Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across ...a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China's Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so- called end of history? The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao's reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever- receding horizon, those "left behind" by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits.Following pronouncements of China's rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.
Fresh off a decisive congregational victory in the so-called worship wars of the 1990s, Contemporary Praise and Worship music spent the early decades of the twenty-first century conquering commercial ...spaces by becoming one of the most popular subsets of the Christian recording industry. To track the changes within the Christian music industry during this crucial twenty-five year span, this essay will explore the placement of Contemporary Praise and Worship music on WOW compilation albums released by a consortium of Christian record labels beginning in 1996 and concluding in 2019. These albums provide a unique lens through which to examine how the marketing forces of the industry both shape and respond to consumer preference. By exploring the growing and changing role of Contemporary Praise & Worship music on these albums, we hope to better understand the shifting role of worship itself within the American evangelical marketplace.
It is a commonly held belief that medieval Catholics were focussed on the 'bells and whistles' of religious practices, the smoke, images, sights and sounds that dazzled pre-modern churchgoers. ...Protestantism, in contrast, has been cast as Catholicism's austere, intellective and less sensual rival sibling. With iis white-washed walls, lack of incense (and often music) Protestantism worship emphasised preaching and scripture, making the new religion a drab and disengaged sensual experience. In order to challenge such entrenched assumptions, this book examines Tudor views on the senses to create a new lens through which to explore the English Reformation. Divided into two sections, the book begins with an examination of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices, establishing intellectual views on the senses in fifteenth-century England, and situating them within their contemporary philosophical and cultural tensions. Having established the parameters for the role of sense before the Reformation, the second half of the book mirrors these concerns in the post-1520 world, looking at how, and to what degree, the relationship between religious practices and sensation changed as a result of the Reformation. By taking this long-term, binary approach, the study is able to tackle fundamental questions regarding the role of the senses in late-medieval and early modern English Christianity. By looking at what English men and women thought about sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, the stereotype that Protestantism was not sensual, and that Catholicism was overly sensualised is wholly undermined. Through this examination of how worship was transformed in its textual and liturgical forms, the book illustrates how English religion sought to reflect changing ideas surrounding the senses and their place in religious life. Worship had to be 'sensible', and following how reformers and their opponents built liturgy around experience of the sacred through the physical allows us to tease out the tensions and pressures which shaped religious reform.
Dr Matthew Milner is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Studies and Digital Humanities at McGill University, Canada
Contents: Introduction: towards thinking about sensation in Tudor religion; The senses and sensing in 15th-century England; Religiosity and sensing in pre-Reformation England; The senses and worship: provision for liturgy in late-medieval England; Sensing pre-Reformation English liturgy; Sensory landscapes of Reformation England; Perception, polity, and gostly thynges in Reformation England; Sensible reformation in mid-Tudor England; Sensing and worship in Elizabethan England; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
Vibrant worship music is part of the Charismatic liturgy all around the world, and has become in many ways the hallmark of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Despite its centrality, scholarly ...interest in the theological and ritual significance of worship for pentecostal spirituality has been sparse, not least in Africa. Combining rich theoretical and theological insight with an in-depth case study of worship practices in Nairobi, Kenya, this interdisciplinary study offers a significant contribution to knowledge and is bound to influence scholarly discussions for years to come. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in Pentecostal worship, ritual, and spirituality.
This book tells a part of the back-story to major religious transformations emerging from the tumult of the late Republic. It considers the dynamic interplay of Cicero's approximations of mortals and ...immortals with a range of artifacts and activities that were collectively closing the divide between humans and gods. A guiding principle is that a major cultural player like Cicero had a normative function in religious dialogues that could legitimize incipient ideas like deification. Applying contemporary metaphor theory, it analyzes the strategies and priorities configuring Cicero's divinizing encomia of Roman dynasts like Pompey, Caesar and Octavian. It also examines Cicero's explorations of apotheosis and immortality in the De re publica and Tusculan Disputations as well as his attempts to deify his daughter Tullia. In this book, Professor Cole transforms our understanding not only of the backgrounds to ruler worship but also of changing conceptions of death and the afterlife.
Invaders as ancestors Gose, Peter
Invaders as ancestors,
c2008, 20081204, 2008, 2008-12-04
eBook
Invaders as Ancestorsexamines how the unique practices involved in Andean ancestor-worship first facilitated Spanish colonization and eventually undid the colonial project.
Judaic background is a topic that is discussed quite regularly, but in contrast, we as Christians rarely tend to discuss the influences that Pagan worship has left upon the Christian worship. ...Throughout time, the Church has changed it's stance many times - if at first, it feared similarities with certain Pagan characteristics, eventually, the Church arrived at a level of maturity, assuming unto itself those very same characteristics. Behind the Church's actions lies It's missionary and pastoral calling. In the following article, starting from certain concrete cases, specifically elements of the Church assumed by the Church but drawing from Pagan origins, we will deduce the elemental principles by which the Church guided Itself when assuming concepts from foreign religious sphere of influence.
Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, ...memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultural history to a study of modern Japanese nationalism for the first time.
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