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Atheism Considered: A Survey of the Rational Rejection of Religious Belief
By C. M. Lorkowski. 2021
Atheism Considered is a systematic presentation of challenges to the existence of a higher power. Rather than engage in polemic…
against a religious worldview, C.M. Lorkowski charitably refutes the classical arguments for the existence of god, pointing out flaws in their underlying reasoning and highlighting difficulties inherent to revealed sources. In place of a theistic worldview, he argues for adopting a naturalistic one, highlighting naturalism’s capacity to explain world phenomena and contribute to the sciences. Lorkowski demonstrates that replacing theism with naturalism, contra popular assumptions, sacrifices nothing in terms of ethics or meaning. Instead, morality ultimately proves more important than religion and does not rely on it. Appropriate for classroom use, this book is meant to cultivate understanding, tolerance, and fruitful dialogue between believers and nonbelievers.Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics #68)
By Muhammad Zaman. 2018
The first book to explore the modern history of Islam in South AsiaThe first modern state to be founded in…
the name of Islam, Pakistan was the largest Muslim country in the world at the time of its establishment in 1947. Today it is the second-most populous, after Indonesia. Islam in Pakistan is the first comprehensive book to explore Islam's evolution in this region over the past century and a half, from the British colonial era to the present day. Muhammad Qasim Zaman presents a rich historical account of this major Muslim nation, insights into the rise and gradual decline of Islamic modernist thought in the South Asian region, and an understanding of how Islam has fared in the contemporary world. Much attention has been given to Pakistan's role in sustaining the Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, in the growth of the Taliban in the 1990s, and in the War on Terror after 9/11. But as Zaman shows, the nation's significance in matters relating to Islam has much deeper roots. Since the late nineteenth century, South Asia has witnessed important initiatives toward rethinking core Islamic texts and traditions in the interest of their compatibility with the imperatives of modern life. Traditionalist scholars and their institutions, too, have had a prominent presence in the region, as have Islamism and Sufism. Pakistan did not merely inherit these and other aspects of Islam. Rather, it has been and remains a site of intense contestation over Islam's public place, meaning, and interpretation. Examining how facets of Islam have been pivotal in Pakistani history, Islam in Pakistan offers sweeping perspectives on what constitutes an Islamic state.La historia del Corán
By Bruce Lawrence. 2006
Una introducci n seria y magn ficamente escrita por el respetado historiador de las religiones Bruce Lawrence…
a uno de los libros m s famosos del mundo Lo hemos hecho descender con la Verdad y con la Verdad ha descendido No te hemos enviado Mahoma sino como anuncio de buenas nuevas y como monitor El Cor n Pocos libros han sido tan mal comprendidos a lo largo de la historia como el Cor n Considerado la palabra directa de Al fue enviado en una serie de revelaciones al profeta Mahoma y es adorado por los musulmanes de todo el mundo en quienes despierta devoci n pasi n y en ocasiones miedo En este libro el respetado historiador de las religiones Bruce Lawrence muestra por qu el Cor n es el islam Describe los or genes de la fe musulmana en la Arabia del siglo VII y explica por qu el Cor n ha de ser memorizado y recitado por sus seguidores Lawrence tambi n estudia a los esc pticos y los comentaristas del libro y eval a su inmensa influencia en la sociedad y la pol tica contempor neas Sobre todo Lawrence subraya que el Cor n es un libro sagrado de s mbolos que no tiene un nico mensaje Es un libro que exige ser interpretado y que solo puede ser comprendido correctamente a trav s de su historiaThe Shack Revisited: There Is More Going On Here than You Ever Dared to Dream
By C. Baxter Kruger. 2012
Millions have found their spiritual hunger satisfied by William P. Young's #1 New York Times bestseller, The Shack--the story of…
a man lifted from the depths of despair through his life-altering encounter with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Now C. Baxter Kruger's THE SHACK REVISITED guides readers into a deeper understanding of these three persons to help readers have a more profound connection with the core message of The Shack--that God is love.An early fan of The Shack and a close friend to its author, Kruger shows why the novel has been enthusiastically embraced by so many Christians worldwide. In the words of William P. Young from the foreword to THE SHACK REVISITED, "Baxter Kruger will stun readers with his unique cross of intellectual brilliance and creative genius as he takes them deeper into the wonder, worship, and possibility that is the world of The Shack."Trusting God Day by Day: 365 Daily Devotions
By Joyce Meyer. 2012
