Unearthly powers : religious and political change in world history / Alan Strathern (University of Oxford)

• VerfasserIn: Strathern, Alan 1975-
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, New York, NY, Port Melbourne, New Delhi, Singapore : Cambridge University Press, 2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Classification: 15.06 - Politische Geschichte; 11.01 - Systematische Religionswissenschaft: Allgemeines
• Physical Description: xvi, 391 Seiten; Illustrationen

Why was religion so important for rulers in the pre-modern world? And how did the world come to be dominated by just a handful of religious traditions, especially Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism? Drawing on sociology and anthropology, as well as a huge range of historical literature from all regions and periods of world history, Alan Strathern sets out a new way of thinking about transformations in the fundamental nature of religion and its interaction with political authority. His analysis distinguishes between two quite different forms of religiosity - immanentism, which focused on worldly assistance, and transcendentalism, which centred on salvation from the human condition - and shows how their interaction shaped the course of history. Taking examples drawn from Ancient Rome to the Incas or nineteenth-century Tahiti, a host of phenomena, including sacred kingship, millenarianism, state-church struggles, reformations, iconoclasm, and, above all, conversion are revealed in a new light