Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,033,983
result(s) for
"Religious"
Sort by:
Neurotheology : how science can enlighten us about spirituality
\"With the advent of the modern cognitive neurosciences, along with anthropological and historical research, the scientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena has become far more sophisticated and wide-ranging. It suggests answers as to how and why religion became so prominent in human societies and in human consciousness. Neurotheology--a term coined by Aldous Huxley in 1962 in his novel Island and introduced into the scientific literature in the 1990s by Newberg and others--explores some of the most controversial positions including the argument that religion was a necessary condition of cohesive societies, morality, and a sense of purpose. The book considers brain development from an evolutionary perspective and assesses how religious and spiritual beliefs and experiences arose and whether such evolutionary evidence eliminates the need for a religious explanation. Newberg demonstrates that religious beliefs and emotions can be both beneficial and detrimental in people's lives. For some, religion provides a means toward compassion, openness, and understanding; others turn to highly destructive acts, as is the case with suicide bombers. What is happening in the brains of such people? Are they pathological? And what of practices such as meditation, prayer, and the ingestion of psychoactive substances? Neuroimaging studies can show how these practices affect people in the moment and over a lifetime. Finally, the book investigates the deeper implications of a neurotheological approach. Does the neuroscientific study of religion negate any or all of the truth claims of religion? How does neurotheology address the \"big questions\" such as: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? And what is the true nature of reality?\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America
Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in Americaexplores the factors that may lead to greater success in ethnic preservation. Pyong Gap Min compares Indian Americans and Korean Americans, two of the most significant ethnic groups in New York, and examines the different ways in which they preserve their ethnicity through their faith. Does someone feel more \"Indian\" because they practice Hinduism? Does membership in a Korean Protestant church aid in maintaining ties to Korean culture?
Pushing beyond sociological research on religion and ethnicity which has tended to focus on whites or on a single immigrant group or on a single generation, Min also takes actual religious practice and theology seriously, rather than gauging religiosity based primarily on belonging to a congregation. Fascinating and provocative voices of informants from two generations combine with telephone survey data to help readers understand overall patterns of religious practices for each group under consideration.Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in Americais remarkable in its scope, its theoretical significance, and its methodological sophistication.
eBook
Global Visions of Violence
In Global Visions of Violence , the editors and contributors argue that violence creates a lens, bridge, and method for interdisciplinary collaboration that examines Christianity worldwide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By analyzing the myriad ways violence, persecution, and suffering impact Christians and the imagination of Christian identity globally, this interdisciplinary volume integrates the perspectives of ethicists, historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to generate new conversations. Taken together, the chapters in this book challenge scholarship on Christian growth that has not accounted for violence while analyzing persecution narratives that can wield data toward partisan ends. This allows Global Visions of Violence to push urgent conversations forward, giving voice to projects that illuminate wide and often hidden landscapes that have been shaped by global visions of violence, and seeking solutions that end violence and turn toward the pursuit of justice, peace, and human rights among suffering Christians.
eBook
Foreigners and their food
Foreigners and Their Food explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize \"us\" and \"them\" through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. David M. Freidenreich analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the \"other.\" Freidenreich illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and he demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, makes pathbreaking contributions to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.
eBook
Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion
Affective meditation on the Passionwas one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ.Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassionadvances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp'sLibellusto theMeditationes vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love'sMirrorand a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments,Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassionilluminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.
eBook
By Force and Fear
An unwilling, desperate nun trapped in the cloister, unable to gain release: such is the image that endures today of monastic life in early modern Europe. InBy Force and Fear, Anne Jacobson Schutte demonstrates that this and other common stereotypes of involuntary consignment to religious houses-shaped by literary sources such as Manzoni's The Betrothed-are badly off the mark.
Drawing on records of the Congregation of the Council, held in the Vatican Archive, Schutte examines nearly one thousand petitions for annulment of monastic vows submitted to the Pope and adjudicated by the Council during a 125-year period, from 1668 to 1793. She considers petitions from Roman Catholic regions across Europe and a few from Latin America and finds that, in about half these cases, the congregation reached a decision. Many women and a smaller proportion of men got what they asked for: decrees nullifying their monastic profession and releasing them from religious houses. Schutte also reaches important conclusions about relations between elders and offspring in early modern families. Contrary to the picture historians have painted of increasingly less patriarchal and more egalitarian families, she finds numerous instances of fathers, mothers, and other relatives (including older siblings) employing physical violence and psychological pressure to compel adolescents into \"entering religion.\" Dramatic tales from the archives show that many victims of such violence remained so intimidated that they dared not petition the pope until the agents of force and fear had died, by which time they themselves were middle-aged. Schutte's innovative book will be of great interest to scholars of early modern Europe, especially those who work on religion, the Church, family, and gender.
eBook