by Ira G. Zepp, Jr (1986)
In The New Religious Image of Urban America, Zepp adopts a novel way of looking at things around him - circles, crosses, squares, trees, fountains, flags, stone monuments - and how these objects are symbols of human community. In the same way, he relates the architecture of shopping malls - including fountains, streams, and trees - to the archetypes of human and religious traditions. Zepp asserts that for many people the shopping mall represents a substitute for ancient sacred centers. If religion, schools, and families (our three major institutions) fail us, we will seek other spaces to fulfill basic human needs. It is not accidental, he argues, that malls contain the same structures, objects, and symbols that give ancient centers their rich human meaning. The New Religious Image of Urban America: The Shopping Mall as Ceremonial Center is the only book that deals with the religious dimension of malls. First published in 1986, it has been updated and expanded to include a new chapter on airports and ballparks as forms of the mall, and a critical response.
Mary Midgley
This work exposes the illogical logic of poor doctrines that shelter themselves behind the prestige of science. Midgley examines how science comes to be used as a substitute for religion and points out how badly that role distorts it.
Marc H. Ellis
In this searing work Marc Ellis asks whether Christianity and Judaism are irredeemably scarred by tragic violence, vengeance, repression, and war. Or can genuine, life-giving elements in these traditions renew them and halt the cycle of violence? Is there God beyond violence? Ellis's personal quest for religious integrity in face of evil leads him to probe religious dimensions of both historical and contemporary eruptions of barbarism, to assess the work of prominent reformist theologians, and finally to examine what, in all honesty, we can still affirm about God.
Tom Beaudoin
Beaudoin, himself a member of Generation X, explores fashion, music videos, and cyber-space and concludes that his generation has fashioned a theology radically different from but no less potent or valid than that of their elders. Beaudoin's investigation of popular culture uncovers four themes that underpin his generation's theology. First, all institutions are suspect - especially organized religion. Recoiling from perceived hypocrisy, yet hungering for spiritual experience, this generation has taken religion into their own hands. Second, personal experience is everything. GenXers want to discover everything for themselves, and every form of intense personal experience - including sex - is potentially spiritual. Third, suffering is also spiritual. Images of a suffering Jesus have a personal meaning for this generation that they don't have for their elders. Finally, this generation sees ambiguity as a central element of faith. Rather than retreating from doubt, they embrace it.
Jacques Baillon
Le théâtre frappe à la porte des sciences, comme il frappe aussi à sa propre porte - sourd qu'il est devenu de se réduire au duel, plus ou moins arrangé, de l'esthétique et de la thématique. En oubliant son processus de production, il accentue l'indifférence des sciences à son égard. Le théâtre apporte un nouvel humus - inouï et modeste- à la réflexion scientifique sur la matière du monde qui est de se représenter.