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This book argues for the diversity of religions and the human element in the development of religion.
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.
Jefferson regarded Jesus as a moral guide rather than a divinity. In his unique interpretation of the Bible, he highlights Christ's ethical teachings, discarding the scriptures' supernatural elements, to reflect the deist view of religion.
Inventor. Innovator. Entrepreneur. These are today’s heroes. Public policies are designed to help them. Investors want to fund them. Successful ones make hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars. Whole nations pin their hopes on these people to stimulate their economies, solve their problems, give them prestige on the world stage. But who are they? What special gifts do they have? And what exactly is it that they do? That is what this book is about. The story of the sewing machine, an invention that dramatically transformed the lives of women, shows that it was brought into existence by individuals with very different aims and talents. Who deserves the credit? Was it the man who built a test device that made a stitch, but then gave it away or lost it? Or another, who built a machine that barely worked, but got a patent on it? Then there was a man who developed it into something useful, and made millions from it. Or was the “true inventor” someone who built an innocuous device to move cloth between stitches, which turned out to be the one feature no sewing machine could do without? Or was he the man who made a simple machine that anyone could afford? Each of these fascinating characters contributed something essential. If we look closely at what they did, and what they were like, we’ll understand how inventions really happen.