engendered much controversy over the past few decades. To a large extent, the multitude of approaches toward Jewish social science research reflects the nature of population studies in general, and that of religions and ethnic groups in particular. Yet the variation in methodology, definitions, and measures of demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural patterns is even more salient in the study of Jews. Different data sets have different definitions for what is "Jewish" or "who is a Jew." In addition, Jews as a group are characterized by high rates of migration, including repeated migration, which makes it difficult to track any given Jewish population. Finally, the question of identification is complicated by the fact that in most places, especially outside of Israel, it is not clear whether "being Jewish" is primarily a religious or an ethnic matter - or both, or neither. This volume also features an essay on American Jewry and North African Jewry; review essays on rebuilding after the Holocaust, Nazi war crimes trials, and Jewish historiography; and reviews of new titles in Jewish studies.

The longstanding European conception that Roma and non-Roma are separated by unambiguous socio-cultural distinctions has led to the construction of Roma as "non-belonging others." Challenging this conception, Textures of Belonging explores how Roma negotiate and feel belonging at the everyday level. Inspired by material culture, sensorial anthropology, and human geography approaches, this book uses ethnographic research to examine the role of domestic material forms and their sensorial qualities in nurturing connections with people and places that transcend socio-political boundaries.

In this trenchant examination of Christianity's dark side, a criminologist argues persuasively that high rates of violent crime in the United States can be correlated with Christian conservative attitudes, especially in regard to social mores and politics. Of particular concern is "Christian nationalism." Supporters of this movement argue that America was founded as a Christian nation and they work to install their fundamentalist brand of Christianity as the dominant factor in American political and social life. Far from being a fanatic outlier sect, this group is shown to have significant cultural influence, especially in the American South. Not coincidentally, the author suggests, the South also has the highest homicide rates. Noting the violent biblical passages often cited by religious conservatives, their sense of righteousness, their dogmatic mindset that tolerates no dissent, and their support for harshly punitive measures toward "sinners," Peterson Sparks shows that their worldview is the ideal seedbed for violence. Not only does this mindset make violent reactions in interpersonal conflicts more likely, the author says, but it exacerbates the problems of the criminal justice system by advocating policies that create high incarceration rates. The author also devotes particular attention to the victimization of women, children, and LGBT people, which follows from this rigid belief system. While not resorting to a blanket condemnation of Christianity or religion as a whole, Peterson Sparks issues a wake-up call regarding conservative Christianity's toxic mixture of fundamentalism, authoritarian politics, patriotism, and retributory justice.

This book argues for the importance of the theory of the culture industry in today's world. It begins by considering the neglect of the culture industry in the second and third generation of the Frankfurt School, presenting historical background information and criticisms on the theories of Habermas and Honneth. In our age, the culture industry is something quite different from what Adorno and Horkheimer described or could even imagine in the twentieth century. Today, the masses can not only access the media but can also respond to the messages they receive. A key question that arises, then, is why the masses, even after gaining access to their own media, still adhere to the values of the capitalist system? Why haven't they achieved a class consciousness? This work seeks to answer those questions. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's work, it reveals the semiotic aspects of the culture industry and describes the industry in the age of simulation and hyperreality. The book argues that the culture industry has now entered the micro level of our everyday life through shopping centers, the image of profusion and more. Further, it explores new aspects of the culture industry, such as a passion for participating in the media, the consumed vertigo of catastrophe, and masking the absence of a profound reality. As such, the book will particularly appeal to graduates and researchers in sociology and sociological theory, and all those with an interest in the Frankfurt School and the works of Jean Baudrillard.

