Still Bored In A Culture Of Entertainment

Richard Winter's critique of our "culture of entertainment" explores the nature, causes and effects of boredom and counteracts it with practical suggestions for living with passion and wonder.

This addition to the award-winning Engaging Culture series explores the link between leisure and spirituality, offering a Christian perspective on leisure concepts and issues in contemporary society. Paul Heintzman, a respected scholar and experienced recreation practitioner, interacts with biblical, historical, and contemporary leisure studies sources to provide a comprehensive understanding of leisure. He also explains the importance of leisure for spiritual growth and development. This work will appeal to professors and students as well as practitioners in the recreation and leisure services field, youth and college pastors, and camp ministries.

This book collects the lifelong research on boredom by American psychologist Augustin de la Peña (1942-2021). It focuses on the experience of boredom—and other similar states, including ennui, melancholy, laziness, interest, attention, and entertainment—and its associated behaviors. Offering an interdisciplinary chronicle of boredom, from Antiquity to the present, special attention is paid to its daily experience as a ubiquitous phenomenon that informs cultural and political actions that continue to shape our society. Dr. de la Peña describes the obsolescence of the Western Commonsense View of Reality to propose a Developmental Psychophysiological Approach to Reality, reconceptualizing boredom. The book theorizes the condition as both logical and emotional, an axis that has defined the sensibility of the modern era. This is a volume edited posthumously by Josefa Ros Velasco and Christian Parreno in homage to Augustin’s work and his invaluable contribution to the establishment of the field of boredom studies.

Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life culls together the scattered fragments of Henri Lefebvre’s (1901–1991) unrealized sociology of boredom. In assembling these fragments, sprinkled through Lefebvre’s vast oeuvre, Patrick Gamsby constructs the core elements of Lefebvre’s latent theory of boredom. Themes of time (modernity, everyday), space (urban, suburban), and mass culture (culture industry, industry culture) are explored throughout the book, unveiling a concealed dialectical movement at work with the experience of boredom. In analyzing the dialectic of boredom, Gamsby argues that Lefebvre’s project of a critique of everyday life is key for making sense of the linkages between boredom and everyday life in the modern world.

Break the Surface of Spiritual Boredom to Find the Reservoir of Meaning Within We need to be bored. When we get bored and take responsibility for our boredom, we arrive at a new level of interest, introspection, or action that has been stirred by the very creativity used to keep boredom away. The relationship between boredom and creativity is far from accidental. Creative minds are often stimulated by boredom, regarding it as a brain rest until the next great idea looms on the horizon of the otherwise unoccupied mind. from Chapter 10 Boredom is a crisis of our age. In religious terms, boredom is sapping spirituality of its mystical and wholesome benefits, slowly corroding our ability to recognize blessing and beauty in our lives, to experience wonder and awe. What happens when our need for constant newness minimizes our interest in prayer, learning, and the mysteries of nature? This intriguing look at spiritual boredom helps you understand just what this condition is, particularly as it relates to Judaism, and what the absence of inspiration means to the present and future of the Jewish tradition. Drawing insights from psychology, philosophy, and theology as well as ancient Jewish texts, Dr. Erica Brown explores the many ways boredom manifests itself within Judaismin the community, classroom, and synagogueand shows its potentially powerful cultural impact on a faith structure that advises sanctifying time, not merely passing it.

Highly illuminating for parents, vital for students and book lovers alike, Enchanted Hunters transforms our understanding of why children should read. Ever wondered why little children love listening to stories, why older ones get lost in certain books? In this enthralling work, Maria Tatar challenges many of our assumptions about childhood reading. Much as our culture pays lip service to the importance of literature, we rarely examine the creative and cognitive benefits of reading from infancy through adolescence. By exploring how beauty and horror operated in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, and many other narratives, Tatar provides a delightful work for parents, teachers, and general readers, not just examining how and what children read but also showing through vivid examples how literature transports and transforms children with its intoxicating, captivating, and occasionally terrifying energy. In the tradition of Bruno Bettelheim’s landmark The Uses of Enchantment, Tatar’s book is not only a compelling journey into the world of childhood but a trip back for adult readers as well.

In the never-ending quest for fulfillment, we sometimes convince ourselves that life would be better if we just had a different career . . . more education . . . a new spouse . . . a fresh start in another location. The solution to life's challenges, we think, is just around the corner, a few steps ahead?always just out of reach. Living on the Ragged Edge Workbook opens the pages of an ancient journal?the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. In this very personal, unbelievably honest book, King Solomon chronicles his search for satisfaction, experiencing everything the world offered. The wisest man who ever lived, he certainly had the intelligence and the vast resources to pursue whatever his heart desired?from personal riches to sexual pleasures. Solomon had it all. He did it all with abandon. And he came to the end of his days with the ultimate secret for the "good life." Do you want to know the secret? Do you want to know how to find joy and peace in this world gone mad? In this bestseller Charles Swindoll delivers his characteristic insights and wisdom in an exploration of the book of Ecclesiastes and brings home to you Solomon's powerful message for living at its best.