Time Religion And History

What is time? How does our sense of time lead us to approach the world? How did the peoples of the past view time? This book answers these questions through an investigation of the cultures of time in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and the Australian Dreamtime. It argues that our contemporary world is blind as to the significance and complexity of time, preferring to believe that time is ‘natural’ and unchanging. This is of critical importance to historians since the base matter of their study is time, yet there is almost no theoretical literature on time in history. This book offers the first detailed historiographical study of the centrality of time to human cultures. It sets out the complex ways in which ideas of time developed in the major world religions, and the manner in which such conceptions led people both to live in ways very different to our contemporary world and to make very different kinds of ‘histories’. It goes on to argue that modern scientific descriptions of time, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, lie much closer to the complex understandings of time in religions such as Christianity than they do to our ‘common-sense’ notions of time which are centred on progress through a past, present and future.

The relationship between Protestant fundamentalists and mass culture is often considered complex and ambiguous. Selling the Old-Time Religion examines this relationship and shows how the first generation of fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing, advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel. Selectively, and with more sophistication than has been accorded to them, fundamentalists adapted to the consumer society and popular culture with the accompanying values of materialism and immediate gratification, despite the seeming conflict between these values and certain tenets of their religious beliefs. Selling the Old-Time Religion is written by a fundamentalist who is based at the country's foremost fundamentalist institute of higher education. It is a candid and remarkable piece of scholarship that reveals from the inside the movement's first encounters with some of the media methods it now wields with well-documented virtuosity. Carl Abrams draws extensively on sermons, popular journals, and educational archives to reveal the attitudes and actions of the fundamental leadership and the laity. Abrams discusses how fundamentalists' outlook toward contemporary trends and events shifted from aloofness to engagement as they moved inward from the margins of American culture and began to weigh in on the day's issues--from jazz to "flappers"--in large numbers. Fundamentalists in the 1920s and 1930s "were willing to compromise certain traditions that defined the movement, such as premillennialism, holiness, and defense of the faith," Abrams concludes, "but their flexibility with forms of consumption and pleasure strengthened their evangelistic emphasis, perhaps the movement's core." Contrary to the myth of fundamentalism's demise after the Scopes Trial, the movement's uses of mass culture help explain their success in the decades following it. In the end fundamentalists imitated mass culture not to be like the world but to evangelize it.

This book examines the meaning of religion within the scientific, evidence-based history of our known past since the big bang. While our current major religions are only centuries or millennia old, our volume discusses the origins and development of human religious practice and belief over our species’ existence of 300,000 years. The volume also connects the scientific approach to natural and social history with ancient truths of our religious ancestors using new lines of inquiry, new technologies, new modes of expression, and new concepts. It brings together insights of natural scientists, social scientists, philosophers, writers, and theologians to discuss narratives of the universe. The essays discuss that to apprehend religion scientifically, or to interpret and explain science theologically, the subject must be examined through a variety of disciplinary lenses simultaneously and raise several theoretical, philosophical, and moral problems. With a singular investigation into the meaning of religion in the context of the 13.8 billion-year history of our universe, this book will be indispensable for scholars and students of religious studies, big history, sociology and social anthropology, philosophy, and science and technology studies.

Religion is a major subfield of ancient history and classical studies, and Roman religion in particular is usually studied today by experts in two rather distinct halves: the religion of the Roman Republic, covering the fifth through first centuries B.C.; and the religious diversity of the Roman Empire, spanning the first four centuries of our era. In Time in Roman Religion, author Gary Forsythe examines both the religious history of the Republic and the religious history of the Empire. These six studies are unified by the important role played by various concepts of time in Roman religious thought and practice. Previous modern studies of early Roman religion in Republican times have discussed how the placement of religious ceremonies in the calendar was determined by their relevance to agricultural or military patterns of early Roman life, but modern scholars have failed to recognize that many aspects of Roman religious thought and behavior in later times were also preconditioned or even substantially influenced by concepts of time basic to earlier Roman religious history. This book is not a comprehensive survey of all major aspects of Roman religious history spanning one thousand years. Rather, it is a collection of six studies that are bound together by a single analytical theme: namely, time. Yet, in the process of delving into these six different topics the study surveys a large portion of Roman religious history in a representative fashion, from earliest times to the end of the ancient world and the triumph of Christianity.

This book proves there is nothing new under the sun regarding many of our modern religious beliefs. This includes Christianity, and how many of its beliefs could be far older than what we have suspected. It gives a complete run-down of the stellar, lunar, and solar evolution of our religious systems and contains new, long-awaited, exhaustive research on the gods and our beliefs.

Conceptions of time in five major religions of mankind.

In Religion and World History, distinguished authors John C. Super and Briane K. Turley examine the value of religion for interpreting the human experience in the past and present. They explore the elements of religion which best connect it to the cultural and political dynamics that have influenced history. Working within this framework, Super and Turley present three unifying themes: * the relationship between formal and informal religious beliefs, how these change through time, and how they are reflected in different cultures * the relationship between church and state, from theocracies to the repression of religion * the ongoing search for spiritual certainty, and the consequent splintering of core religious beliefs and the development of new ones. One of the few recent books to examine religion’s role in geo-political affairs, its unique approach enables the reader to grasp the many and complex ways in which religion acts upon and reacts to broader global processes.

Examining a wide array of ancient writings, Brent Nongbri dispels the commonly held idea that there is such a thing as ancient religion. Nongbri shows how misleading it is to speak as though religion was a concept native to pre-modern cultures.