Re-enchanting Modernity

Re-enchanting Modernity PDF Author: Mayfair Yang
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478009241
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In Re-enchanting Modernity Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity.

Re-enchanting Modernity

Re-enchanting Modernity PDF Author: Mayfair Yang
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478009241
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book

Book Description
In Re-enchanting Modernity Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative local autonomy and self-governance. Central to Wenzhou's religious civil society is what Yang calls a "ritual economy," in which an ethos of generosity is expressed through donations to temples, clerics, ritual events, and charities in exchange for spiritual gain. With these investments in transcendent realms, Yang adopts Georges Bataille's notion of "ritual expenditures" to challenge the idea that rural Wenzhou's economic development can be described in terms of Max Weber's notion of a "Protestant Ethic". Instead, Yang suggests that Wenzhou's ritual economy forges an alternate path to capitalist modernity.

The Re-enchantment of the World

The Re-enchantment of the World PDF Author: Joshua Landy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The Re-Enchantment of the World is an interdisciplinary volume that challenges the long-prevailing view of modernity as "disenchanted." There is of course something to the widespread idea, so memorably put into words by Max Weber, that modernity is characterized by the "progressive disenchantment of the world." Yet what is less often recognized is the fact that a powerful counter-tendency runs alongside this one, an overwhelming urge to fill the vacuum left by departed convictions, and to do so without invoking superseded belief systems. In fact, modernity produces an array of strategies for re-enchantment, each fully compatible with secular rationality. It has to, because God has many "aspects"--or to put it in more secular terms, because traditional religion offers so much in so many domains. From one thinker to the next, the question of just what, in religious enchantment, needs to be replaced in a secular world receives an entirely different answer. Now, for the first time, many of these strategies are laid out in a single volume, with contributions by specialists in literature, history, and philosophy.

Re-Enchanting the World

Re-Enchanting the World PDF Author: C. Mathews Samson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817354271
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In considering the interplay between contemporary Protestant practice and native cultural traditions among Maya evangelicals, this work documents the processes whereby some Maya have converted to different forms of Christianity and the ways in which the Maya are incorporating Christianity for their own purposes.

The Enchantment of Modern Life

The Enchantment of Modern Life PDF Author: Jane Bennett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884535
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Arts of Wonder

Arts of Wonder PDF Author: Jeffrey L. Kosky
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226451062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Kosky focuses on a handful of artists - Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy - to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation.

Beauty for Truth's Sake

Beauty for Truth's Sake PDF Author: Stratford Caldecott
Publisher: Brazos Press
ISBN: 1493410601
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Based in the riches of Christian worship and tradition, this brief, eloquently written introduction to Christian thinking and worldview helps readers put back together again faith and reason, truth and beauty, and the fragmented academic disciplines. By reclaiming the classic liberal arts and viewing disciplines such as science and mathematics through a poetic lens, the author explains that unity is present within diversity. Now repackaged with a new foreword by Ken Myers, this book will continue to benefit parents, homeschoolers, lifelong learners, Christian students, and readers interested in the history of ideas.

The Enchantments of Mammon

The Enchantments of Mammon PDF Author: Eugene McCarraher
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674242777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
“An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy...McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.” —The Observer At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct. Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls. “A majestic achievement...It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.” —Commonweal “More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion...will stun even skeptical readers.” —Christian Century

Enchanting a Disenchanted World

Enchanting a Disenchanted World PDF Author: George Ritzer
Publisher: Pine Forge Press
ISBN: 1412975816
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This study is about Disney, malls, cruise lines, Las Vegas, the World Wide Web, Planet Hollywood, credit cards, and all other ways we now consume. It discusses the fundamental change that our society has undergone because of the way and the level at which we consume.

Enchanting Robots

Enchanting Robots PDF Author: Maciej Musiał
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030125793
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
This book argues that robots are enchanting humans (as potential intimate partners), because humans are enchanting robots (by performing magical thinking), and that these processes are a part of a significant re-enchantment of the “modern” world. As a foundation, the author examines arguments for and against intimate relationships with robots, particularly sex robots and care robots. Moreover, the book provides a consideration of human-robot interactions and philosophical reflections about robots through the lens of magic and magical thinking as well as theoretical and practical re-evaluations of their status and presence. Furthermore, the author discusses the abovementioned issues in the context of disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world, characterizing modernity as a coexistence of these two processes. The book closes with a consideration of future scenarios regarding the meaning of life in the age of rampant automation and the possibility that designing robots becomes a sort of new eugenics as a consequence of recognizing robots as persons.

Temples of Modernity

Temples of Modernity PDF Author: Robert M. Geraci
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149857775X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Geraci offers an investigation into the intersection of religion, science, and technology in scientific and engineering communities in India. Using historical and ethnographic methods, Geraci explores religion, science, and technology in politics, scientific uses of Hindu images and rituals, and Indian reflections on the future of humanity.