City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right

How we came to seek absolute good in religion and nature—and why that quest often leads us astrayPeople have long looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how these two paths came to be seen as separate f...

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主要作者: Bell, Michael 1957- (Author)
格式: 电子 图书
语言:English
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Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
出版: Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press 2018
In:Year: 2018
Further subjects:B Philosophy of nature
B Human Ecology Religious aspects
B SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology of Religion
B Nature Moral and ethical aspects
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Parallel Edition:Erscheint auch als: 9780691165097
实物特征
总结:How we came to seek absolute good in religion and nature—and why that quest often leads us astrayPeople have long looked to nature and the divine as paths to the good. In this panoramic meditation on the harmonious life, Michael Mayerfeld Bell traces how these two paths came to be seen as separate from human ways, and how many of today’s conflicts can be traced back thousands of years to this ancient divide.Taking readers on a spellbinding journey through history and across the globe, Bell begins with the pagan view, which sees nature and the divine as entangled with the human—and not necessarily good. But the emergence of urban societies gave rise to new moral concerns about the political character of human life. Wealth and inequality grew, and urban people sought to justify their passions. In the face of such concerns, nature and the divine came to be partitioned from the human, and therefore seen to be good—but they also became absolute and divisive.Bell charts the unfolding of this new moral imagination in the rise of Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Jainism, and many other traditions that emerged with bourgeois life. He follows developments in moral thought, from the religions of the ancient Sumerians, Greeks, and Hebrews to the science and environmentalism of today, along the way visiting with contemporary indigenous people in South Africa, Costa Rica, and the United States. City of the Good urges us to embrace the plurality of our traditions—from the pagan to the bourgeois—and to guard against absolutism and remain open to difference and its endless creativity
Item Description:De Gruyter - University Press Pilot Project. eBook available to select US libraries only
实物描述:1 Online-Ressource
格式:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:978-1-4008-8793-4
访问:Restricted Access
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1515/9781400887934