In Search of the Sacred Book

Author: Aníbal González
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822983028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
In Search of the Sacred Book studies the artistic incorporation of religious concepts such as prophecy, eternity, and the afterlife in the contemporary Latin American novel. It departs from sociopolitical readings by noting the continued relevance of religion in Latin American life and culture, despite modernity's powerful secularizing influence. Analyzing Jorge Luis Borges's secularized "narrative theology" in his essays and short stories, the book follows the development of the Latin American novel from the early twentieth century until today by examining the attempts of major novelists, from María Luisa Bombal, Alejo Carpentier, and Juan Rulfo, to Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Lezama Lima, to "sacralize" the novel by incorporating traits present in the sacred texts of many religions. It concludes with a view of the "desacralization" of the novel by more recent authors, from Elena Poniatowska and Fernando Vallejo to Roberto Bolaño.

Sacred

Author: Chris Rainier
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1647224578
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Sacred presents photographs of locations cloaked in mysticism and imbued with a spiritual energy, exploring the meaning of the sacred in a global, multicultural context. Countless cultures have found it in the magnificence of nature and what can be called the divine gestures of the nature landscape. We looked to the majesty of snowcapped mountains, the glow of the full moon, the power of a magical waterfall, the endless sands of the Sahara Desert, the towering height of the tallest trees and the subtle essence of a lotus flower. We created remarkable buildings to the essence of what we felt to be sacred. What is sacred and what do cultures around the world consider sacred? What is sacred to a Muslim, a Tibetan monk, a Native American, a Christian elder, an atheist, a mountaineer, a poet or an artist? Chris Rainier has spent the last forty years in search of the sacred––from the peaks of Tibet to the icebergs of Antarctica, from the vibrant mysticism of India to the mysteries of the Silk Road, from the jungles of New Guinea to the druid stones of Scotland, and from the deserts of the Southwest United States to the rock art of aboriginal Australia and Africa. Rainier’s photographs masterfully capture the wonder and awe inherent to all these sites. Sacred presents photographs from this lifelong journey. The collection offers spiritually driven glimpses of ancient monuments and haunting landscapes from around the world––each echoing with the energy of timeless and sacred power places. RENOWN PHOTOGRAPHER AND AUTHOR: Chris Rainier is a documentary photographer and National Geographic explorer who is highly respected for his documentation of endangered cultures and traditional languages around the globe. AWARD-WINNING PHOTOGRAPHY: Rainier was Ansel Adams last photo assistant and has contributed numerous photographs for the United Nations, UNESCO, Amnesty International, Conservation International, the Smithsonian Institution, CNN, BBC, NPR, National Geographic, TIME magazine, the New York Times, and LIFE magazine. CELEBRATED CONTRIBUTORS: Over twelve internationally recognized contributors discuss what sacred means to them and include British essayist and novelist Pico Iyer; ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker Wade Davis; and Pulitzer Prize winner and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek.

The Sacred and the Profane

Author: Mircea Eliade
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156792011
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also emcompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence. -- P. [4] of cover.

Sacred

Author: Dennis Lehane
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061807664
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
A beautiful, grief-stricken woman has vanished without a trace. So has the detective hired to find her. And a lot of money… Enter tough-nosed private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Rooted in the streets of blue-collar Dorchester, they've seen it all – and survived. But this case leads them into unexpected territory: a place of lies and corruption, where trusting anyone could get them killed, and where nothing is sacred. Another superior thriller from Dennis Lehane, the bestselling and acclaimed author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Gone, Baby, Gone.

Facts are Sacred

Author: Simon Rogers
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
ISBN: 9780571301614
Category : Almanacs
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A full-colour guide to the data that shapes our lives, looking behind the headlines and the soundbites to what's really going on. What are the real effects of the austerity measures? What is the true human cost of the war in Afghanistan?

Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy

Author: James L. Griffith
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 146250583X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Drawing on narrative, postmodern, and other therapeutic perspectives, this book guides therapists in exploring the creative and healing possibilities in clients' spiritual and religious experience. Vivid personal accounts and dialogues bring to life the ways spirituality may influence the stories told in therapy, the language and metaphors used, and the meanings brought to key relationships and events. Applications are discussed for a wide variety of clinical situations, including helping people resolve relationship problems, manage psychiatric symptoms, and cope with medical illnesses.

What Color Is the Sacred?

Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789993
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path. Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum,this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich. Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.

The Mark of the Sacred

Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788456
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
This study of religion and violence “forces us to reexamine some of our most cherished self-images of modern liberal democratic societies” (Charles Taylor). Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls “enlightened doomsaying,” has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religion and reason that has set us on this course. In denial of our sacred origins and hubristically convinced of the powers of human reason, we cease to know our own limits: our disenchanted world leaves us defenseless against a headlong rush into the abyss of global warming, nuclear holocaust, and the other catastrophes that loom on our horizon. Reviving the religious anthropology of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss and in dialogue with the work of René Girard, Dupuy shows that we must remember the world’s sacredness in order to keep human violence in check. A metaphysical and theological detective, he tracks the sacred in the very fields where human reason considers itself most free from everything it judges irrational: science, technology, economics, political and strategic thought. In making such claims, The Mark of the Sacred takes on religion bashers, secularists, and fundamentalists at once. Written by one of the deepest and most versatile thinkers of our time, it militates for a world where reason is no longer an enemy of faith. “The Mark of the Sacred is one of those rare books . . . which, in an enlightened well-organized state, should be printed and freely distributed in all schools!” —Slavoj Žižek

The Sacred Act of Reading

Author: Anne Margaret Castro
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813943469
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
From Zora Neale Hurston to Derek Walcott to Toni Morrison, New World black authors have written about African-derived religious traditions and spiritual practices. The Sacred Act of Reading examines religion and sociopolitical power in modern and contemporary texts of a variety of genres from the black Americas. By engaging with spiritual traditions such as Vodou, Kumina, and Protestant Christianity while drawing on canonical Eurocentric literary theory, Anne Margaret Castro presents a novel, nuanced reading of power through the physical and metaphysical relationships portrayed in these great works of New World black literature. Castro examines prophecy in the dramas of Derek Walcott, preaching in the ethnography of Zora Neale Hurston, and liturgy in the novels of Toni Morrison, offering comparative readings alongside the works of Afro-Colombian anthropologist Manuel Zapata Olivella, Jamaican sociologist Erna Brodber, and Canadian fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson. The Sacred Act of Reading is the first book to bring together literary texts, historical and contemporary anthropological studies, theology, and critical theory to show how black authors in the Americas employ spiritual phenomena as theoretical frameworks for thinking within, against, and beyond structures of political dominance, dependence, and power.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Author: Viktor Pelevin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780670019885
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
A novel about a fifteen-year-old prostitute who is actually a 2,000-year old werefox who seduces men with her tail and drains them of their sexual power. She falls in love with a KGB officer who is actually a werewolf.