In her dynamic new devotional, TRUSTING GOD DAY BY DAY, international speaker and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Meyer…
provides you with powerful "starting points" for every day of the year. Each day's devotion is filled with practical advice and help from Joyce along with life-changing promises from God's Word that you can quickly and easily apply in your own life.The world wants you to place your trust in your circumstances, your success, your talents and the opinions of others. But God's called you to rise above the world, and put your full trust in Him - to believe and apply what He's promised in His Word more than anything else.Living this way won't just happen - you have to be intentional. But where do you begin? We all need help to make good choices, battle worry, overcome anxiety and keep a positive attitude. Using this devotional, readers will learn to grab hold of life this way, day by day, with trust in God.No Stones: Women Redeemed from Sexual Addiction
By Mark Laaser, Marnie C. Ferree. 2010
In this book Marnie C. Ferree offers a unique resource for women struggling with sexual addiction. Taking her book's title…
from the parable where Jesus extends grace to the woman caught in adultery, Ferree bravely shares her own story of sexual addiction, recalling her years of shame from living a double life and the moment when she ultimately had to tell the truth. But more than just offering her story as a hopeful example of God's transforming power, Ferree distills her clinical expertise on female sexual addiction accessibly and gently, providing a much-needed resource for women struggling with any degree of relational or sexual addiction. Ferree details the roots of addiction in family trauma and offers clear-eyed advice as both a counselor and a "grateful recovering sex addict" on how to achieve sobriety and healing. Written by a counselor who understands the condition from the inside out, No Stones offers practical help for those battling sexual addiction. It also includes a specific chapter for anyone in close relationship with an addict, whether a spouse, family member, or friend, who wants to come alongside women as they seek help. Important for pastors and church leaders, this book will also be a much sought-after resource for Christian counselors and therapists counseling women who grapple with this type of addiction.Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu's Unifying Buddhist Philosophy
By Jonathan C. Gold. 2015
The Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (fourth–fifth century C.E.) is known for his critical contribution to Buddhist Abhidharma thought, his turn…
to the Mahayana tradition, and his concise, influential Yogacara–Vijñanavada texts. Paving the Great Way reveals another dimension of his legacy: his integration of several seemingly incompatible intellectual and scriptural traditions, with far-ranging consequences for the development of Buddhist epistemology and the theorization of tantra.Most scholars read Vasubandhu's texts in isolation and separate his intellectual development into distinct phases. Featuring close studies of Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosabhasya, Vyakhyayukti, Vimsatika, and Trisvabhavanirdesa, among other works, this book identifies recurrent treatments of causality and scriptural interpretation that unify distinct strands of thought under a single, coherent Buddhist philosophy. In Vasubandhu's hands, the Buddha's rejection of the self as a false construction provides a framework through which to clarify problematic philosophical issues, such as the nature of moral agency and subjectivity under a broadly causal worldview. Recognizing this continuity of purpose across Vasubandhu's diverse corpus recasts the interests of the philosopher and his truly innovative vision, which influenced Buddhist thought for a millennium and continues to resonate with today's philosophical issues. An appendix includes extensive English-language translations of the major texts discussed.Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters
By Mary-Jane Rubenstein. 2018
Pantheism is the idea that God and the world are identical—that the creator, sustainer, destroyer, and transformer of all things…
is the universe itself. From a monotheistic perspective, this notion is irremediably heretical since it suggests divinity might be material, mutable, and multiple. Since the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, Western thought has therefore demonized what it calls pantheism, accusing it of incoherence, absurdity, and—with striking regularity—monstrosity.In this book, Mary-Jane Rubenstein investigates this perennial repugnance through a conceptual genealogy of pantheisms. What makes pantheism “monstrous”—at once repellent and seductive—is that it scrambles the raced and gendered distinctions that Western philosophy and theology insist on drawing between activity and passivity, spirit and matter, animacy and inanimacy, and creator and created. By rejecting the fundamental difference between God and world, pantheism threatens all the other oppositions that