Author: Ayala Fader Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691234485 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
"This book concerns a cohort of ultra-orthodox Jews based in the greater New York area who, while retaining membership and close familial and other ties with their strictly observant communities, seek out secular knowledge about the world on the down low (so to speak), both online and via in-person encounters. Ayala Fader conducted her ethnographic research in these rarified social circles for years, developing relationships of trust with the mostly young married men and women who have taken to clandestine methods to find alternative social spaces in which to question what it means to be ethical and what a life of self-fulfillment looks like. Fader's book reveals the stresses and strains that such "double-lifers" experience, including the difficulty these life choices inject into relationships with wives, husbands, and one's children. Not all of these "double-lifers" become atheists. Fader's interlocutors can be placed on a broad spectrum ranging from religiously observant but open-minded at one end to atheism on the other. The rabbinical leadership of these ultra-orthodox communities are well aware of this phenomenon and of how unfiltered internet access makes such alternative forms of seeking an ever-present temptation. (Some ultra-orthodox rabbis have been sounding the alarm for years, claiming that the internet represents more of a threat to community survival today than the Holocaust did in the last century.) Fader's book examines the institutional responses of ultra-orthodox communities to the double-lifers. These include what is typically referred to as a Torah-based type of "religious therapy" conducted by trained members of these communities who as therapists and "life coaches" blend elements of modern psychiatry with ultra-orthodoxy and "treat" troubling, potentially life-altering doubt and skepticism as symptoms of underlying emotional pathology"--
Author: John Martin Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520912330 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
How could early modern Venice, a city renowned for its political freedom and social harmony, also have become a center of religious dissent and inquisitorial repression? To answer this question, John Martin develops an innovative approach that deftly connects social and cultural history. The result is a profoundly important contribution to Renaissance and Reformation studies. Martin offers a vivid re-creation of the social and cultural worlds of the Venetian heretics—those men and women who articulated their hopes for religious and political reform and whose ideologies ranged from evangelical to anabaptist and even millenarian positions. In exploring the connections between religious beliefs and social experience, he weaves a rich tapestry of Renaissance urban life that is sure to intrigue all those involved in anthropological, religious, and historical studies—students and scholars alike.
Author: Ayala Fader Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400830990 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
Mitzvah Girls is the first book about bringing up Hasidic Jewish girls in North America, providing an in-depth look into a closed community. Ayala Fader examines language, gender, and the body from infancy to adulthood, showing how Hasidic girls in Brooklyn become women responsible for rearing the next generation of nonliberal Jewish believers. To uncover how girls learn the practices of Hasidic Judaism, Fader looks beyond the synagogue to everyday talk in the context of homes, classrooms, and city streets. Hasidic women complicate stereotypes of nonliberal religious women by collapsing distinctions between the religious and the secular. In this innovative book, Fader demonstrates that contemporary Hasidic femininity requires women and girls to engage with the secular world around them, protecting Hasidic men and boys who study the Torah. Even as Hasidic religious observance has become more stringent, Hasidic girls have unexpectedly become more fluent in secular modernity. They are fluent Yiddish speakers but switch to English as they grow older; they are increasingly modest but also fashionable; they read fiction and play games like those of mainstream American children but theirs have Orthodox Jewish messages; and they attend private Hasidic schools that freely adapt from North American public and parochial models. Investigating how Hasidic women and girls conceptualize the religious, the secular, and the modern, Mitzvah Girls offers exciting new insights into cultural production and change in nonliberal religious communities.
Author: Ross Douthat Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 143917833X Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Traces the decline of Christianity in America since the 1950s, posing controversial arguments about the role of heresy in the nation's downfall while calling for a revival of traditional Christian practices.
Author: Katie Henry Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062698893 Category : Young Adult Fiction Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year! Put an atheist in a strict Catholic school? Expect comedy, chaos, and an Inquisition. The Breakfast Club meets Saved! in debut author Katie Henry’s hilarious novel about a band of misfits who set out to challenge their school, one nun at a time. Perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli and Robyn Schneider. When Michael walks through the doors of Catholic school, things can’t get much worse. His dad has just made the family move again, and Michael needs a friend. When a girl challenges their teacher in class, Michael thinks he might have found one, and a fellow atheist at that. Only this girl, Lucy, isn’t just Catholic . . . she wants to be a priest. Lucy introduces Michael to other St. Clare’s outcasts, and he officially joins Heretics Anonymous, where he can be an atheist, Lucy can be an outspoken feminist, Avi can be Jewish and gay, Max can wear whatever he wants, and Eden can practice paganism. Michael encourages the Heretics to go from secret society to rebels intent on exposing the school’s hypocrisies one stunt at a time. But when Michael takes one mission too far—putting the other Heretics at risk—he must decide whether to fight for his own freedom or rely on faith, whatever that means, in God, his friends, or himself.
