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Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan
This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents. Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.
Free Zone Scientology
In this novel academic study, Aled Thomas analyses modern issues surrounding boundaries and fluidity in contemporary Scientology. By using the Scientologist practice of 'auditing' as a case study, this book explores the ways in which new types of 'Scientologies' can emerge. The notion of Free Zone Scientology is characterised by its horizontal structure, in contrast to the vertical-hierarchy of the institutional Church of Scientology. With this in mind, Thomas explores the Free Zone as an example of a developing and fluid religion, directly addressing questions concerning authority, leadership and material objects. This book, by maintaining a double-focus on the top-down hierarchy of the Chu...
The Politics of Religious Literacy
Religious Literacy has become a popular concept for navigating religious diversity in public life. Spanning classrooms to boardrooms, The Politics of Religious Literacy challenges commonly held understandings of religious literacy as an inclusive framework for engaging with religion in modern, multifaith democracies. As the first book to rethink religious literacy from the perspective of affect theory and secularism studies, this new approach calls for a constructive reconsideration focused on the often-overlooked feelings and practices that inform our questionably secular age. This study offers fresh insights into the changing dynamics of religion and secularism in the public sphere.
Handbook of Ethical Foundations of Mindfulness
This handbook explores the multifaceted ethical dimensions of mindfulness, from early Buddhist sources to present-day Western interpretations of mindfulness. It takes a modern ethical approach to the study of mindfulness, and traces contemporary mindfulness practice from solitary journey to the global whole. Noted practitioners, teachers, scholars, and other professionals lend diverse perspectives to the debate over the moral content of mindfulness and its status as religious, secular, or post-secular practice. Chapters offer new views on the roots of mindfulness in Buddhist moral teachings, ethical mindfulness in interpersonal relationships, and the necessity of ethics in mindfulness-based ...
Experiencing Ways Through Words
We tend to think of ourselves using language. What if we thought instead about language working on us, or about language as something we experience rather than make use of? This book explores the generative capacities of language, suggesting that we need to pay much greater attention to the meaning-making capabilities, and political and moral implications, of more intangible aspects of language: atmosphere, mood, texture, the mode-of-being a use of language carries — and not only carries, but gives off, sends into both its reader and writer. Advancing an interpretation of language as fundamentally attitudinal and creative, Experiencing Ways Through Words explores literature in the light of such thinking, claiming that properties we tend to sideline as ‘aesthetic’ are profoundly constitutive of a text’s capacity for significance.
The Dynamic Cosmos
This edited volume applies the analytic notions of paradox and play to the ethnographic manifestation of spirits, angels, and demons in different locations around the world. The 10 case studies conceptualize the co-presence of humans and entities with terms that do not exclude spiritual reasoning on the one hand, and social explanations on the other. Through in-depth descriptions of localized possession cosmologies, the different chapters collectively propose path-breaking methodological directions in this field, which incorporate ethnographic theories of simultaneity into anthropological theories of religion, kinship, and ritual. Framed by an introduction written by the editors and an afterword by Michael Lambek, a leading authority in possessions studies, the volume contains cutting edge analyses that will provide readers with new tools to evaluate previously unstudied aspects of spirit possession; all of which stem from the fantastic forms of human movement that accompany the phenomenality of paradoxes in mundane reality.
Hemingway and Agamben
Marcos Antonio Norris implements Giorgio Agamben's notion of 'secularized theism' to resolve a critical disagreement among Hemingway scholars who have portrayed the writer as either a Roman Catholic or a secular existentialist. He argues that Hemingway is, properly speaking, neither a secularist nor a theist, but a 'secularised theist', whose 'religion' is practiced through sovereign decision making, which, in its most extreme form, includes the act of killing. This book resolves an important debate in Hemingway studies and uncovers fundamental similarities between theism and atheism, building upon the theoretical undertaking first introduced by Agamben and the Existentialists (EUP, 2021). Bringing Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Giorgio Agamben into close conversation, the author reconceptualises existentialism, issues a posthumanist critique of moral authoritarianism and advances an original interpretation of Hemingway as a secularised theist.
The Gramophone
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The American Bar
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The Ohio Bell
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