stem from it: light versus darkness, male versus female, and humans versus every other organism. If the panic over pantheism has to do with a fear of crossed boundaries and demolished hierarchies, then the question becomes what a present-day pantheism might disrupt and what it might reconfigure. Cobbling together heterogeneous sources—medieval heresies, their pre- and anti-Socratic forebears, general relativity, quantum mechanics, nonlinear biologies, multiverse and indigenous cosmologies, ecofeminism, animal and vegetal studies, and new and old materialisms—Rubenstein assembles possible pluralist pantheisms. By mobilizing this monstrous mixture of unintentional God-worlds, Pantheologies gives an old heresy the chance to renew our thinking.The Philosophical Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Expanded Edition
By Sang Hyun Lee. 1988
This book demonstrates the originality and coherence of Jonathan Edwards' philosophical theology using his dynamic reconception of reality as the…
interpretive key. The author argues that what underlies Edwards' writings is a radical shift from the traditional Western metaphysics of substance and form to a new conception of the world as a network of dispositions: active and abiding principles that possess reality apart from their manifestations in actions and events. Edwards' dispositional ontology enables him to restate the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition in theology in a strikingly modern philosophical framework. A prime example of Edwards' innovative reconstruction in philosophical theology is his conception of God as both eternal actuality and a disposition to repeat that actuality within God and also through creation. This view is a compelling alternative to the traditional Western doctrine of God as changeless actuality, on the one hand, and the recent process theologians' excessive stress on God's involvement in change, on the other. Edwards' achievement was that he saw dynamic movement as essential to God's own life without compromising the traditional Christian tenets of God's prior actuality and transcendence. The author of this volume also explicates the way in which Edwards' dynamic reconception of reality informs his theories of imagination, aesthetic perception, the knowledge of God, and the meaning of history. This expanded edition includes a new preface and a new appendix titled "Jonathan Edwards on Nature."The Ghost Festival in Medieval China
By Stephen F. Teiser. 1988
Largely unstudied until now, the religious festivals that attracted Chinese people from all walks of life provide the most instructive…
examples of the interaction between Chinese forms of social life and the Indian tradition of Buddhism. Stephen Teiser examines one of the most important of such annual celebrations. He provides a comprehensive interpretation of the festivities of the seventh lunar month, in which laypeople presented offerings to Buddhist monks to gain salvation for their ancestors. Teiser uncovers a wide range of sources, many translated or analyzed for the first time in any language, to demonstrate how the symbolism, rituals, and mythology of the ghost festival pervaded the social landscape of medieval China.Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion)
By Timothy P. Jackson. 2015
What is the place of Christian love in a pluralistic society dedicated to “liberty and justice for all”? What would…
it mean to take both Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln seriously and attempt to translate love of God and neighbor into every quarter of life, including law and politics?Timothy Jackson here argues that agapic love of God and neighbor is the perilously neglected civil virtue of our time -- and that it must be considered even before justice and liberty in structuring political principles and policies. Jackson then explores what “political agape” might look like when applied to such issues as the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and adoption.The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity
By Royall Tyler. 1990
In this annotated translation and study of an early fourteenth-century Japanese devotional picture scroll set, Royall Tyler illuminates the complex…
relationships between medieval Japanese religion and politics, text, and art. The Kasuga Gongen genki ("The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity") mingles text and painting on silk to tell the tale of miraculous events at the Kasuga shrine in Nara, a site favored by the dominant Fujiwara clan for centuries. The work's values are aristocratic, but the text sheds light on the syncretic nature of the era's religious practices, allowing Tyler to collapse the distinction between high and low forms of medieval Japanese religion. Tyler provides a detailed examination of the scrolls, the shrine, and their history and political role. He also elucidates the scrolls' relationship to literary genre and religious practice, including the interaction between Shintoism and Buddhism. His copious annotations describe the work's historical context, as well as its religious and cultural influences. This study is essential for scholars of religion, art historians, and cultural historians alike.For over a decade, a small group of scientists and philosophers-members of the Mind and Life Institute-have met regularly to…
