Author: Peter D. Hershock Publisher: ISBN: 9780415770521 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The core teachings and practices of Buddhism are systematically directed toward developing keen and caring insight into the relational or interdependent nature of all things. Hershock applies Buddhist thought to reflect on the challenges to public good, created by emerging social, economic, and political realities associated with increasingly complex global interdependence. In eight chapters, the key arenas for public policy are addressed: the environment, health, media, trade and development, the interplay of politics and religion, international relations, terror and security, and education. Each chapter explains how a specific issue area has come to be shaped by complex interdependence and offers specific insights into directing the growing interdependence toward greater equity, sustainability, and freedom. Thereby, a sustained meditation on the meaning and means of realizing public good is put forward, which results in a solid Buddhist conception of diversity. Hershock argues that concepts of Karma and emptiness are relevant across the full spectrum of policy domains and that Buddhist concepts become increasingly forceful as concerns shift from the local to the global. A remarkable book on this fascinating religion, Buddhism in the Public Sphere will be of interest to scholars and students in Buddhist studies and Asian religion in general.
Author: Peter D. Hershock Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135986746 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Chapter INTRODUCTION -- chapter 1 LIBERATING ENVIRONMENTS -- chapter 2 HEALTH AND HEALING: Relating the personal and the public -- chapter 3 TRADE, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF POST-MARKET ECONOMICS -- chapter 4 TECHNOLOGY, MEDIA, AND THE COLONIZATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS -- chapter 5 GOVERNANCE CULTURES AND COUNTERCULTURES: Religion, politics, and public good -- chapter 6 DIVERSITY AS COMMONS: International relations beyond competition and cooperation -- chapter 7 FROM VULNERABILITY TO VIRTUOSITY: Responding to the realities of global terrorism -- chapter 8 EDUCATING FOR VIRTUOSITY.
Author: Albert Welter Publisher: Springer ISBN: 9811024375 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
This collection examines the impact of East Asian religion and culture on the public sphere, defined as an idealized discursive arena that mediates the official and private spheres. Contending that the actors and agents on the fringes of society were instrumental in shaping the public sphere in traditional and modern East Asia, it considers how these outliers contribute to religious, intellectual, and cultural dialog in the public sphere. Jürgen Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as the discursive arena which grew within Western European bourgeoisie society, arguably overlooking topics such as gender, minorities, and non-European civilizations, as well as the extent to which agency in the public sphere is effective in non-Western societies and how practitioners on the outskirts of mainstream society can participate. This volume responds to and builds upon this dialogue by addressing how religious, intellectual, and cultural agency in the public sphere shapes East Asian cultures, particularly the activities of those found on the peripheries of historic and modern societies.
Author: Peter D. Hershock Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 144221614X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 291
Book Description
Among Buddhist traditions, Zen has been remarkably successful in garnering and sustaining interest outside the Buddhist homelands of Asia, and “zen” is now part of the global cultural lexicon. This deeply informed book explores the history of this enduring Japanese tradition—from its beginnings as a form of Buddhist thought and practice imported from China to its reinvention in medieval Japan as a force for religious, political, and cultural change to its role in Japan’s embrace of modernity. Going deeper, it also explores Zen through the experiences and teachings of key individuals who shaped Zen as a tradition committed to the embodiment of enlightenment by all. By bringing together Zen’s institutional and personal dimensions, Peter D. Hershock offers readers a nuanced yet accessible introduction to Zen as well as distinctive insights into issues that remain relevant today, including the creative tensions between globalization and localization, the interplay of politics and religion, and the possibilities for integrating social transformation with personal liberation. Including an introduction to the basic teachings and practices of Buddhism and an account of their spread across Asia, Public Zen, Personal Zen deftly blends historical detail with the felt experiences of Zen practitioners grappling with the meaning of human suffering, personal freedom, and the integration of social and spiritual progress.
Author: Shawn Frederick McHale Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 9780824826550 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
In this ambitious and path-breaking book, Shawn McHale challenges long held views that define modern Vietnamese history in terms of anticolonial nationalism and revolution. McHale argues instead for a historiography that does not overstress either the role of politics in general or communism in particular. Using a wide range of sources from Vietnam, France, and the United States, many of them previously unexploited, he shows how the use of printed matter soared between 1920 and 1945 and in the process transformed Vietnamese public life and shaped the modern Vietnamese consciousnesss. Print and Power examines the impact of the French colonial state on Vietnamese society as well as Vietnamese and East Asian understandings of public discourse and public space. The work goes on to contest the impact of Confucianism on pre-modern and modern Vietnam and, based on materials never before used, provides a radically new perspective on the rise of Vietnamese communism from 1929 to 1945.
Author: Niamh Reilly Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135014256 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
The re-emergence of religion as a significant cultural, social and political, force is not gender neutral. Tensions between claims for women’s equality and the rights of sexual minorities on one side and the claims of religions on the other side are well-documented across all major religions and regions. It is also well recognized in feminist scholarship that gender identities and ethno-religious identities work together in complex ways that are often exploited by dominant groups. Hence, a more comprehensive understanding of the changing role and influence of religion in the public sphere more widely requires complex, multidisciplinary and comparative gender analyses. Most recent discussion on these matters, however, especially in Europe, has focused primarily on the perceived subordinate status of Muslim women. These debates are a reminder of the deep interrelation of questions of gender, identity, human rights and religious freedom more generally. The relatively narrow (albeit important) purview of such discussions so far, however, underscores the need to extend the horizon of enquiry vis-à-vis religion, gender and the public sphere beyond the binary of ‘Islam versus the West’. Religion, Gender and the Public Sphere moves gender from the periphery to the centre of contemporary debates about the role of religion in public and political life. It offers a timely, multidisciplinary collection of gender-focused essays that address an array of challenges arising from the changing role and influence of religious organisations, identities, actors and values in the public sphere in contemporary multicultural and democratic societies.
Author: Peter Thijssen Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317088158 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
The public sphere provides a domain of social life in which public opinion is expressed by means of rational discourse and debate. Habermas linked its historical development to the coffee houses and journals in England, Parisian salons and German reading clubs. He described it as a bourgeois public sphere, where private people come together and where they turn from a politically disempowered bourgeoisie into an effective political agent - the public intellectual. With communication networks being diversified and expanded over time, the worldwide web has put pressure on traditional public spheres. These new informal and horizontal networks shaped by the internet create new contexts in which an anonymous and dispersed public may gather in political e-communities to reflect critically on societal issues. These de-centered modes of communication and influence-seeking change the role of the (traditional) public intellectual and - at first sight - seem to make their contributions less influential. What processes, therefore, influence changes within public spheres and how can intellectuals assert authority within them? Should we speak of different types of intellectuals, according to the different modes of public intellectual engagement? This ground-breaking volume gives a multi-disciplinary account of the way in which public intellectuals have constructed their role and position in the public sphere in the past, and how they try to voice public concerns and achieve authority again within those fragmented public spheres today.
Author: Peter D. Hershock
Author: Peter D. Hershock
Author: Albert Welter
Author: Peter D. Hershock
Author: Shawn Frederick McHale
Author: Niamh Reilly
Author: Benjamin Schonthal
Author: Peter D. Hershock
Author: Peter Thijssen
Author: Gareth Fisher