Author: Thomas Cahill Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0385495587 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
The New York Times bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization reveals how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. • “Cahill is our king of popular historians.” —The Dallas Morning News This was an age in which whole continents and peoples were discovered. It was an era of sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies—and of unprecedented courage, as thousands refused to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. In these exquisitely written and lavishly illustrated pages, Cahill illuminates, as no one else can, the great gift-givers who shaped our history—those who left us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.
Author: Margot Adler Publisher: Beacon Press ISBN: 0807070246 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 325
Book Description
Starting in 1964, writes Margot Adler in this dazzling memoir, “I found myself mysteriously at the center of extraordinary events.” Now a correspondent for National Public Radio, Adler was a young woman determined to be taken seriously and to be an agent of change—on her own terms, free from dogma and authoritarian constraints. From campus activism at the University of California at Berkeley to civil rights work in Mississippi, from antiwar protests to observing the socialist revolution in Cuba, she found those chances in the 1960s. Heretic’s Heart illuminates the events, ideas, passions, and ecstatic commitments of the decade like no other memoir. At the book’s center is the powerful—and unique—correspondence between Adler, then an antiwar activist at Berkeley, and a young American soldier fighting in Vietnam. The correspondence begins when Adler reads a letter the infantryman has written to a Berkeley newspaper. “I’ve heard rumors that there are people back in the world who don’t believe this war should be. I’m not positive of this though, ’cause it seems to me that if enough of them told the right people in the right way, then something might be done about it. . . . You see, while you’re discussing it amongst each other, being beat, getting in bed with dark-haired artists . . . some people here are dying for lighting a cigarette at night.” Heretic’s Heart also explores Adler’s attempt to come to terms with her singular legacy as the only grandchild of Alfred Adler, collaborator of Freud and founder of Individual Psychology, and as the daughter of a forceful beauty who bequeaths her spunk and adventurousness to her daughter, but whose overpowering personality forces Adler to strike out on her own. Adler’s memoir marks an initiatory journey from spirit through politics and revolution back to spirit again. Revealing, funny, joyful, and often wise, Heretic’s Heart will restore the spirit of the 1960s: the passion, the confusion, the sense of social transformation and limitless possibility, and the ecstatic feeling that the world is on the cusp of change.
Author: Dean Grodzins Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807862045 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 656
Book Description
Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was a powerful preacher who rejected the authority of the Bible and of Jesus, a brilliant scholar who became a popular agitator for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights, and a political theorist who defined democracy as "government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people--words that inspired Abraham Lincoln. Parker had more influence than anyone except Ralph Waldo Emerson in shaping Transcendentalism in America. In American Heretic, Dean Grodzins offers a compelling account of the remarkable first phase of Parker's career, when this complex man--charismatic yet awkward, brave yet insecure--rose from poverty and obscurity to fame and notoriety as a Transcendentalist prophet. Grodzins reveals hitherto hidden facets of Parker's life, including his love for a woman who was not his wife, and presents fresh perspectives on Transcendentalism. Grodzins explores Transcendentalism's religious roots, shows the profound religious and political issues at stake in the "Transcendentalist controversy," and offers new insights into Parker's Transcendentalist colleagues, including Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. He traces, too, the intellectual origins of Parker's epochal definition of democracy as government of, by, and for the people. The manuscript of this book was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians.
Author: Jonathan Benzion Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004510311 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
This work is an academic pursuit that aims to produce innovative scholarly general interest that explores, through a fresh perspective and from a historical approach and a multidisciplinary angle, an understudied subject of Colonial and Early Independent Mexico’s History: Islam.
Author: Ayala Fader
Author: John Martin
Author: Ayala Fader
Author: Ross Douthat
Author: David W. Bercot
Author: Katie Henry
Author: Thomas Cahill
Author: Margot Adler
Author: Dean Grodzins
Author: Jonathan Benzion