The Chicken Farm and Other Sacred Places PDF Download

Author: Ken Barnes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781576585535
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
"With humor and honesty, teacher Ken Barnes takes us on his journey from tending chickens to assisting in a kitchen to sweating in a steel mill and more. Stories of frustration, joy, and every emotion in between reveal the true direction of being a disciple of Christ: the way up is always down. Joy in serving comes not from excitement or recognition. It comes from following the example of Christ, the ultimate servant."--From back cover

Author: Jon Pahl
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725224658
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Christian historian Sidney Mead has observed: "In America space has played the part that time has played in older cultures of the world." In Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl examines this provocative statement in conversation with what he calls the "spatial character" of American theology. He argues that places are always imaginatively constructed by the human beings who inhabit them. Sometimes this spatial theology works to our benefit; other times it poses spiritual risks. What happens when our banal "clothing of the sacred" violates our genuine need for comfort and intimacy? Or when we remember that the fleeting pleasures of a shopping trip or a Disneyland escape are designed to fill someone else's pocket rather than the spiritual emptiness in our own hearts? Pahl develops several ways to "clothe the divine from within the Christian tradition." He introduces a theology of place that reveals aspects of God's character through biblical metaphors drawn from physical spaces, such as the true vine, the rock, and the living water. Accessible and thought provoking, this enlightening book provides a better grasp of our particularly American way of lending religious significance to spaces of all kinds.

Author: Bal Gopal Shrestha
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144383825X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 635

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Book Description
This book presents a detailed view of Newar society and culture, and its socio-economic, socio-religious and ritual aspects, concentrating on the Newar town of Sankhu in the Valley of Nepal. The foundation of the town of Sankhu is attributed to the goddess Vajrayoginī, venerated by both Buddhists and Hindus in Nepal and beyond. Myths, history, and topographical details of the town and the sanctuary of the goddess Vajrayoginī and her cult are discussed on the basis of published sources, unpublished chronicles, and inscriptions. The book deals with the relation between Hinduism and Buddhism, with the interrelations between the Newar castes (jāt), caste-bound associations (sī guthi), and above all with the numerous socio-religious associations (guthi) that uphold ritual life of the Newars. All major and minor Newar feasts, festivals, dances, fasts and processions of gods and goddesses are discussed.

Author: Todd LeVasseur
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081316799X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Distinct practices of eating are at the heart of many of the world's faith traditions -- from the Christian Eucharist to Muslim customs of fasting during Ramadan to the vegetarianism and asceticism practiced by some followers of Hinduism and Buddhism. What we eat, how we eat, and whom we eat with can express our core values and religious devotion more clearly than verbal piety. In this wide-ranging collection, eminent scholars, theologians, activists, and lay farmers illuminate how religious beliefs influence and are influenced by the values and practices of sustainable agriculture. Together, they analyze a multitude of agricultural practices for their contributions to healthy, ethical living and environmental justice. Throughout, the contributors address current critical issues, including global trade agreements, indigenous rights to land and seed, and the effects of postcolonialism on farming and industry. Covering indigenous, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish perspectives, this groundbreaking volume makes a significant contribution to the study of ethics and agriculture.

Author: Priya Vincent
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1430306181
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
This is the story of a garden in India that evolved into farm and my inner journey during the process of its creation. It is the story of the transformation of an outer landscape from what was virtually a desert to a productive garden. It is the story of a process of inner transformation and deeper surrender that the work made possible. I invite you, with this book, to join me on this journey of outer and inner discovery. For wherever we are and whatever our work, we all share a similar process when we seek to become conscious and to understand the mystery of our being.

Author: Loftur Reimar Gissurarson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351292145
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Icelandic Spiritualism is an engaging social anthropological study of the place of spiritualism in Icelandic church and society during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging standard theoretical approaches to the study of religion, the book contributes a wealth of data on the history of religion and psychical research, presenting it in a vivid descriptive narrative. The authors trace the role of the spirit world in Icelandic culture, giving particular attention to the distinctive history of Iceland's "conversion" to Christianity. They focus on the appearance of "modern" spiritualism as a distinct phenomenon in Icelandic life. The book studies the interaction between various groups in fin-de-siecle Icelandic society, not least in the state church, as mediumistic phenomena became widely reported through the newspapers. To some, Icelandic spiritualism may be considered a deviant case of Protestantism. What makes this book interesting, however, is that the spiritualism is seen as integral to Iceland's transition to modernity. While Icelandic Spiritualism concentrates mainly on the first half of the twentieth century, it also provides a summary of the continuation of spiritualist phenomena up to the current period. This intriguing study will be of interest to theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists.

