Out today in paperback, LIVING WITH THE GODS: On Beliefs and People by Neil MacGregor.
"‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ Joan Didion’s famous sentence opens a collection of essays she wrote around her experiences in the secular America of the 1970s. It is not a reflection on religion, but it speaks to exactly that compelling need which we all have, for stories that order our memories and hopes, and give shape and meaning to our individual and collective lives.
We begin where the oldest surviving evidence begins, in the caves of Europe at the end of the Ice Age. We shall see in Chapter 1 that a society with a belief in something beyond itself, a narrative that goes beyond the immediate and beyond the self, seems better equipped to confront threats to its existence, to survive and to flourish. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that without such overarching stories, what he called ‘an idea that it constructs of itself ’, there can in fact be no society. Those stories, the ideals they illustrate and the ceremonies in which they are enacted constituted for Durkheim the essential elements of any system of communal belief: and, in a sense, the stories are the society. If, for whatever reason, we lose or forget them, in a very real way we, collectively, no longer exist."— from LIVING WITH THE GODS: On Beliefs and People (2018) by Neil MacGregor
ABOUT LIVING WITH THE GODS
In the same format as his best-selling books A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany: Memories of a Nation—the acclaimed art historian now gives us a magnificent new book that explores the relationship between faith and society.
In the same format as his best-selling books A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany: Memories of a Nation—the acclaimed art historian now gives us a magnificent new book that explores the relationship between faith and society.
Until fairly recently, religion as a major influence on the nature of individual societies around the world seemed to be on the wane. Now, far from being marginalized, the relationship between faith and society has moved to the center of politics and global conversation. Neil MacGregor’s new book traces the ways in which different societies have understood and articulated their places in the cosmic scheme. It examines mankind’s beliefs not from the perspective of institutional religions but according to how shared narratives have shaped societies—and what happens when different narratives run up against each other. As he did in A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany: Memories of a Nation, MacGregor brilliantly combines objects, places, and ideas to examine and, ultimately, illuminate these pressing contemporary concerns.
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