Free Download Saint worship and the worship of Mary : why devotion to the saints makes sense By Orestes Augustus Brownson
2003 | 173 Pages | ISBN: 1928832881 | PDF | 2 MB
Protestants call it idolatry and modernists see it as quaint superstition, but in these lucid pages written over a century ago, Catholic author Orestes Brownson demonstrates that veneration of Mary and the saints is not merely permissible; it's essential for every Christian who yearns to worship God in spirit and in truth.Worship comes from the Anglo-Saxon word weorthscipe, which means "worthy of honor." And Mary and the saints are worthy of honor more than all other created beings. As Christians praise God in the majesty of the heavens and of the earth, so they praise Him by venerating Him in His saints, who are also the work of His hands and whose good deeds are possible only by His grace.Such praise is not idolatrous because idolatry is the act of rendering to created things the worship that is due to God alone. Catholics do pray to Mary and to the saints, but they don't invoke them as God; they call on them as humans - humans whose nearness to God in Heaven enables them to assist us here on earth. Catholics simply ask of Mary and the saints what they ask of each other while they live in the flesh: prayers.Brownson explains that veneration of Mary and the saints arises from two central mysteries of our Faith - the creation and the Incarnation. And he shows that saint worship is not just a pious devotion that Christians can take or leave as they choose. Rather, it must be part of the faith of every Christian, for it serves as a critical safeguard against atheism, pantheism, and idolatry.Saint Worship and the Worship of Mary challenges every Christian - Catholic and Protestant alike - to take a fresh look at veneration of Mary and the saints, and to discover in these wise and worthy devotions sure means to keep alive in their souls the great mysteries of our Christian Faith.

Free Download Dr Anna McKay, "Female Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature "
English | ISBN: 1843847132 | 2024 | 328 pages | EPUB, PDF | 15 MB + 14 MB
Uncovers the female voices, lived experiences, and spiritual insights encoded by the imagery of textiles in the Middle Ages.

Free Download Daniel Alvarez, "Sweet Devotion"
Español | 2017 | ISBN: 8494632337 | PDF | pages: 272 | 19.8 mb

Free Download Francesca Cioni, "Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert"
English | ISBN: 0198874405 | 2024 | 352 pages | EPUB | 3 MB
George Herbert, his contemporaries, and readers inhabited a world of material things that were spiritually animated but deeply troubling. Habitual providential and typological interpretation imbued matter with meaning, and connected it with the rest of Creation; using material things was an act of interpretation, devotion an act of habitual reading. Materialist philosophies rejected distinctions between body and soul; injunctions to continuous prayer made every place and every bodily motion a potential house of and vehicle for prayer. At the same time Protestant doctrine and Church of England policy, expressed in sermons, visitation articles and works of theology as well as devotional manuals, prayer books and even physiologies and biographies, policed the ways and conditions in which material things, bodies, and spaces might be properly used in 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 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.

Joy Devotion The Importance of Ian Curtis and Fan Culture by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike | 4.18 MB
English | 130 str. Pages

Title: Joy Devotion
Author: Jennifer Otter Bickerdike
Year: 2016

Free Download Sarah Birnbach, "A Daughter's Kaddish: My Year of Grief, Devotion, and Healing"
English | ISBN: 1637560222 | 2022 | 304 pages | EPUB | 3 MB
A woman breaks with Jewish tradition to honor her late father in this moving memoir of faith, grief, and transformation.

Free Download Alec Ryrie, "Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain "
English | ISBN: 1138108979 | 2017 | 308 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
Scholars increasingly recognise that understanding the history of religion means understanding worship and devotion as well as doctrines and polemics. Early modern Christianity consisted of its lived experience. This collection and its companion volume (Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie) bring together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to discuss what that lived experience comprised, and what it meant. Private and domestic devotion - how early modern men and women practised their religion when they were not in church - is a vital and largely hidden subject. Here, historical, literary and theological scholars examine piety of conformist, non-conformist and Catholic early modern Christians, in a range of private and domestic settings, in both England and Scotland. The subjects under analysis include Bible-reading, the composition of prayers, the use of the psalms, the use of physical props for prayers, the pious interpretation of dreams, and the troubling question of what counted as religious solitude. The collection as a whole broadens and deepens our understanding of the patterns of early modern devotion, and of their meanings for early modern culture as a whole.