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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Aspects of religions (non-Christian) > Theology > General
This book is an extended, critical reflection on the state of
interrelgious dialogue in its modern version. While there has been
some important writing in the field of comparative theology, there
has been no extended, critical reflection on the state of the
discipline in its modern version, its strengths and problematic
areas as it grows as a serious theological and scholarly
discipline. This work of young scholars in conversation with one
another, remedies this lack by, as it were, taking the discipline
apart and putting it back together again. The volume seeks to
understand how to learn from multiple religions in a way that is
truly open to those religions on their own terms, while yet being
rooted in the tradition/s that we bring to our interreligious
study.
The Death of God theologians represented one of the most
influential religious movements that emerged of the 1960s, a decade
in which the discipline of theology underwent revolutionary change.
Although they were from different traditions, utilized varied
methods of analysis, and focused on culture in distinctive ways,
the four religious thinkers who sparked radical theology--Thomas
Altizer, William Hamilton, Richard Rubenstein, and Paul Van
Buren--all considered the Holocaust as one of the main challenges
to the Christian faith. Thirty years later, a symposium organized
by the American Academy of Religion revisited the Death of God
movement by asking these four radical theologians to reflect on how
awareness of the Holocaust affected their thinking, not only in the
1960s but also in the 1990s. This edited volume brings together
their essays, along with responses by other noted scholars who
offer critical commentary on the movement's impact, legacy, and
relationship to the Holocaust.
The human heart is a wonderful mystery of rhythmic life and beauty,
like music and poetry. Listening to the beat of another's heart
requires being up close, personal and intimate. Trust is essential.
In Heaven's Heartbeat, author Micah Smith presents a ninety-day
devotional dedicated to helping you hear God's heartbeat. Using
anecdotes from his personal life, Micah offers messages to
encourage you to hang in there and not give up when times are tough
and uncertain. He presents an invitation to hear God's voice with
renewed hope, growing trust, and calm confidence during the foggy
seasons of chaos and confusion. Heaven's Heartbeat is not a book of
devotional theories. In the next ninety-days you will discover the
reality of God's presence in your life, the help of his Word to
guide you, and the healing power of a Father's heart.
Can it be justifiable to commit oneself 'by faith' to a religious
claim when its truth lacks adequate support from one's total
available evidence? In Believing by Faith, John Bishop defends a
version of fideism inspired by William James's 1896 lecture 'The
Will to Believe'. By critiquing both 'isolationist'
(Wittgensteinian) and Reformed epistemologies of religious belief,
Bishop argues that anyone who accepts that our publicly available
evidence is equally open to theistic and naturalist/atheistic
interpretations will need to defend a modest fideist position. This
modest fideism understands theistic commitment as involving
'doxastic venture' - practical commitment to propositions held to
be true through 'passional' causes (causes other than the
recognition of evidence of or for their truth).
While Bishop argues that concern about the justifiability of
religious doxastic venture is ultimately moral concern, he accepts
that faith-ventures can be morally justifiable only if they are in
accord with the proper exercise of our rational epistemic
capacities. Legitimate faith-ventures may thus never be
counter-evidential, and, furthermore, may be made
supra-evidentially only when the truth of the faith-proposition
concerned necessarily cannot be settled on the basis of evidence.
Bishop extends this Jamesian account by requiring that justifiable
faith-ventures should also be morally acceptable both in motivation
and content. Hard-line evidentialists, however, insist that all
religious faith-ventures are morally wrong. Bishop thus conducts an
extended debate between fideists and hard-line evidentialists,
arguing that neither side can succeed in establishing the
irrationality of itsopposition. He concludes by suggesting that
fideism may nevertheless be morally preferable, as a less dogmatic,
more self-accepting, even a more loving, position than its
evidentialist rival.
This book offers the first in-depth treatment in English language
of Habermas's long-awaited work on religion, Auch eine Geschichte
der Philosophie, published in 2019. Charting the contingent origins
and turning points of occidental thinking through to the current
"postmetaphysical" stage, the two volumes provide striking insights
into the intellectual streams and conflicts in which core
components of modern self-understanding have been forged. The
encounter of Greek metaphysics with biblical monotheism has led to
a theology of history as salvation, expanding in bold arcs from
Adam's Fall to Christ and the Last Judgement. The reconstruction of
key turns in the relationship between faith and knowledge ends,
however, with locating the uniqueness of religion in "ritual" and
defining reason as inherently secular. The book exposes the sources
and trajectories, analysed by Habermas with great erudition, to
different assessments in biblical studies, theology, and philosophy
of subjectivity. Apart from Paul and Augustine, key lines of
continuity are identified in the Gospels, early patristic theology,
Duns Scotus and Schleiermacher that retain the internal connection
of faith to autonomous freedom.
