What do you see as the pro's and con's of #documentaries? I'm often not a fan, but want to be. My issues with them, and mostly it comes from I love to learn and want docs to be a starting point, not the end:
Credentials of the experts can be spotty
No sources given
No way to ask follow-up questions
Too much theatrics / reenactment
Not as detailed as a book
Often don't cover the topics I want (social science, #religion, #history, etc)
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.
If you search for this phrase or "how to start a religion" in Google, 670 million results are shown in the first case and more than 3 billion in the second case. On Amazon there are several books with these or similar titles such as (surprisingly) "How to Build a God in Your Garage". Some websites (with more or less seriousness) try to explain step by step how to create your sect or community of beliefs.
Deeper and deeper into #Japanese#culture and people, I went into the #Kyoto Imperial Palace for a special performance of #Gagaku (雅楽), imperial court #music and #dances of #Asian mainland origin that have been performed there since the Heian Period over a thousand years ago. An acquaintance who is a Shintō priestess (see photo) from Nara played two types of traditional flutes that sustain an eerie or higher-worldly atmosphere. The relatively slow and deliberate movements of the mostly male dancers in many-layered gorgeous contumes stand in contrast with the frenetic tempo of modern #entertainment. We experience #time as the pace of transformation, and that brief time transfixed with the Gagaku performance was but an interlude from an ancient era in a workday preparing for university classes and a keynote address. Photos will have to suffice to evoke the special atmosphere.
"The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology (formerly
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology) is a growing teaching and learning
resource. Its goal is to facilitate access to scholarship in Social Anthropology
for experts and non-experts worldwide. All entries are written and peer-reviewed
by leading academics."
📗 The book “Portuguese Colonialism and Islam. Mozambique and Guinea, 1930 –1974: From Repression to Religious Seduction”, authored by Mário Machaqueiro, will be presented by Susana Trovão (CRIA) and Pedro Aires Oliveira (IHC) on the 15th of November.
A favourite verbal mistake I think should enter the language, when I first learnt about "cognitive dissonance" I confused it with "cognitive dissidence" should be a term - for thinking outside the box, for offering uncomfortable truths, for many neurodiverse.
I hear lots of professed Christians say a key belief is seeking truth & why science originated in Christian societies - cognitive dissonance.
The safest, richest, most stable, freest, and, by many counts, most moral countries in the world are secular, have a large percentage of their population not believing in God. One cavate they aren't forced into disbelief as in being communistic or capitalist as in USSR, Albania, Egypt, Turkey, etc
In Out of Eden , Paul W. Kahn offers a philosophical meditation on the problem of evil. He uses the Genesis story of the Fall as the starting point for a profound articulation of the human condition. Kahn's interpretation of Genesis leads him to inquiries into a variety of modern forms of evil, including slavery, torture, and genocide.
Alright. I just finished the Dīgha Nikāya, the first volume of the Sutta Piṭaka of the Pāli Canon of #Buddhism.
Next up is the Majjhima Nikāya which will probably take me a lot longer since it's more than twice as long at 1424 pages in 5.75 x 9.00 inches while the Dīgha Nikāya is only 684 pages in 5.75 x 8.75 inches.
Conversations with Robert Bellah and Christian Smith
More often than not it's a class in the social sciences that challenges the faith of students, not a class in biology. Does critical understanding of our religious traditions, institutions, and convictions undercut them? Or can a modern social scientific approach deepen faith's commitments, making us full participants in today's intellectual culture?
The Kashihara shrine (橿原神宮) area of Nara is a cradle of Japanese civilization formerly known as Yamato. I especially didn't want to miss the archaeological museum, so a couple of its treasures are included here. The shrine is dedicated to the legendary first Emperor Jimmu (神武天皇). The Buddhist temple Kumedera (久米寺) near Kashihara Jingū is a Shingon temple, but it predates the founder Kūkai. It was where Kūkai found the indecipherable Mahāvairocana Sūtra (大日経) that justified his precious voyage to Chang'an, as I alluded recently in the journal paper "Translation Issues in the Rapid Transmission of Esoteric Buddhism from India to China to Japan" at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371965557
Now that's exactly what I have always believed... My moral code in a nutshell, simple and to the point,with religion having nothing to do with it:
"What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right." #SmallGods by #terrypratchett#discworld#discworldquotes@bookstodon#reading#religion#morality
I find myself not understanding the concept of atheism. Who wants to explain it to me in a coherent way for a beginner? With a metaphysical substantiation please, if that is at all possible.
"He demonstrates how imperial Christianity inflected the production of truth far beyond the domain of theology — and how intellectual tools forged in the fires of doctrinal controversy shed their theological baggage and came to undergird the great intellectual productions of the Theodosian Age, and their material expressions."