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia: on the night after the terrorist attack killing thirty-eight tourists on the nearby beach of Sousse, a woman sits facing the sea, and attempts to take stock. Personal tragedies soon resurface, the unexpected deaths of a dear friend - a fellow writer who died just weeks ago at sea, having forsaken the work that had given his life meaning - and of her father, a quiet man who had left all that he held dear in Tunisia to emigrate to France in his later years. Through childhood memories and the prism of modern French classics, the story of Tunisia's Jewish community is pieced together. Shifting from Tunisia to Paris to a Flaubertian village in Normandy, Colette Fellous embarks on a Proustian lyrical journey, in which she gives voice to loved ones silenced by death and to those often unheard in life. Her love letter and adieu to her native country becomes an archive - or refuge - for stories of human resilience.

This book, a collection of previously published articles, focuses on the role of the Singaporean State in social cultural engineering. It deals with the relationship between the Singaporean state and local agencies and how the latter negotiated with the state to establish an acceptable framework for social cultural engineering to proceed. The book also highlights the tensions and conflicts that occurred during this process. The various chapters examine how the Singaporean state used polices and regulatory control to conserve and maintain ethno-cultural and ethno-religious landscapes, develop a moral education system and how the treatment of women and its morality came into alignment with the values that the state espoused upon from the 1980s through the 1990s.

This book presents selected academic papers addressing five key research areas - archaeology, history, language, culture and arts - related to the Malay Civilisation. It outlines new findings, interpretations, policies, methodologies and theories that were presented at the International Seminar on Archaeology, History, and Language in the Malay Civilisation (ASBAM5) in 2016. Further, it provides new perspectives and serves as a vital point of reference for all researchers, students, policymakers and legislators who have an interest in the Malay Civilisation.

Winner of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Best First Book Prize of the American Society of Church History
Named a Society for U. S. Intellectual History Notable Title in American Intellectual History
The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, Matthew S. Hedstrom contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise-most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the numerical decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals a more complex and fascinating story, one Hedstrom tells in The Rise of Liberal Religion.
Hedstrom attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture-particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century-as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, among other sources, Hedstrom is able to provide a rich, on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-WWII period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. This compelling history of religion and book culture not only shows how reading and book buying were critical twentieth-century religious practices, but also provides a model for thinking about the relationship of religion to consumer culture more broadly. In this way, The Rise of Liberal Religion offers both innovative cultural history and new ways of seeing the imprint of liberal religion in our own times.

A journey through Johannesburg via three art projects raises intriguing notions about the constitutive relationship between the city, imagination and the public sphere- through walking, gaming and performance art. Amid prevailing economic validations, the trilogy posits art within an urban commons in which imagination is all-important.

Prayer is a phenomenon which seems to be characteristic not only of participants in every religion, but also men and women who do not identify with traditional religions. It can be practised even by those who do not believe either in a God or transcendent force. In this sense, therefore, we may assert that the prayer is a typically human activity that has accompanied the development of different civilizations over the course of the centuries. Both the material issues of concrete daily life as well as more symbolic elements expressed through words, gestures, body positions, and community celebration are brought together in the act of praying.

This edited book offers an engaging portrait into a vital, religious movement inside this southern Africa country. It tells the story of a community of faith that is often overlooked in the region. The authors include leading scholars of religion, theology, and politics from Botswana and Zimbabwe. The insights they present will help readers understand the place of Pentecostal Christianity in this land of many religions. The chapters detail a history of the movement from its inception to the present. Chapters focus on specific Pentecostal churches, general doctrine of the movement, and the movement's contribution to the country. The writing is deeply informed and features deep historical, theological, and sociological analysis throughout. Readers will also learn about the socio-political and economic relevance of the faith in Zimbabwe as well as the theoretical and methodological implications raised by the Pentecostalisation of society. The volume will serve as a resource book both for teaching and for those doing research on various aspects of the Zimbabwean society past, present, and future. It will be a good resource for those in schools and university and college departments of religious studies, theology, history, politics, sociology, social anthropology, and related studies. Over and above academic and research readers, the book will also be very useful to government policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and civic societies who have the Church as an important stakeholder.