Author: Xiaowei Wang
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Author: Nicholas O’Connell
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029580341X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
On Sacred Ground explores the literature of the Northwest, the area that extends from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the Siskiyou Mountains. The Northwest exhibits astonishing geographical diversity and yet the entire bioregion shares a similarity of climate, flora, and fauna. For Nicholas O’Connell, the effects of nature on everyday Northwest life carry over to the region's literature. Although Northwest writers address a number of subjects, the relationship between people and place proves the dominant one, and that has been true since the first tribes settled the region and began telling stories about it, thousands of years ago. Indeed, it is the common thread linking Chief Seattle to Theodore Roethke, Narscissa Whitman to Ursula K. Le Guin, Joaquin Miller to Ivan Doig, Marilynne Robinson to Jack London, Betty MacDonald to Gary Snyder. Tracing the history of Pacific Northwest literary works--from Native American myths to the accounts of explorers and settlers, the effusions of the romantics, the sharply etched stories of the realists, the mystic visions of Northwest poets, and the contemporary explosion of Northwest poetry and prose--O’Connell shows how the most important contribution of Northwest writers to American literature is their articulation of a more spiritual human relationship with landscape. Pacific Northwest writers and storytellers see the Northwest not just as a source of material wealth but as a spiritual homeland, a place to lead a rich and fulfilling life within the whole context of creation. And just as the relationship between people and place serves as the unifying feature of Northwest literature, so also does literature itself possess a perhaps unique ability to transform a landscape into a sacred place.

Author: Sally Ann McMurry
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271021071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Rural Pennsylvania's landscapes are evocative, richly textured testimonies to the lives and skills of generations of builders&—architects as well as local builders and craft workers. Farmhouses and barns, silos and fences, even field patterns attest to how residents over the years have had a sense of place that was not only functional but also comfortable and aesthetically appropriate for the time. From Sugar Camps to Star Barns tells the story of one such place, a landscape that evolved in southwestern Pennsylvania's Somerset County. Sally McMurry traces the rural life and landscape of Somerset County as it evolved from the earliest settlement days. Eighteenth-century residents were a forest people, living on sparsely built farmsteads and making free use of the heavily forested landscape. The makeshift sugar camp typified their hardscrabble lives. In the nineteenth century, the people of this area turned to farming. Prompted by the ''market revolution'' that had come to Somerset County, they pursued a highly varied agriculture, combining a subsistence base with robust production of commodities shipped to distant cities. Their landscape reflected this combination of the local and the cosmopolitan&—a combination that reached its full expression in the distinctive two-story banked farmhouse with double-decker porch, flanked by a substantial Pennsylvania barn. The twentieth century brought a more industrialized agriculture to Somerset County. But the shift to profit-and-loss farming also meant the accentuation of landscape elements specific to market products. The magnificent ''star barns'' of this era overshadowed the houses, and ancillary structures, such as ''peepy houses'' and silos, spoke to the pressures of efficiency and mass production. The subsequent rise of coal mining helped to stimulate this trend, both by supplying local markets and by creating an incentive for farmers to visually distinguish their landscapes from those of the coal-patch towns. Illustrated with over 100 photographs, maps, drawings, and diagrams, From Sugar Camps to Star Barns demonstrates how much we can learn about the economy and culture of a particular place simply by being attentive to the built landscape.

Author: Ann Armbrecht
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231146531
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Thin Places is an eloquent meditation on what it means to move between cultures and how one might finally come home, a particular paradox in a culture that lacks deep ties to the natural world. During the 1990s, Ann Armbrecht, an American anthropologist, made several trips to northeastern Nepal to research how the Yamphu Rai acquired, farmed, and held onto their land; how they perceived their area's recent designation as a national park and conservation area; and whether-as she believed-they held a wisdom about living on the earth that the industrialized West had forgotten. What Armbrecht found instead were men and women who shared her restlessness, people also driven by the feeling that there must be more to life than they could find in their village. Charting Armbrecht's travels in the mountains of Nepal and in the United States, as well as her disintegrating marriage back home, Thin Places is ultimately an exploration not of the sacred far-off but of the sacredness of places that are between?between the internal and external landscape, the self and others, and the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where we arrive but a way of being in place, wherever that place may be.