explore the intersection between science and the spirit. At one of these meetings, the themes discussed were both fundamental and profound: can physics, chemistry, and biology explain the mystery of life? How do our philosophical assumptions influence science and the ethics we bring to biotechnology? And how does an ancient spiritual tradition throw new light on these questions?Pier Luigi Luisi not only reproduces this dramatic, cross-cultural dialogue, in which world-class scientists, philosophers, and Buddhist scholars develop a holistic approach to the scientific exploration of reality, but also adds scientific background to their presentations, as well as supplementary discussions with prominent participants and attendees. Interviews with His Holiness the Karmapa, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, and the actor and longtime human rights advocate Richard Gere take the proceedings into new directions, enriching the material with personal viewpoints and lively conversation about such topics as the origin of matter, the properties of cells, the nature of evolution, the ethics of genetic manipulation, and the question of consciousness and ethics. A keen study of character, Luisi incorporates his own amusing observations into this fascinating dialogue, painting a very human portrait of some of our greatest-and most intimidating-thinkers. Deeply textured and cleverly crafted, Mind and Life is an excellent opportunity for any reader to join in the debate surrounding this cutting-edge field of inquiry.The Philosophy of Qi: The Record of Great Doubts (Translations from the Asian Classics)
By Kaibara Ekken. 2007
The Record of Great Doubts emphasizes the role of qi in achieving a life of engagement with other humans, with…
the larger society, and with nature as a whole. Rather than encourage transcendental escapism or quietism, Ekken articulates a philosophy of material force as a basis of living a life of commitment to the world. In this spirit, moral cultivation is not an isolated or a self-centered preoccupation, but an activity that occurs within the dynamic forces of nature and amid the rigorous demands of society. In this context, a vitalism of qi is an emergent force, not only providing the philosophical grounding for this vibrant interaction but also giving a basis for an investigation of the natural world that plumbs the principle within things. Ekken thus aimed to articulate a creative and dynamic milieu for moral education, political harmony, social coherence, and agricultural sustainability. The Record of Great Doubts embodies Ekken's profound commitment to Confucian ideas and practices as a method for establishing an integrative ethical vision, one he hoped would guide Japan through a new period of peace and stability. A major philosophical treatise in the Japanese Neo-Confucian tradition, The Record of Great Doubts illuminates a crucial chapter in East Asian intellectual history.Mormonism and American Politics (Religion, Culture, and Public Life #18)
By Jana Balmer, Randall Riess. 2016
When Joseph Smith ran for president as a radical protest candidate in 1844, Mormons were a deeply distrusted group in…
American society, and their efforts to enter public life were met with derision. When Mitt Romney ran for president as a Republican in 2008 and 2012, the public had come to regard Mormons as consummate Americans: patriotic, family-oriented, and conservative. How did this shift occur?In this collection, prominent scholars of Mormonism, including Claudia L. Bushman, Richard Lyman Bushman, Jan Shipps, and Philip L. Barlow, follow the religion's quest for legitimacy in the United States and its intersection with American politics. From Brigham Young's skirmishes with the federal government over polygamy to the Mormon involvement in California's Proposition 8, contributors combine sociology, political science, race and gender studies, and popular culture to track Mormonism's rapid integration into American life. The book takes a broad view of the religion's history, considering its treatment of women and African Americans and its portrayal in popular culture and the media. With essays from both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, this anthology tells a big-picture story of a small sect that became a major player in American politics.Moral Geography traces the development of a moral basis for American expansionism, as Protestant missionaries, using biblical language and metaphors,…