With over a billion followers spread across the world, Islam today stands as the second largest and the fastest growing religion of our time. I wonder how many of these over one billion followers know that their religious scriptures mention spacecrafts that visited the deserts of Arabia during Prophet Muhammad's time. To most Muslims, it will come as a great surprise that the pagan Arabs, who opposed the Prophet, worshipped alien visitors from outer space! These alien visitors (or sky-gods as they were understood by pagan Arabs) are mentioned repeatedly in the Quran and the Hadeeth. Yet, in spite of their emphasized mention, the Muslim world has not been able to gather any concrete proof of their existence. In the absence of concrete scientific proof, these alien space travelers occupy Muslim conscience as spiritual beings. Concrete proof of the existence of UFOs has been gathered elsewhere in another part of the world. In the West, thousands of books have been written on the subject of UFOs but the real reasons for their visits to our world have still remained a mystery. Furthermore, UFO researchers today understand that governments of certain Western countries are concealing important information on UFOs, but the reasons for this global censorship have not been understood. It took courage to write this book and it will take courage to read it. Yet, one thing is for sure, UFOs in the Quran will blow your mind. At times it will amaze you, at times it will frighten you but for most part, it will just take the ground from under your feet. Abdul Aziz Khan is a television journalist whose news reports and documentaries have gone on air in many countries around the world. He is a former Field Investigator with MUFON, the worlds largest organization doing investigations into unexplained aerial phenomenon.

Now a global and transnational phenomenon, hip hop culture continues to affect and be affected by the institutional, cultural, religious, social, economic and political landscape of American society and beyond. Over the past two decades, numerous disciplines have taken up hip hop culture for its intellectual weight and contributions to the cultural life and self-understanding of the United States. More recently, the academic study of religion has given hip hop culture closer and more critical attention, yet this conversation is often limited to discussions of hip hop and traditional understandings of religion and a methodological hyper-focus on lyrical and textual analyses. Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the Terrain provides an important step in advancing and mapping this new field of Religion and Hip Hop Studies. The volume features 14 original contributions representative of this new terrain within three sections representing major thematic issues over the past two decades. The Preface is written by one of the most prolific and founding scholars of this area of study, Michael Eric Dyson, and the inclusion of and collaboration with Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman fosters a perspective internal to Hip Hop and encourages conversation between artists and academics.

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been "discovered" by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.

"Fabend relates developments in the Reformed Dutch Church during the Second Great Awakening to larger themes in American social history, such as the evolution of ethnic identity, the changing roles of women, and the history of reform movements. It is serious scholarship, yet it is written in a style that is accessible to the general reader." --David Stephen Cohen, New Jersey Historical Commission "Zion on the Hudson is required reading for anyone struggling with the questions of why 'Dutchness' persisted in New York and New Jersey, and what eventually caused it to disappear. Making use of a wide array of previously untapped sources, Fabend unfolds the story of Dutch persistence in a beautifully written style." --Charles T. Gehring, Director, New Netherland Project The Dutch came to the New World in the seventeenth century as explorers and traders, but religion soon followed, for it was accepted in the Netherlands that state and church were mutually benefited by advancing the "true Christian religion." The influence of "Dutchness"--defined as loyalty to what are presumed to be the distinctive qualities of Dutch national character and culture--persisted in New York and New Jersey for more than two hundred years after Dutch emigration ended. Why? Firth Haring Fabend finds the explanation in the devotion of the Reformed Dutch Church membership to the doctrines and traditions of their religion. She looks at both the larger themes in American history and at the beliefs and behaviors of individuals in this often-neglected ethnic group. Thus, Zion on the Hudson presents both a broad and an intimate look at the way one mainstream Protestant denomination dealt with the transformative events of the evangelical era. As Fabend describes the efforts of the descendents of the Dutch settlers to preserve the European standards and traditions of their church while developing a taste for a new kind of theology and a preference for an American identity, she documents how Dutchness finally became a historical memory. The Americanization of the Reformed Dutch Church, Fabend writes, is a microcosm of the story of the Americanization of the United States itself. Firth Haring Fabend is the author A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660-1800 (Rutgers University Press), winner of the New York State Historical Association Annual Book Award and the Hendricks Prize of the New Netherland Project.

