Tag: Devotion

Free Download Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 By Sumathi Ramaswamy
2012 | 303 Pages | ISBN: 8121508517 | PDF | 6 MB
Illustrations:12 B/w Illustrations Description:Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India’s most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead proposes a new analytic: language devotion. She uses this concept to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden, Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil devotion; she considers why, as its speakers sought political and social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to dominate representations of the language. In vigorously arguing for a cultural history that reveals the structures of sentiments and the ideologies of love that emerge around a language, Passions of the Tongue allows us to understand how languages can inspire their speakers to devote themselves zealously to their cause.

Free Download Paul Katsafanas, "Philosophy of Devotion: The Longing for Invulnerable Ideals"
English | ISBN: 0192867679 | 2023 | 256 pages | EPUB, PDF | 690 KB + 1535 KB
Why do people persist in commitments that threaten their happiness, security, and comfort? Why do some of our most central, identity-defining commitments seem to resist the effects of reasoning and critical reflection? Drawing on real-life examples, empirical psychology, and philosophical reflection, Paul Katsafanas argues that these commitments involve an ethical stance called devotion, which plays a pervasive-but often hidden-role in human life. Devotion typically involves sacralizing certain values, goals, or relationships. To sacralize a value is to treat it as inviolable (trade-offs with ordinary values are forbidden), incontestable (even contemplating such trade-offs is prohibited), and dialectically invulnerable (no rational considerations can disrupt the agent’s commitment to the value). Philosophy of Devotion offers a detailed philosophical account and defense of these features. Devotion and the sacralization of values can be reasonable; indeed, a life involving meaningful, sustained commitment depends on these stances. Without devotion, we risk an existential condition that Katsafanas describes as normative dissipation, in which all of our commitments become etiolated. Yet devotion can easily go wrong, deforming into the individual and group fanaticism that have become pervasive features of modern social life. Katsafanas provides an alternative to fanaticism, investigating the way in which we can express non-pathological forms of devotion. We can be devoted through affirmation and through what Katsafanas calls the deepening move, which treats the agent’s central commitments as systematically inchoate. Each of these stances enables a wholehearted form of devotion that nevertheless preserves flexibility and openness, avoiding the dangers of fanaticism on the one hand and normative dissipation on the other. But this is inevitably a fragile and precarious achievement: affirmation can slide into a focus on rejecting what isn’t affirmed, and the deepening move can ossify into rigidity. Only the perpetual quest to maintain a form of existential flexibility, which may require oscillation between affirmation and deepening, can stave off these dangers

Free Download Saint Louis de Montfort, "True Devotion to Mary"
English | 2021 | ISBN: 1635822408 | EPUB | pages: 160 | 0.9 mb
Who is Mary to you? What role does she play in your spiritual life?Are you struggling to get focused spiritually or looking for a way to grow to new heights?

Free Download Mona Oraby, "Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt"
English | ISBN: 0691250650 | 2024 | 328 pages | EPUB, PDF | 40 MB + 30 MB

Free Download A Dog’s Devotion: True Adventures of a K9 Search and Rescue Team by Suzanne Elshult, James Guy Mansfield
English | October 15, 2022 | ISBN: 1493068717 | 312 pages | PDF | 10 Mb
In late March of 2014, death descended upon the community of Oso, Washington in the form of a massive landslide. Ten million cubic yards of dirt and mud crashed through homes, sweeping a 20-foot-high wall of debris before it and scouring the valley floor. In the cold rain of that morning, an entire community disappeared in a sea of mud. In the desperate hours that followed, rescue crews were able to pull only eight survivors out of the wrecked landscape. And then all became quiet, with the stunned realization that many more people were missing, but none were still living.

Free Download Angela Rudert, "Shakti’s New Voice: Guru Devotion in a Woman-Led Spiritual Movement "
English | ISBN: 1498547540 | 2017 | 256 pages | EPUB | 7 MB
Shakti’s New Voice is the first comprehensive study of Anandmurti Gurumaa, a widely popular contemporary female guru from north India known for offering spiritual teachings and music on satellite television and the Internet. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and religious-historical research-as well as unexpected and unprecedented outsider contact with the guru-Angela Rudert offers an intimate portrait of "Gurumaa" that will be of interest to the guru’s admirers as well as to scholars. To examine Gurumaa’s innovation, Rudert turns to examples drawn from fieldwork research in the guru’s ashram and from other locations in India and in the United States. These examples specifically discuss Gurumaa’s religious pluralism, her gender activism, and her embrace of new media, in order to illuminate elements of continuity and change within the time-honored South Asian tradition of guru-bhakti, devotion to the guru. Raised in a Sikh family, educated in a Catholic convent school and understood to have attained her enlightenment in Vrindavan, the famous Hindu pilgrimage site of Lord Krishna’s divine play, Gurumaa refuses identification with any particular religious tradition, or "ism," yet her teachings draw from many. She speaks strongly, often harshly, about contemporary issues of gender inequality, while calling for women’s empowerment, and she has established a non-governmental organization called Shakti to promote girls’ education in India. In the case of Anandmurti Gurumaa and those spiritual seekers in her fold, innovations and re-interpretations of tradition come from within the pluralistic setting of Indian religiosity, while they exist and act within a global religious milieu.

Free Download Karen Pechilis, "Interpreting Devotion: The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India"
English | 2011 | pages: 272 | ISBN: 0415615860, 1138948411 | PDF | 3,2 mb
Devotion is a category of expression in many of the world’s religious traditions. This book looks at issues involved in academically interpreting religious devotion, as well as exploring the interpretations of religious devotion made by a sixth century poet, a twelfth century biographer, and present-day festival publics.

Free Download Ivan Drpić, "Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium"
English | 2016 | pages: 512 | ISBN: 1107151511, 1316606090 | PDF | 45,0 mb
This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpić argues, constitutes a critical – if largely neglected – source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

Free Download Peter Jackson Rova, "Devotion and Artifice: Themes of Suspension in the History of Religions "
English | ISBN: 3110458748 | 2023 | 200 pages | EPUB, PDF | 2 MB + 69 MB
How have humans sought to prevent viable assumptions about themselves and their world from being in force, how does this propensity manifest itself, and in what terms has it been theorized and criticized throughout the ages?

Free Download Michelangelo’s Art of Devotion in the Age of Reform
English | 2023 | ISBN: 1009314378 | 199 Pages | PDF | 17 MB
In this volume, Emily A. Fenichel offers an in-depth investigation of the religious motivations behind Michelangelo’s sculpture and graphic works in his late period. Taking the criticism of the Last Judgment as its point of departure, she argues that much of Michelangelo’s late oeuvre was engaged in solving the religious and artistic problems presented by the Counter-Reformation. Buffeted by critiques of the Last Judgment, which claimed that he valued art over religion, Michelangelo searched for new religious iconographies and techniques both publicly and privately. Fenichel here suggests a new and different understanding of the artist in his late career. In contrast to the received view of Michelangelo as solitary, intractable, and temperamental, she brings a more nuanced characterization of the artist. The late Michelangelo, Fenichel demonstrates, was a man interested in collaboration, penance, meditation, and experimentation, which enabled his transformation into a new type of religious artist for a new era.