Today's shifting discourses regarding life and death are about
theology, medicine, economics, and politics as much as they are
about life and death. At the heart of one of these discourses is
HIV & AIDS, a pandemic that allows for a slippery discussion
about its origins and nature. Those who live in the borderland this
pandemic creates are often blamed for the affliction; they are seen
as 'dirty.' Yet, those who live or work with persons with HIV &
AIDS know another story of marginalizing macrostructures that
indicate that the issue is as much structural injustice as
individual responsibility. Theology in the Age of Global AIDS and
HIV is a courageous and challenging call to look at how dominant
theologies have participated in the creation of 'risk environments'
for susceptibility to this virus and to act so that our weeping and
raging with the suffering helps us learn how to care for one
another and be responsible theo-ethicists and global citizens in
this age of global AIDS and HIV.
This book contains selected papers which were presented at the 3rd
International Halal Conference (INHAC 2016), organized by the
Academy of Contemporary Islamic Studies (ACIS), Universiti
Teknologi MARA (UiTM) Shah Alam, Malaysia. It addresses
halal-related issues that are applicable to various industries and
explores a variety of contemporary and emerging issues.
Highlighting findings from both scientific and social research
studies, it enhances the discussion on the halal industry (both in
Malaysia and at the international level), and serves as an
invitation to engage in more advanced research on the global halal
industry.
This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It
contains classical literature works from over two thousand years.
Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore
shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the
cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical
literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the
mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from
oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of
international literature classics available in printed format again
- worldwide.
In The Names of God, as in his previous study, Toward a Grammar of
Biblical Poetics (OUP, 1992), Herbert Brichto continues to argue
against the atomistic readings of the Hebrew Bible by the currently
dominant schools of Biblical scholarship. He maintains, that
despite the repetitions and self contradictions found in the Five
Books of Moses, the Pentateuch possesses an aesthetic and
ideological wholeness. Its harmonious blend of stories and
structures inform one another as they give shape and meaning to the
relationship and expectations between a benevolent God and
recalcitrant humankind. In particular, Bichto focuses his "poetic"
reading on the Book of Genesis. He uses the methods of contemporary
literary criticism to examine one of the greatest inconsistencies
within Genesis, the alternating use of Yahweh (the Lord) and Elohim
(God) as names for the Deity. Often cited as the proof of multiple
authorship, Brichto shows, instead, that this "inconsistency"
serves as a device for a single author, using the specific name
that is appropriate to each specific story. Brichto then proceeds
to overturn other multiple-author proofs, including variations in
genealogies, eponyms, and chronologies. He shows that their
variety, ingenuity, and imaginative whimsy serve a vital poetic
function in the structure of the text as a whole. Finding a unity
in this diversity of genres, styles, and devices, Brichto overturns
many of the assumptions of current scholarship as he solidifies his
thesis of single authorship.
Abraham Abulafia (1240 - c. 1291) founded an enormously influential
branch of Jewish mysticism, referred to as the prophetic or
ecstatic kabbalah. This book, from several perspectives, explores
the impact of Christianity upon Abulafia. His copious writings
evince an intense fascination with Christian themes, yet Abulafia's
frequent diatribes against Jesus and Christianity reveal him to be
deeply conflicted in his relationship to his southern European
religious neighbors. This book undertakes a careful study of
Abulafia's writings, suggesting that the recognition of an inner
dynamic of attraction and revulsion toward the forbidden other
provides a crucial key to understanding Abulafia's mystical
hermeneutic and his meditative practice. It also demonstrates that
Abulafia's uneasy relationship to Christianity shaped the very core
of his mystical doctrine.
This book offers help for dealing with the practical issues of life
most people struggle with daily. The approach of the author is to
make perceptive insights, and to offer control steps and redeeming
responses, most of which are based on sound biblical teaching. No
matter what is your status in life, whether from the perspectives
of financial strength or weakness or official position or authority
rank and power, or otherwise, you cannot escape life's struggles.
Therefore, this book is for you. Here are some of the issues
analyzed for your benefit: Honor Marriage Create your Future Pursue
God's Goals Let God take Charge Take Eight Great Steps Understand
Happiness Rise above Peer Pressure Have a Positive Mind-set
Perceive God's Objectives Face death with Confidence The author
challenges cuttingly and comprehensively -- everyone. He writes so
that whatever might be the nature of your 'tough times' there are
strategies, he shows, based on sound principles of spirituality and
integrity, for succeeding in struggling victoriously.
In this work, Jobling argues that religious sensibility in the
Western world is in a process of transformation, but that we see
here change, not decline, and that the production and consumption
of the fantastic in popular culture offers an illuminating window
onto spiritual trends and conditions. She examines four major
examples of the fantastic genre: the "Harry Potter" series
(Rowling), "His Dark Materials" (Pullman), "Buffy the Vampire
Slayer" (Whedon) and the "Earthsea cycle" (Le Guin), demonstrating
that the spiritual universes of these four iconic examples of the
fantastic are actually marked by profoundly modernistic
assumptions, raising the question of just how contemporary
spiritualities (often deemed postmodern) navigate philosophically
the waters of truth, morality, authority, selfhood and the divine.
