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In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

Science fiction --- Puppets in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Religious aspects. --- Anthropos. --- Daniel Paul Schreber. --- Giordano Bruno. --- Hermeticism. --- Neoplatonism. --- Weird Studies. --- alchemy. --- automata. --- simulacra.

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An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the WestThis landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be.Shagan shows how religious belief enjoyed a special prestige in medieval Europe, one that set it apart from judgment, opinion, and the evidence of the senses. But with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the question of just what kind of knowledge religious belief was-and how it related to more mundane ways of knowing-was forced into the open. As the warring churches fought over the answer, each claimed belief as their exclusive possession, insisting that their rivals were unbelievers. Shagan challenges the common notion that modern belief was a gift of the Reformation, showing how it was as much a reaction against Luther and Calvin as it was against the Council of Trent. He describes how dissidents on both sides came to regard religious belief as something that needed to be justified by individual judgment, evidence, and argument.Brilliantly illuminating, The Birth of Modern Belief demonstrates how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.

Christian West;religious belief;unbelievers;modern belief;Protestant Reformation;Luther;Calvin;Council of Trent;Enlightenment;belief;unbelief;religion;secular age;Reformation;modernity;Protestants;Catholics;Anabaptists;medieval Christians;God;deity;epistemology;faith;infinite creator;simulacra;Europe. --- Christian belief. --- Christian society. --- Church. --- Counter-Reformation. --- Descartes. --- Francesco Spiera. --- Samuel Taylor Coleridge. --- atheism. --- birth pangs. --- classical philosophy. --- confessional credulity. --- doctrines. --- dogma. --- eighteenth century. --- evil. --- existence. --- human beings. --- human creations. --- human judgment. --- infidels. --- knowledge. --- medieval credulity. --- modern credulity. --- modern historians. --- opinion. --- ratiocination. --- sixteenth century. --- social world. --- spiritual objects. --- Europe --- Europe. --- Religion --- History. --- Anabaptists. --- Calvin. --- Catholics. --- Christian West. --- Council of Trent. --- Enlightenment. --- God. --- Luther. --- Protestant Reformation. --- Protestants. --- Reformation. --- belief. --- deity. --- epistemology. --- faith. --- infinite creator. --- medieval Christians. --- modern belief. --- modernity. --- religion. --- religious belief. --- secular age. --- simulacra. --- unbelief. --- unbelievers.

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