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Author: Norman Cohn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Author: Norman Cohn
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300090888
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.
Author: Norman Rufus Colin Cohn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cosmogony
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
Author: Heidi C. M. Scott
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271065362
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.
Author: Matthew Buttsworth
Publisher: Matt Buttsworth
ISBN: 0987062824
Category : Deep ecology
Languages : en
Pages : 516
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Book Description
Author: Karen Ann Lang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801488559
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos, Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany--the period from the 1880s to 1940--she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena--chaos--into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry.Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur.Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge.
Author: Ted Daniels
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814719082
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Gathers apocalyptic writings from Communism, Nazism, the environmental movement, the Branch Davidians, the Order of the Solar Temple, Aum Shinri Kyo, the Montana Freemen, and Aryan hate groups
Author: Sidney Greidanus
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 143355500X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
"I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things." Isaiah 45:7 When God created the world, he brought perfect order out of what was "without form and void." But with human rebellion against God leading to God's curse, disorder was introduced into creation—disorder that we still see all around us today. Tracing the chaos to cosmos theme from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, pastor-scholar Sidney Greidanus reveals how God is restoring his creation through Jesus Christ, who has already begun to shine light into the darkness and will one day return to bring peace, order, and restoration once and for all. With discussion questions at the end of each chapter and a fourteen-session reading plan, this book is ideal for small groups as well as individual study.
Author: Karolyn Kinane
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786453591
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
The idea of the complete annihilation of all life is a powerful and culturally universal concept. As human societies around the globe have produced creation myths, so too have they created narratives concerning the apocalyptic destruction of their worlds. This book explores the idea of the apocalypse and its reception within culture and society, bringing together 17 essays that explore both the influence and innovation of apocalyptic ideas from classical Greek and Roman writings to the foreign policies of today's United States.
Author: Robin A. Parry
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1625648103
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.
Author:
Publisher: Matt Buttsworth
ISBN: 1471037126
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 51
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Book Description
