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The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:38:31 +0000

# Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 31, 2005)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0520243064
# ISBN-13: 978-0520243064

Book Description
"Sacred gaze" denotes any way of seeing that invests its object--an image, a person, a time, a place--with spiritual significance. Drawing from many different fields, David Morgan investigates key aspects of vision and imagery in a variety of religious traditions. His lively, innovative book explores how viewers absorb and process religious imagery and how their experience contributes to the social, intellectual, and perceptual construction of reality. Ranging widely from thirteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century Tibet to contemporary America, Thailand, and Africa, The Sacred Gaze discusses the religious functions of images and the tools viewers use to interpret them. Morgan questions how fear and disgust of images relate to one another and explains how scholars study the long and evolving histories of images as they pass from culture to culture. An intriguing strand of the narrative details how images have helped to shape popular conceptions of gender and masculinity. The opening chapter considers definitions of "visual culture" and how these relate to the traditional practice of art history.
Amply illustrated with more than seventy images from diverse religious traditions, this masterful interdisciplinary study provides a comprehensive and accessible resource for everyone interested in how religious images and visual practice order space and time, communicate with the transcendent, and embody forms of communion with the divine. The Sacred Gaze is a vital introduction to the study of the visual culture of religions.

From the Inside Flap
"The work presented in this book is very important. It offers a useful bridge between art history and religious studies, opening up the insights of each to the other. By offering a workable set of analytical categories to be used in studying religious images, Morgan's excellent scholarship promises to advance the current move toward more sophisticated understandings of religious material culture by leaps and bounds."--Jeanne Halgren Kilde, author of When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America

"The Sacred Gaze is a seminal book--it goes further than anything else I know of in placing religious aspects of the field on a firm foundation of scholarship. Morgan has almost single-handedly defined the subfield of religious visual culture studies, and the present volume moves the conversation to an impressive new level."--Jay D. Green, Professor of History, Covenant College

"The Sacred Gaze is of fundamental importance for the relations between images and religious belief, and is a major contribution to the burgeoning field of visual studies. Morgan's wide-ranging book moves from the contested status of images between cultures, to the history of current American attitudes towards them. A notable achievement."--David Freedberg, author of The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response

"This book is a tonic. It's just what visual studies needs: a sensible, ecumenical, interdisciplinary, multicultural consideration of the place of visuality in religion, and the place of religion in all images. It should help start conversations that can go back and forth between the secularized debates of the university and the religionist discourse that still predominates outside it."--James Elkins, author of The Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art

"David Morgan makes a compelling case for the importance of visual evidence in the study of religion, and he offers useful suggestions about how to interpret that evidence. I don't know of a better introduction to religion and visual culture."--Thomas A. Tweed, author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion

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Is There a Sabbath for Thought?: Between Religion and Philosophy (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:38:23 +0000

# Publisher: Fordham University Press (June 1, 2005)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0823223736
# ISBN-13: 978-0823223732

Book Description
Seeking to renew an ancient companionship between the philosophical and the religious, this book’s meditative chapters dwell on certain elemental experiences or happenings that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine. William Desmond engages the philosophical work of Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Shestov, and Soloviev, among others, and pursues with a philosophical mindfulness what is most intimate in us, yet most universal: sleep, poverty, imagination, courage and witness, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war. Being religious has to do with that intimate universal, beyond arbitrary subjectivism and reductionist objectivism. In this book, he attempts to look at religion with a fresh and open mind, asking how philosophy might itself stand up to some of the questions posed to it by religion, not just how religion might stand up to the questions posed to it by philosophy. Desmond tries to pursue a new and different policy, one faithful to the light of this dialogue. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Quotation

http://www.amazon.com/There-Sabbath-Thought-Perspectives-Continental/dp/0823223736/

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The Future of Religion

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:36:44 +0000

# Publisher: Columbia University Press (February 3, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0231134940
# ISBN-13: 978-0231134941

Review

"It is a truism that modernity understood itself as a liberation from religion: the Age of Faith was to be superseded by the Age of Reason. It is this self-assurance that postmodernism calls into question by heralding, for its part, the Age of Interpretation. Should modernity's verdict about the demise of religion also be revisited? In this book, two of the most preeminent figures of postmodernism engage in a conversation on the issue. The pragmatist Richard Rorty, who calls himself 'religiously unmusical,' grants -- somewhat grudgingly, given his anticlericalism -- that religion will probably not disappear, but contends that it should remain private and kept out of the public sphere, while Gianni Vattimo, returning to the belief of his roots, argues that Christianity, with its ethics of humility and pardon, represents the very presupposition of our public life. A delightful dialogue that challenges the beliefs of theists and atheists alike. It also confirms that postmodernists practice what they say when they hold that philosophy is a conversation." -- Jean Grondin, University of Montreal

