This video is an excerpt of a lecture by Jürgen Habermas, delievered at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs on October 19th.
Posts Tagged ‘ritual’
November 2nd, 2011
Where did religion come from?
posted by Robert N. Bellah
When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied, “Deep desire to know everything: what the universe is and where we are in it.” I don’t deny that I said it—it’s just that I would have thought I would have given a more pedestrian reply, because I am a sociologist, with a Ph.D. in my discipline and some 40 years experience as a professor at Harvard and Berkeley. And I am quite aware that early in the last century Max Weber, in a famous 1918 talk called “Science as a Vocation,” warned that “science has entered a phase of specialization previously unknown and this will forever remain the case.”
August 17th, 2011
A fairy tale cathedral
posted by Amanda KaplanThe Assumption of the Virgin does not just mark Mary’s ascent to heaven but an annual pilgrimage to one of France’s oldest churches located in one of France’s oldest trees, Chêne Chappelle:
August 15th, 2011
An interdisciplinary exploration of death
posted by Amanda KaplanThis September 24th, historian, writer, and artist Dr. Paul Koudounaris will open the doors to his first exhibit and book signing of The Empire of Death.
June 30th, 2010
“The Lady Twilight”
posted by Charles GelmanOver at Killing the Buddha, William Dalrymple is excerpting his new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.
June 17th, 2010
Redeeming the Burning Man
posted by Amanda KaplanIn her newly published book Theater in a Crowded Fire, Lee Gilmore tells the story of the infamous Burning Man Festival, reclaiming its reputation as a specifically spiritual event. Religion Dispatches interviews Gilmore.
December 11th, 2009
Colonialism and conflict
posted by Stephen Berkwitz
If the idea of purification is to retain broad currency across the colonial landscape, it may need to be defined differently, more in terms of separating out truth from falsehood, or the divine from the diabolical, than of fixing boundaries between the spiritual and the material. While questions of ontological difference could be salient in Sumba and certain other mission fields, the distinctions drawn between persons and things in acts of purification fail to account for other important distinctions drawn between persons themselves.
October 28th, 2009
Sacramental poetics
posted by Regina Schwartz
By its very nature, mystery is much more difficult to speak about, and certainly to track. But religious ritual claims to offer mystery as well as sociality. It claims to make the transcendent immanent, and transcendence—whether vertical or horizontal, above or beyond—is the sphere of the sacred, of what is beyond our comprehension, control and use. We can point to it, sign it, and by doing so, evoke it. But that “beyond” is more than we can say, hear, touch, taste or even understand.
September 8th, 2009
Rethinking secularism and religion in the global age
posted by Mark Juergensmeyer
Last September, I sat down at UC-Berkeley with the eminent sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, for a discussion about religious evolution, the ideas of religion and secularism, the rise of extreme positions associated with both of those terms, and the future of universalistic faiths in an emerging global civil society. The following is an excerpt from our discussion, a full transcript of which is available here (PDF).
February 9th, 2009
Embedded religion in Asia
posted by Richard Madsen
The secularity of modern Asian states has by no means led to widespread social secularity, Taylor’s second secularity, a decline of religious belief and practice among ordinary people. The degree of religious practice varies from country to country, but almost everywhere temples, mosques, churches, and shrines are ubiquitous and full of people, especially during festival seasons. Even in China, where the government actively propagates an atheist ideology and has severely restricted open religious activities, it has been estimated that as much as ninety-five percent of the population engages from time to time in some form of religious practice. Moreover, throughout Asia there have been impressive revivals and reformations of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian religious beliefs and practices—Asia is religiously dynamic.
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