Secrecy

Silence, Power, and Religion

Secrecy
Hugh B Urban
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NZ$ 79.00
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NZ$ 63.20
Paperback
Not defined - 264pg
24 Feb 2021 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226746647
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The powers of political secrecy and social spectacle have been taken to surreal extremes recently. Witness the twin terrors of a president who refuses to disclose dealings with foreign powers while the private data of ordinary citizens is stolen and marketed in order to manipulate consumer preferences and voting outcomes. We have become accustomed to thinking about secrecy in political terms and personal privacy terms. In this bracing, new work, Hugh Urban wants us to focus these same powers of observation on the role of secrecy in religion. With Secrecy, Urban investigates several revealing instances of the power of secrecy in religion, including nineteenth-century Scottish Rite Freemasonry, the sexual magic of a Russian-born Parisian mystic; the white supremacist BruderSchweigen or "Silent Brotherhood" movement of the 1980s, the Five Percenters, and the Church of Scientology. An electrifying read, Secrecy is the culmination of decades of Urban' s reflections on a vexed, ever-present subject.
"Secrecy is original, and the scholarship is rock solid--it is clear, to the point, and quite effective at what it sets out to do. The different aspects of secrecy are fascinating and the book' s engagement with issues such as race, capitalism, and power is unique. There is some classical sociological work on secrecy, and secrecy has been studied in specific religious traditions, but there is nothing else on this scale. "--Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, Williams College "Urban is the most wide-ranging and prolific comparative scholar of religion working today. Secrecy brings critical theoretical frames to the politics of the present, as well as to vivid interpretations of little-understood nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century religious movements that remained on the edge of the public sphere, as secret movements, but nevertheless exerted considerable influence. The comparisons reveal how power is generated through secrecy, and how that power moves fluidly across the domains of religion and the political. Urban shows how the allegedly public sphere of governance is in fact ever more clouded by secrecy. This is urgent, troubling, necessary reading. "--Paul Christopher Johnson, author of Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France and editor of Comparative Studies in Society and History
Hugh Urban is professor of religion and comparative studies at the Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion, and Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9780226746647
Published: 24 Feb 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 9mm
Width: 6mm
Spine: 1mm
Pages: 264

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