Religion and World Civilizations

Religion and World Civilizations PDF Author: Andrew Holt
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1440874239
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An indispensable resource for readers investigating how religion has influenced societies and cultures, this three-volume encyclopedia assesses and synthesizes the many ways in which religious faith has shaped societies from the ancient world to today. Each volume of the set focuses on a different era of world history, ranging through the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. Every volume is filled with essays that focus on religious themes from different geographical regions. For example, volume one includes essays considering religion in ancient Rome, while volume three features essays focused on religion in modern Africa. This accessible layout makes it easy for readers to learn more about the ways that religion and society have intersected over the centuries, as well as specific religious trends, events, and milestones in a particular era and place in world history. Taken as a a whole, this ambitious and wide-ranging work gathers more than 500 essays from more than 150 scholars who share their expertise and knowledge about religious faiths, tenets, people, places, and events that have influenced the development of civilization over the course of recorded human history.

Religion and World Civilizations

Religion and World Civilizations PDF Author: Andrew Holt
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1440874239
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An indispensable resource for readers investigating how religion has influenced societies and cultures, this three-volume encyclopedia assesses and synthesizes the many ways in which religious faith has shaped societies from the ancient world to today. Each volume of the set focuses on a different era of world history, ranging through the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. Every volume is filled with essays that focus on religious themes from different geographical regions. For example, volume one includes essays considering religion in ancient Rome, while volume three features essays focused on religion in modern Africa. This accessible layout makes it easy for readers to learn more about the ways that religion and society have intersected over the centuries, as well as specific religious trends, events, and milestones in a particular era and place in world history. Taken as a a whole, this ambitious and wide-ranging work gathers more than 500 essays from more than 150 scholars who share their expertise and knowledge about religious faiths, tenets, people, places, and events that have influenced the development of civilization over the course of recorded human history.

The Role of Religion in Ancient Civilizations

The Role of Religion in Ancient Civilizations PDF Author: Kim Woodring
Publisher: Cognella Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9781516580712
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Role of Religion in Ancient Civilizations: Select Readings addresses the importance of religion in ancient civilizations and encourages readers to evaluate these civilizations both historically and critically. The selected readings help readers understand civilizations as whole systems with not only social and political characteristics, but also religious ones. Topics include the establishment of patriarchal civilizations, Mesopotamian and Egyptian religion, and the early civilizations of Northwest India. Students also learn about the religions of ancient China and Japan, traditional African religions and belief systems, religion and burial in Roman Britain, and the great temples of Meso-American religions. The final selections are devoted to early Christianity, the Byzantine Empire, and Islam. The second edition features updated material and new articles that address Egyptian religion, early northwest civilizations, goddesses and demonesses in South Asian religion, Christianity during the Roman Empire, and the rise and expansion of Islam. Taken as a whole, these carefully curated articles demonstrate both the uniqueness of each religion and the traditions and practices that, over time, became interconnected and fused to form new religions. The Role of Religion in Ancient Civilizations is well suited to survey courses in world and ancient religions, as well as classes on religious history and the history of the ancient world.

Religion and World Civilizations

Religion and World Civilizations PDF Author: Andrew P. Holt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781440874277
Category : Religion and civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This work provides a three volume overview of the ways in which religious faith has shaped societies from the ancient world until the present. Each volume focuses on a different era of world history, ranging through the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, and includes essays that focus on religious themes from different geographical regions"--

From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond

From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond PDF Author: Saïd Amir Arjomand
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438483414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The post–World War II idea of the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers, and as elaborated into the sociology of axial civilizations by S. N. Eisenstadt in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, continues to be the subject of intense scholarly debate. Examples of this can be found in recent works of Hans Joas and Jürgen Habermas. In From World Religions to Axial Civilizations and Beyond, an internationally distinguished group of scholars discuss, advance, and criticize the Jaspers-Eisenstadt thesis, and go beyond it by bringing in the critical influence of Max Weber's sociology of world religions and by exploring intercivilizational encounters in key world regions. The essays within this volume are of unusual interest for their original analysis of relatively neglected civilizational zones, especially Islam and the Islamicate civilization and the Byzantine civilization, and its continuation in Orthodox Russia.

Religious Foundations of Western Civilization

Religious Foundations of Western Civilization PDF Author: Jacob Neusner
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 1426719418
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 666

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Book Description
World Religions Religious Foundations of Western Civilization introduces students to the major Western world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—their beliefs, key concepts, history, as well as the fundamental role they have played, and continue to play, in Western culture. Contributors include: Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck, Bruce D. Chilton, Th. Emil Homerin, Jon D. Levenson, William Scott Green, Seymour Feldman, Elliot R. Wolfson, James A. Brundage, Olivia Remie Constable, and Amila Buturovic. "This book provides a superb source of information for scientists and scholars from all disciplines who are trying to understand religion in the context of human cultural evolution." David Sloan Wilson, Professor, Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York This is the right book at the right time. Globalization, religious revivalism, and international politics have made it more important than ever to appreciate the significant contributions of the Children of Abraham to the formation and development of Western civilization. John L. Esposito, University Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Muslm-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Jacob Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and Theology, and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. General Interest/Other Religions/Comparative Religion

Battling the Gods

Battling the Gods PDF Author: Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.

Axial Civilizations And World History

Axial Civilizations And World History PDF Author: J©đhann P©Łll © rnason
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004139559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
A collection of essays by social theorists, historical sociologists and area specialists in classical, biblical and Asian studies. The contributions deal with cultural transformations in major civilizational centres during the "Axial Age," the middle centuries of the last millennium BCE, and their long-term consequences.

Religions of the Ancient World

Religions of the Ancient World PDF Author: Sarah Iles Johnston
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674015173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 750

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Book Description
This groundbreaking, first basic reference work on ancient religious beliefs collects and organizes available information on ten ancient cultures and traditions, including Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia, and offers an expansive, comparative perspective on each one.

Religion in the Emergence of Civilization

Religion in the Emergence of Civilization PDF Author: Ian Hodder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139492179
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book presents an interdisciplinary study of the role of spirituality and religious ritual in the emergence of complex societies. Involving an eminent group of natural scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians, this volume examines Çatalhöyük as a case study. A nine-thousand-year old town in central Turkey, Çatalhöyük was first excavated in the 1960s and has since become integral to understanding the symbolic and ritual worlds of the early farmers and village-dwellers in the Middle East. It is thus an ideal location for exploring theories about the role of religion in early settled life. This book provides a unique overview of current debates concerning religion and its historical variations. Through exploration of themes including the integration of the spiritual and the material, the role of belief in religion, the cognitive bases for religion, and religion's social roles, this book situates the results from Çatalhöyük within a broader understanding of the Neolithic in the Middle East.

Progress and Religion

Progress and Religion PDF Author: Christopher Dawson
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813218195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Progress and Religion was perhaps the most influential of all Christopher Dawson's books, establishing him as an interpreter of history and a historian of ideas.