Gananath Obeyesekere calls his contribution to this volume a peon to 'foolishness'. But this is a fertile foolishness that implies a positive freedom to engage passionately in comparison, to avoid disciplinary overspecialization, to understand that the non-rational need not imply the irrational, and to acknowledge the power of art and literature as potential inspirations for our work. These themes of creativity and engagement echo through this volume's discussions of orthodoxy, aesthetics, and the ambivalences that surround religious authority and leadership. A special section on pilgrimage to Holy Land sites examines sacred space, place, and narrative as expressions of knowledge and power, while Birgit Meyer's inaugural lecture at the University of Utrecht calling for a material approach to religion elicits a number of constructive responses from scholars in art history, anthropology, and religious studies. The volume is rounded out by a teaching section exploring the dynamics of teaching the anthropology of Christianity in a seminary and reviews of recent literature in the anthropology of religion and related studies.

This volume describes and maps congregations of Christian confessions and denominations, as well as groups with Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and various other spiritual faiths, in different European countries. Consisting of three parts, it presents concrete sociological studies addressing how established and not established, old and new congregations of various faiths create a new kind of religious diversity at the country level; how religious congregations are challenged and thrive in large cities; and how religious congregations change in the 21st century. The book enlightens by its descriptive analysis and the theoretical questions it raises concerning the religious transformations happening all over Europe. It addresses issues of religious diversity in the cities of Europe by presenting large studies conducted in cities such as Barcelona in Spain, and Aarhus in Denmark. By means of large-scale censuses taken in areas such as North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany and in countries like Switzerland and Italy, the book shows how the historically established churches restructure their congregations and activities. It clarifies for the new gatherers where and how a new diversity of religious congregations is in the process of being established. Finally, the book covers two important topical issues: pluralisation and secularisation. It provides new data on religious diversity, painting a new picture of secularisation: the impact and structural consequences of the long-term decrease of membership in the established churches.

This is a case study of one congregation within the Unity Fellowship Church Movement that relies on therapeutic religion, a form of religion that strives to equip individuals with psychological capital, by enabling self-expressions and affirmations of social differences. The therapeutic ethic that characterizes this congregation has enabled some freedoms that are otherwise disallowed in traditional congregations. These new freedoms inadvertently have led to certain excesses, including overtly sexual language and behaviors. But this is not to say that the congregation disregards conventional norms altogether, or that therapy is used simply as an excuse for self-indulgence. Rather, in spite of the occasional "messiness" that may arise, there is something significant and deep about therapeutic religion. For religious organizations serving traumatized and marginalized populations in particular, therapeutic religion may be pivotal in helping to reintegrate the wounded back into the community folds.

Denominationalism--that ''free market'' mode of organizing religious life which, some say, manages to combine traditional religious claims with a free society in a peculiarly American way--is the subject of the previously unpublished papers in this collection. No institution, the editors argue, is as crucial for the understanding of American religious life, yet so much in need of reassessment as the denomination. In a wide-ranging collection of articles, a distinguished set of commentators on American religion examine the denomination's past and present roles, its definable nature, and its evolution over time. The study of denominations, the authors show, sheds light on broader understandings of American religious and cultural life. The contributors--scholars of the Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Mormon, and African-American traditions--explore the state and history of denominational studies in America, suggesting new models and approaches drawn from anthropology, sociology, theology, history, and history of religions. They offer provocative case studies that reimagine denominational studies.

By setting the Irish religious conflict in a wide comparative perspective, this book offers fresh insights into the causes of religious conflicts, and potential means of resolving them. The collection mounts a challenge to widely held views of 'Irish exceptionalism' and points to significant historical and contemporary commonalities across the Western European and North Atlantic worlds.