"Who could have foreseen postmodern thought taking this turn? Nihilism is 'the actual meaning of Christianity.' Hermeneutics teaches "love is the only law." A book in which Rorty and Vattimo make such avowals together is by definition an important affair." -- Jeffrey M. Perl, editor, Common Knowledge

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Quotation

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Religion-Gianni-Vattimo/dp/0231134940

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Render to Caesar: Jesus, the Early Church, and the Roman Superpower

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:22:30 +0000

# Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (July 27, 2005)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0195183347
# ISBN-13: 978-0195183344

Review
"For those interested in religion and politics (and who is not?), Bryan can help us grasp the clarity of the perspective that runs through the whole Bible. This kind of New Testament theology illumines both historical context and theological significance." --America

"...a fine book, readable, closely argued, and assidusously documented. Render to Caesar is a valuable correction of certain forms of political theology, and also of pacifist and other abdications of political responsibility. It is, at the same time, a compelling call for the Church to muster the wisdom and courage to do its public duty." --First Things

"...a fine book.... Render to Caesar is a valuable correction of certain forms of political theology, and also of pacifist and other abdications of political responsibility. It is, at the same time, a compelling call for the Church to muster the wisdom and courage to do its public duty."--First Things

"With admirable learning and balanced judgment, Bryan covers a wide range of ancient texts pertaining to religion and politics. In showing that the prophets, Jesus, and the NT writers were mainly concerned with the origin and purpose of political power, he clarifies in what sense the biblical tradition is and is not political. While providing sensible correctives to overstatements by other scholars, Bryan also presents an accurate picture of the early church's place in the Roman empire."--Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., author of The Church According to the New Testament: What the Wisdom and Witness of Early Christianity Teach Us Today

"The interface between the gospel of Jesus and the empire of Caesar has suddenly become a hot, and disturbingly relevant, topic in biblical studies. Christopher Bryan's new book, full of his characteristically shrewd and original observations and scholarly insights, cuts across much current thinking and raises questions which cannot be ignored, either by historians or by those keen to rediscover the relevance of the gospel in today's world."--N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham and author of the three-volume Christian Origins and the Question of God

"Bryan cogently and elegantly argues that the biblical tradition confronts human power structures not to displace them, but to insist that they recognize their origin in God and their purpose of serving God by promoting justice and peace."--hristian Century

"Were Jesus and the first Christians political revolutionaries? Given the chance, would they have replaced the Roman imperium with some other social and political order? Against several strands of recent exegesis, Christopher Bryan thinks not. In my view, he makes his case. But almost as important, he does it with clear arguments and in literate English. Render to Caesar is a good read, which lamentably can now be said of few scholarly works."--Robert W. Jenson, author of Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God and Volume 2: The Works of God

Book Description
At the end of the 20th century, "postcolonialism" described the effort to understand the experience of those who had lived under colonial rule. This kind of thinking has inevitably brought about a reexamination of the rise of Christianity, which took place under Roman colonial rule. How did Rome look from the viewpoint of an ordinary Galilean in the first century of the Christian era? What should this mean for our own understanding of and relationship to Jesus of Nazareth? In the past, Jesus was often "depoliticized," treated as a religious teacher imparting timeless truths for all people. Now, however, many scholars see Jesus as a political leader whose goal was independence from Roman rule so that the people could renew their traditional way of life under the rule of God. In Render to Caesar, Christopher Bryan reexamines the attitude of the early Church toward imperial Rome. Choosing a middle road, he asserts that Jesus and the early Christians did indeed have a critique of the Roman superpower -- a critique that was broadly in line with the entire biblical and prophetic tradition. One cannot worship the biblical God, the God of Israel, he argues, and not be concerned about justice in the here and now. On the other hand, the biblical tradition does not challenge human power structures by attempting to dismantle them or replace them with other power structures. Instead, Jesus' message consistently confronts such structures with the truth about their origin and purpose. Their origin is that God permits them. Their purpose is to promote God's peace and justice. Power is understood as a gift from God, a gift that it is to be used to serve God's will and a gift that can be taken away by God when misused. Render to Caesar transforms our understanding of early Christians and their relationship to Rome and demonstrates how Jesus' teaching continues to challenge those who live under structures of government quite different from those that would have been envisaged by the authors of the New Testament.

URL:

Quotation

http://www.amazon.com/Render-Caesar-Jesus-Church-Superpower/dp/0195183347/

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