The Corporeal Imagination

2012-02-28 Religion

Author : Patricia Cox Miller
Release : 2012-02-28
Genre : Religion
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 689/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Book Synopsis The Corporeal Imagination by : Patricia Cox Miller

Download or read book The Corporeal Imagination written by Patricia Cox Miller. This book was released on 2012-02-28. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

In the Eye of the Animal

2018-06-15 Religion

Author : Patricia Cox Miller
Release : 2018-06-15
Genre : Religion
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 226/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Book Synopsis In the Eye of the Animal by : Patricia Cox Miller

Download or read book In the Eye of the Animal written by Patricia Cox Miller. This book was released on 2018-06-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early Christian theology posited a strict division between animals and humans. Nevertheless, animal figures abound in early Christian literature and art—from Augustine's renowned "wonder at the agility of the mosquito on the wing," to vivid exegeses of the six days of creation detailed in Genesis—and when they appear, the distinctions between human and animal are often dissolved. How, asks Patricia Cox Miller, does one account for the stunning zoological imagination found in a wide variety of genres of ancient Christian texts? In the Eye of the Animal complicates the role of animals in early Christian thought by showing how textual and artistic images and interpretive procedures actually celebrated a continuum of human and animal life. Synthesizing early Christian studies, contemporary philosophy, animal studies, ethology, and modern poetry, Miller identifies two contradictory strands in early Christian thinking about animals. The dominant thread viewed the body and soul of the human being as dominical, or the crowning achievement of creation; animals, with their defective souls, related to humans only as reminders of the brutish physical form. However, the second strand relied upon the idea of a continuum of animal life, which enabled comparisons between animals and humans. This second tendency, explains Miller, arises particularly in early Christian literature in which ascetic identity, the body, and ethics intersect. She explores the tension between these modes by tracing the image of the animal in early Christian literature, from the ethical animal behavior on display in Basil of Caesarea's Hexaemeron and the anonymous Physiologus, to the role of animals in articulating erotic desire, and from the idyllic intimacy of monks and animals in literature of desert ascetism to early Christian art that envisions paradise through human-animal symbiosis.

Imagination and the Meaningful Brain

2003 Body, Mind & Spirit

Author : Arnold H. Modell
Release : 2003
Genre : Body, Mind & Spirit
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 255/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Book Synopsis Imagination and the Meaningful Brain by : Arnold H. Modell

Download or read book Imagination and the Meaningful Brain written by Arnold H. Modell. This book was released on 2003. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the biology of meaning that integrates the role of subjective processes with current knowledge of brain/mind function.

Creative Measures of the Anthropocene

2019-10-30 Performing Arts

Author : Kaya Barry
Release : 2019-10-30
Genre : Performing Arts
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 485/5 ( reviews)

GET EBOOK

Book Synopsis Creative Measures of the Anthropocene by : Kaya Barry

Download or read book Creative Measures of the Anthropocene written by Kaya Barry. This book was released on 2019-10-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes that creative and participatory modes of measuring, knowing, and moving in the world are needed for coming to grips with the Anthropocene epoch. It interrogates how creative, affective and experiential encounters that traverse the local and the global, as well as the mundane and the everyday, can offer new perspectives on the challenges that lay ahead. This book considers the role of the arts in exploring geographical concerns and increasing human mobility. In doing so, it offers ways to counteract the unstable, shifting and disorienting impacts and debates surrounding human activity and the Anthropocene. The authors bring together perspectives from mobilities, creative arts, cultural geography, philosophy and humanities in an innovative exploration of how creative forms of measurement can assist in reconfiguring individual and collective action.

Popular eBooks

The Corporeal Imagination

In the Eye of the Animal

Imagination and the Meaningful Brain

Creative Measures of the Anthropocene

You may also like...