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4 books match the query 'Pillars'

cover of Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders

Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism

Pillars, Lines, Ladders

Moshe Idel

Central European University Press, 2005

Ascensions on high took many forms in Jewish mysticism and they permeated most of its history from its inception until Hasidism. The book surveys the various categories, with an emphasis on the architectural images of the ascent, like the resort to images of pillars, lines, and ladders. After surveying the variety of scholarly approaches to religion, the author also offers what he proposes as an eclectic approach, and a perspectivist one. The latter recommends to examine religious phenomena from a variety of perspectives. The author investigates the specific issue of the pillar in Jewish mysticism by comparing it to the archaic resort to pillars recurring in rural societies. Given the fact that the ascent of the soul and pillars constituted the concerns of two main Romanian scholars of religion, Ioan P. Culianu and Mircea Eliade, Idel resorts to their views, and in the Concluding Remarks analyzes the emergence of Eliade's vision of Judaism on the basis of neglected sources.
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cover of Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860

Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace

New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860

Daniel A. Cohen

University of Massachusetts Press, 2006

In this innovative study, Daniel A. Cohen explores a major cultural shift embodied in hundreds of early New England crime publications. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers, he shows how the arbiters of an increasingly pluralistic literary marketplace gradually supplanted pious execution sermons with last-speech broadsides, gallows verses, criminal autobiographies, trial reports, newspaper stories, and romantic docudramas. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace probes the forgotten origins of our modern mass media's preoccupation with crime and punishment.
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cover of Pillars of the Nation: Child Citizens and Ugandan National Development

Pillars of the Nation

Child Citizens and Ugandan National Development

Kristen E. Cheney

University of Chicago Press, 2007

How can children simultaneously be the most important and least powerful people in a nation? In her innovative ethnography of Ugandan children—the pillars of tomorrow’s Uganda, according to the national youth anthem—Kristen E. Cheney answers this question by exploring the daily contradictions children face as they try to find their places amid the country’s rapidly changing social conditions.

Drawing on the detailed life histories of several children, Cheney shows that children and childhood are being redefined by the desires of a young country struggling to position itself in the international community. She moves between urban schools, music festivals, and war zones to reveal how Ugandans are constructing childhood as an empowering identity for the development of the nation. Moreover, through her analysis of children’s rights ideology, national government strategy, and children’s everyday concerns, Cheney also shows how these young citizens are vitally linked to the global political economy as they navigate the pitfalls and possibilities for a brighter tomorrow.

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cover of Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World: The Serial Stelae Cycle of "18-Rabbit–God K," King of Copan

Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World

The Serial Stelae Cycle of "18-Rabbit–God K," King of Copan

By Elizabeth A. Newsome

University of Texas Press, 2001

Assemblies of rectangular stone pillars, or stelae, fill the plazas and courts of ancient Maya cities throughout the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras. Mute testimony to state rituals that linked the king's power to rule with the rhythms and renewal of time, the stelae document the ritual acts of rulers who sacrificed, danced, and experienced visionary ecstasy in connection with celebrations marking the end of major calendrical cycles. The kings' portraits are carved in relief on the main surfaces of the stones, deifying them as incarnations of the mythical trees of life.

Based on a thorough analysis of the imagery and inscriptions of seven stelae erected in the Great Plaza at Copan, Honduras, by the Classic Period ruler "18-Rabbit-God K," this ambitious study argues that stelae were erected not only to support a ruler's temporal claims to power but more importantly to express the fundamental connection in Maya worldview between rulership and the cosmology inherent in their vision of cyclical time. After an overview of the archaeology and history of Copan and the reign and monuments of "18-Rabbit-God K," Elizabeth Newsome interprets the iconography and inscriptions on the stelae, illustrating the way they fulfilled a coordinated vision of the king's ceremonial role in Copan's period-ending rites. She also links their imagery to key Maya concepts about the origin of the universe, expressed in the cosmologies and mythic lore of ancient and living Maya peoples.

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