“Today on Oprah,” intoned the TV announcer, and all over America viewers tuned in to learn, empathize, and celebrate. In this book, Kathryn Lofton investigates the Oprah phenomenon and finds in ...Winfrey’s empire—Harpo Productions, O Magazine, and her new television network—an uncanny reflection of religion in modern society. Lofton shows that when Oprah liked, needed, or believed something, she offered her audience nothing less than spiritual revolution, reinforced by practices that fuse consumer behavior, celebrity ambition, and religious idiom. In short, Oprah Winfrey is a media messiah for a secular age. Lofton’s unique approach also situates the Oprah enterprise culturally, illuminating how Winfrey reflects and continues historical patterns of American religions.
This book advances that history by exploring stories, images and discourses across a worldwide range of geographical, cultural and confessional contexts. Its twelve authors not only enrich our ...understanding of the significance of the contextual method, but also produce a new range of original ways of doing theology in contemporary situations. The authors discuss some prioritised thematic perspectives with an emphasis on liberating paths, and expand the ongoing discussion on the methodology of theology into new areas. Themes such as interreligious plurality, global capitalism, ecumenical liberation theology, eco-anxiety and the anthropocene, postcolonialism, gender, neo-pentecostalism, world theology, and reconciliation are examined in situated depth. Additionally, voices from Indigenous lands, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Europe and North America enter into a dialogue on what it means to contextualise theology in an increasingly globalised and ever-changing world. Such a comprehensive discussion of new ways of thinking about and doing contextual theology will be of great use to scholars in Theology, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Science, Gender Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Global Studies.
Discipline and debate Lempert, Michael
2012., 20120331, 2012, c2012., 2012-04-30, 20120101
eBook
The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence, compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh ...methods to make monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist reformers—like the Dalai Lama—adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as natural rights and individual autonomy. In the first in-depth account of disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, Michael Lempert looks closely at everyday education rites—from debate to reprimand and corporal punishment. His analysis explores how the idioms of violence inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. Bringing the study of language and social interaction to our understanding of Buddhism for the first time, Lempert shows and why liberal ideals are being acted out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of liberalism as a globalizing discourse.
African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry examines perceptions of the natural world revealed by the religious ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina ...from the colonial period into the twentieth century. Focusing on Kongo nature spirits known as the simbi, Ras Michael Brown describes the essential role religion played in key historical processes, such as establishing new communities and incorporating American forms of Christianity into an African-based spirituality. This book illuminates how people of African descent engaged the spiritual landscape of the Lowcountry through their subsistence practices, religious experiences and political discourse.
It has become increasingly clear that an adequate understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural, and religious change is contingent on an appreciation of the growing impact of digital ...media. Utilizing results of an unprecedented international study, this volume explores the ways in which young adults in seven different countries engage with digital and social media in religiously significant ways.
Presenting and analyzing the findings of the international research project Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG), an international panel of contributors sheds new light on the impact of digital media and its associated technologies on young people's religiosities, worldviews, and values. Case studies from China, Finland, Ghana, Israel, Peru, Poland, and Turkey are used to demonstrate how these developments are progressing not only in the West but also across the world.
This book is unique in that it presents a truly macroscopic perspective on trends in religion amongst young adults. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars working in religious studies, digital media, communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, theology, and youth studies.
Created by two of the field’s leading experts, this unique introduction to international religious demography outlines the challenges in interpreting data on religious adherence, and presents a ...contemporary portrait of global religious belief. Offers the first comprehensive overview of the field of international religious demography – detailing what we know about religious adherents around the world, and how we know itExamines religious freedom and diversity, including agnostics and atheists, on a global scale, highlighting trends over the past 100 years and projecting estimates for the year 2050Outlines the issues and challenges related to definitions, taxonomies, sources, analyses, and other techniques in interpreting data on religious adherenceConsiders data from religious communities, censuses, surveys, and scholarly research, along with several in-depth case studies on the global Muslim population, religion in China, and the religious demography of recently created Sudan and South SudanArgues against the belief that the twentieth-century was a ‘secular’ period by putting forward new evidence to the contraryProvides resources for measuring both qualitatively and quantitatively important data on the world's religious situation in the twenty-first century
Saving god Johnston, Mark
2009., 20110711, 2011, 2009, c2009., 2009-01-01
eBook
In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) but, more ...importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as false and spiritually debilitating.
