1,721,024 research outputs found
Religion and the Global City
No full textReligion and the Global City examines the new realities of religion in global cities, bringing together in-depth case studies to reveal the presence, visibility, and social, political and cultural roles of religion in contemporary global urban landscapes, and offering an overview of the main debates and developments in this growing field
The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood
No full textFrom recent sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, to arguments about faith schools and religious indoctrination, this volume considers the interconnection between the actual lives of children and the position of children as placeholders for the future. Childhood has often been a particular site of struggle for negotiating the location of religion in public and everyday social life, and children's involvement and non-involvement in religion raises strong feelings because they represent the future of religious and secular communities, even of society itself. The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion and Childhood provides a rich resource for students and scholars of this interdisciplinary field, and addresses wider questions about the distinctiveness of childhood and its religious dimensions in historical and contemporary perspective.
Divided into five thematic parts, the volume provides classic, contemporary, and specially commissioned readings from a range of perspectives, including the sociological, anthropological, historical, and theological. Case studies range from Augustine's description of childhood in Confessions, the psychology of religion and childhood, to religion in children's literature, religious education, and Qur'anic schools.
- Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the UK and Europe, USA, Latin America and Africa
- An introduction situates each thematic part, and each reading is contextualised by the editors
- Guidance on further reading and study questions are provided on the book's webpage - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-bloomsbury-reader-in-religion-and-childhood-9781474251105/#sthash.fNzTomk1.dpu
Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader
No full textThis Reader brings together a selection of key writings to explore the relationship between religion, media and cultures of everyday life. It provides an overview of the main debates and developments in this growing field, focusing on four major themes:
- Religion, spirituality and consumer culture
- Media and the transformation of religion
- The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture
- Religion, and the ethics of media and culture
'God isn't a communist':Conservative Evangelicals, Morality and Money in London
Full text linkThis chapter examines moral threads interwoven in the thoughts and actions of conservative evangelicals in relation to the place of money in their lives. I argue that as well as a calculative ethic shaped by modes of economic value, we also see a desire for a value beyond value, in which the good is imagined in relation to a transcendent grace that both exceeds and vaolorizes capitalist regimes. Approaching conservative evangelicals through the lens of the good moves us beyond the ‘othering’ of nonliberal religious movements, while also inviting attention to contradictions and eruptions that evade the logic of capital
Introduction: The Good between Social Theory and Philosophy
Full text linkOver the past two decades, dark and apocalyptic tones have come to dominate many areas of social and cultural theory. This chapter argues that understanding social life calls not only for focus on the darkness of our current times but also for bringing the question of the good to the centre of social science inquiry as a way of studying the workings of aspirational and imaginative endeavours in people’s lives. Drawing on the history of social theory and a rapidly growing interest in morality, ethics and values within and beyond the social sciences, we present the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social and cultural life
The Metropolis and Evangelical Life: Coherence and Fragmentation in the ‘Lost City of London’
Full text linkThis article examines the interplay of different processes of cultural and subjective fragmentation experienced by conservative evangelical Anglicans, based on an ethnographic study of a congregation in central London. The author focuses on the evangelistic speaking practices of members of this church to explore how individuals negotiate contradictory norms of interaction as they move through different city spaces, and considers their response to tensions created by the demands of their workplace and their religious lives. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, the author argues that their faith provides a sense of coherence and unity that responds to experiences of cultural fragmentation characteristic of everyday life in the city, while simultaneously leading to a specific consciousness of moral fragmentation that is inherent to conservative evangelicalism
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