Product Description: Charles Taylor's monumental book A Secular Age has been extensively discussed, criticized, and worked on. This volume, by contrast, explores ways of working with Taylor's book, especially its potentials and limits for individual research projects...read more

It is often assumed that religion is the backward-looking servant of tradition and the status quo, utterly opposed to the new. This refrain in so much of recent polemical writing has permeated the public mind and can even be found in academic publications. But recent scholarship increasingly shows that this view is a gross simplification - that, in fact, religious beliefs and practices have contributed to significant changes in human affairs: political and legal, social and artistic, scientific and commercial. This is certainly not to say that religion is always innovative. But the relationship between religion and innovation is much more complex and instructive than is generally assumed.Religion and Innovation includes contributions from leading historians, archaeologists, and social scientists, who offer findings about the relationship between religion and innovation. The essays collected in this volume range from discussions of the transformative power of religion in early societies; to re-examinations of our notions of naturalism, secularization, and progress; to explorations of cutting-edge contemporary issues.Combining scholarly rigor with clear, accessible writing, Religion and Innovation: Antagonists or Partners? is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of religion and the ongoing debates about its role in the modern world and into the future.

Product Description: This volume explores two topics of contemporary critical interest, agency and materiality, in the context of their intersection with the divine. Specific case studies, emphasizing the ancient Near East but including treatments also of the European Middle Ages and ancient Greece, draw on a broad range of written and pictorial sources to elucidate the nature and implications of this intersection...read more

When Cassie Bowen meets her aunt Flora's neighbor, Brent Conway, a man man of somewhat dubious reputation, she realizes that he holds the hope of breaking the ancient gypsy curse that has tormented her family for generations, a spell that dooms the women of her family to a lonely spinsterhood. Original.

Product Description: Behind the stereotype of a solitary meditator closing his eyes to the world, meditation always takes place in close interaction with the surrounding culture. Meditation and Culture: The Interplay of Practice and Context explores cases in which the relation between meditative practice and cultural context is particularly complex...read more

Product Description: Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores: key issues of definition and of methodology religious encounters with popular culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood This Companion will serve as an enjoyable and informative resource for students and a stimulus to future scholarly work...read more

Product Description: Religious or spiritual beliefs underpin many controversies and conflicts in the contemporary world. Written by a range of scholarly contributors, this three-volume set provides contextual background information and detailed explanations of religious controversies across the globe...read more

Product Description: Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology offers a new understanding of the materiality of religion. By drawing on the field of archaeological theory and method, the relationship between religion and material culture is explored...read more

Product Description: This book takes its leave with the realization that Western-driven culture is quickly reaching the limits of global capitalism, and that this reality manifests itself not only economically and politically, but that it is at once a cultural, aesthetic, political, religious, ecological, and philosophical problem...read more

Product Description: Although emerging scholarship in the social sciences suggests that religion can be a potential catalyst of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, few attempts have been made to bring to the fore new theoretical positions and empirical analyses of how cosmopolitanism -- as a philosophical notion, a practice and identity outlook -- can also shape and inform concrete religious affiliations...read more

Product Description: Religion and spirituality are being transformed in our late modern and secularising times. New forms of belief proliferate, often notable for not being limited to traditional systems of reference or expression. Increasingly, these new religions present worldviews which draw directly upon popular culture - or occulture - in fiction, film, art and the internet...read more

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age succeeds in conveying to readers the complexity of secularism while serving as an invaluable guide to a landmark book.