A state of mixture Payne, Richard E
2015., 20150901, 2015, 2015-09-01, Letnik:
56
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Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, known as the Iranian Empire, that integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia ...to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions.The rise of Christianity in Iran depended on the Zoroastrian theory and practice of hierarchical, differentiated inclusion, according to which Christians, Jews, and others occupied legitimate places in Iranian political culture in positions subordinate to the imperial religion. Christians, for their part, positioned themselves in a political culture not of their own making, with recourse to their own ideological and institutional resources, ranging from the writing of saints' lives to the judicial arbitration of bishops. In placing the social history of East Syrian Christians at the center of the Iranian imperial story,A State of Mixturehelps explain the endurance of a culturally diverse empire across four centuries.
Japanese "new religions"shinshūkyō have used various media forms for training, communicating with members, presenting their messages, reinforcing or protecting the image of the leader and potentially ...attracting converts. In this book, the complex and dual relationship between the media and new religions is investigated by looking at the tensions groups face between the need for visibility and the risks of facing attacks and criticism through the media. Indeed, media and new technologies have been extensively used by religious groups not only to spread their messages and to try to reach a wider audience, but also to promote themselves as a highly modern and up-to-date form of religion appropriate for a modern technological age. In the 1980s and early 1990s, some movements, such as Agonshū, Kōfuku no Kagaku and Aum Shinrikyō, came into prominence especially via the use of media (initially pub- lications, but also ritual broadcasts, advertising campaigns and public media events). This created new modes of ritual engagement and new ways of inter- actions between leaders and members. The aim of this book is to develop and illustrate particular key issues in the wider new religions and media nexus by using specific movements as examples. In particular, the analysis of the inter- action between media and new religions will focus primarily on three case studies predominantly during the first period of development of the groups.
Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise 2024 Karl Barths Theologie wird gemeinhin – und zurecht – als Widerspruch gegen die Säkularisierung der Kirche in der Neuzeit gelesen. Inwiefern ...sie zugleich den Versuch darstellt, theologisch adäquat auf die Säkularisierung der die Kirche umgebenden Gesellschaft zu reagieren, hat die bisherige Forschung erst in Ansätzen ausgeleuchtet. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, wie Barth ganz konkret auf das sich vollziehende Ende der ‚christlichen Welt‘ im europäischen Kontext reagiert hat. Sie fragt: Welche ekklesiologischen und sozialethischen Umstellungen ermöglichten es Barth, die partikulare Existenz der Kirche in einem nichtchristlichen Umfeld theologisch zu affirmieren? Und welche Denkmuster prägten seine „Theologie der Welt", d.h. die von ihm vorgeschlagene theologische Bestimmung nichtchristlicher Menschen, des säkularen Staates und der profanen Kultur insgesamt? Dabei wird die These plausibilisiert, dass Barth angesichts der gesellschaftlichen Säkularisierungsprozesse seiner Zeit eine umfassende christologisch-inklusive Theologie der Welt entwickelte, die von Christi Wirken auch in einer säkularen Gesellschaft ausging – und dass diese Welttheologie in Barths Denken zur Ausbildung charakteristischer Stärken und Schwächen geführt hat. ; Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise 2024 Karl Barths Theologie wird gemeinhin – und zurecht – als Widerspruch gegen die Säkularisierung der Kirche in der Neuzeit gelesen. Inwiefern sie zugleich den Versuch darstellt, theologisch adäquat auf die Säkularisierung der die Kirche umgebenden Gesellschaft zu reagieren, hat die bisherige Forschung erst in Ansätzen ausgeleuchtet. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht, wie Barth ganz konkret auf das sich vollziehende Ende der ‚christlichen Welt‘ im europäischen Kontext reagiert hat. Sie fragt: Welche ekklesiologischen und sozialethischen Umstellungen ermöglichten es Barth, die partikulare Existenz der Kirche in einem nichtchristlichen Umfeld theologisch zu affirmieren? Und welche Denkmuster prägten seine „Theologie der Welt", d.h. die von ihm vorgeschlagene theologische Bestimmung nichtchristlicher Menschen, des säkularen Staates und der profanen Kultur insgesamt? Dabei wird die These plausibilisiert, dass Barth angesichts der gesellschaftlichen Säkularisierungsprozesse seiner Zeit eine umfassende christologisch-inklusive Theologie der Welt entwickelte, die von Christi Wirken auch in einer säkularen Gesellschaft ausging – und dass diese Welttheologie in Barths Denken zur Ausbildung charakteristischer Stärken und Schwächen geführt hat.
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