imaginatively conjoined the cultivation of souls with the cultivation of land and made space sacred. While the political implications of the mapping of American expansion have been much studied, this is the first major study of the close and complex relationship between mapping and missionizing on the American frontier. Moral Geography provides a fresh approach to understanding nineteenth-century Protestant home missions in Ohio's Western Reserve. Through the use of maps, letters, religious tracts, travel narratives, and geographical texts, Amy DeRogatis recovers the struggles of settlers, land surveyors, missionaries, and geographers as they sought to reconcile their hopes and expectations for a Promised Land with the realities of life on the early American frontier.Nagarjuna in Context: Mahayana Buddhism and Early Indian Culture
By Joseph Walser. 2005
Joseph Walser provides the first examination of Nagarjuna's life and writings in the context of the religious and monastic debates…
of the second century CE. Walser explores how Nagarjuna secured the canonical authority of Mahayana teachings and considers his use of rhetoric to ensure the transmission of his writings by Buddhist monks. Drawing on close textual analysis of Nagarjuna's writings and other Buddhist and non-Buddhist sources, Walser offers an original contribution to the understanding of Nagarjuna and the early history of Buddhism.Nietzsche and Levinas: "After the Death of a Certain God" (Insurrections: Critical Studies In Religion, Politics and Culture)
By Bettina Bergo, Jill Stauffer. 2009
The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche…
and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that goodness exists independently of calculative reason-for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility.Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and sociality? What is a human subject-and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical-in the wake of the demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable in existence? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas?Abed Azzam offers a fresh interpretation of Nietzsche's engagement with the work of Paul the Apostle, reorienting the relationship between…
the two thinkers while embedding modern philosophy within early Christian theology. Paying careful attention to Nietzsche's dialectics, Azzam situates the philosopher's thought within the history of Christianity, specifically the Pauline dialectics of law and faith, and reveals how atheism is constructed in relation to Christianity.Countering Heidegger's characterization of Nietzsche as an anti-Platonist, Azzam brings the philosopher closer to Paul through a radical rereading of his entire corpus against Christianity. This approach builds a compelling new history of the West resting on a logic of sublimation, from ancient Greece and early Judaism to the death of God. Azzam discovers in Nietzsche's philosophy a solid, tangible Pauline structure and virtual, fragile Greek content, positioning the thinker as a forerunner of the recent "return to Paul" led by Badiou, Agamben, i ek, and Breton. By changing the focus of modern philosophical inquiry from "Nietzsche and philosophy" to "Nietzsche and Christianity," Azzam initiates a major challenge to the primacy of Plato in the history of Western philosophy and narrow certainties regarding Nietzsche's relationship to Christian thought.From Shirley MacLaine's spiritual biography Out on a Limb to the teenage witches in the film The Craft, New Age…
and Neopagan beliefs have made sensationalistic headlines. In the mid- to late 1990s, several important scholarly studies of the New Age and Neopagan movements were published, attesting to academic as well as popular recognition that these religions are a significant presence on the contemporary North American religious landscape. Self-help books by New Age channelers and psychics are a large and growing market; annual spending on channeling, self-help businesses, and alternative health care is at $10 to $14 billion; an estimated 12 million Americans are involved with New Age activities; and American Neopagans are estimated at around 200,000. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America introduces the beliefs and practices behind the public faces of these controversial movements, which have been growing steadily in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America.What is the New Age movement, and how is it different from and similar to Neopaganism in its underlying beliefs and still-evolving practices? Where did these decentralized and eclectic movements come from, and why have they grown and flourished at this point in American religious history? What is the relationship between the New Age and Neopaganism and other religions in America, particularly Christianity, which is often construed as antagonistic to them? Drawing on historical and ethnographic accounts, Sarah Pike explores these questions and offers a sympathetic yet critical treatment of religious practices often marginalized yet soaring in popularity. The book provides a general introduction to the varieties of New Age and Neopagan religions in the United States today as well as an account of their nineteenth-century roots and emergence from the 1960s counterculture. Covering such topics as healing, gender and sexuality, millennialism, and ritual experience, it also furnishes a rich description and analysis of the spiritual worlds and social networks created by participants.