Jobling tackles what she sees as a misplaced disregard for the
significance of the fantasy genre as a worthy object for academic
investigation by offering a full-length, thematic, comparative and
cross-disciplinary study of the four case-studies proposed, chosen
because of their significance to the field and because these books
have all been posited as exemplars of a 'postmodern' religious
sensibility. This work shows how attentiveness to spiritual themes
in cultural icons can offer the student of theology and religions
insight into the framing of the moral and religious imagination in
the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how this can
prompt traditional religions to reflect on whether their own
narratives are culturally framed in a way resonating with the
'signs of the times'.
What does "death" really mean? Is there life after death? Is that
idea even intelligible? Despite our constant confrontation with
death there has been little serious philosophical reflection on the
meaning of death and even less on the classical question of
immortality. Popular books on "death and dying" abound, but they
are largely manuals for dying with composure, or individual "near
death" experiences of light at the end of the tunnel. This lively
conversation includes various views on these matters, from John
Lachs's gentle but firm insistence that the notion of immortality
is philosophically unintelligible, to Jurgen Moltmann's brave and
careful examination of various arguments for what happens to us
when we die. David Roochnik searches the Platonic dialogues for a
metaphorical immortality which might satisfy the human longing for
some meaning which does not die with us. Aaron Garrett traces the
naturalization of the idea of immortality from Scotus to Locke in
the history of Western philosophy, and David Schmidtz offers
autobiographical reflections in shaping his philosophy of life's
meaning. David Eckel takes us through a synopsis of Buddhist ideas
on these issues, and Brian Jorgensen offers a response. Rita Rouner
uses the poems she wrote after the death of her son to chronicle a
survivor's struggle with life and death. Peter Gomes casts a
critical eye on our death rituals, and defends a classical
Christian view of death and immortality, while Wendy Doniger
examines the literature on those who were offered immortality by
the gods and chose instead to remain mortal.
In addition to three scrolls containing the Book of Joshua, the
Qumran caves brought to light five previously unknown texts
rewriting this book. These scrolls (4Q123, 4Q378, 4Q379, 4Q522,
5Q9), as well as a scroll from Masada (Mas 1039-211), are commonly
referred to as the Apocryphon of Joshua. While each of these
manuscripts has received some scholarly attention, no attempt has
yet been made to offer a detailed study of all these texts. The
present monograph fills this gap by providing improved editions of
the six scrolls, an up-to-date commentary and a detailed discussion
of the biblical exegesis embedded in each scroll. The analysis of
the texts is followed by a reassessment of the widely accepted view
considering 4Q123, 4Q378, 4Q379, 4Q522, 5Q9 and Mas 1039-211 as
copies of a single composition. Finally, the monograph attempts to
place the Qumran scrolls rewriting the Book of Joshua within the
wider context of Second Temple Jewish writings concerned with the
figure of Joshua.
Norgate assesses the way in which the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity is the foundation for all other Christian doctrines,
especially the Christian understanding of salvation. He
investigates in detail the approach of the German Lutheran
theologian, Isaac A. Dorner (1809-1884) to this question. Analysis
of his arguments concerning the priority of the doctrine of God for
Christian belief and dogmatics is given. It examines the form of
his doctrine of God's triunity, and gives an extensive study of how
Dorner's particular account of God's triune identity informs the
Christian conception of God's relation to the world, first, as
Creator and, second, as Saviour. In this process, it seeks to
refocus attention on Dorner as a major figure in the development of
modern theology. The relationship between Dorner's doctrines of the
triune God and salvation is assessed. Dorner's positive
reconstruction of the Christian idea of God as Trinity provides
helpful resources in delineating a non-competitive account of God's
relation to the world. This means that God is not confused with nor
distant from the world. The eternal vitality of God's immanent
personality is the basis of His vital economic activity, which
culminates in the incarnation of the Son. We follow the main
tributaries of Dorner's arguments in System of Christian Faith,
beginning with an analysis of his doctrine of God, via his
development of the doctrines of creation, humanity, and the
incarnation of the God-man. An assessment is given of those
doctrines which pertain to the way in which God brings salvation
through Jesus Christ: sin, Jesus, and atonement. Norgate concludes
by comparing Dorner's achievements with those found in more recent
theologies of atonement. "T&T Clark Studies in Systematic
Theology" is a series of monographs in the field of Christian
doctrine, with a particular focus on constructive engagement with
major topics through historical analysis or contemporary
restatement.
This rhetorical study of the various language strategies and
competing worldviews involved in the 140-year argument between
Biblical creationists and Darwinian evolutionists focuses on the
1860 Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and
the 1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial. When Darwin published his
Origins of Species in 1859, he initiated a debate about the origin
of human life and the role of God in human affairs scarcely
equalled in world history. Smout traces the response of Biblical
creationists to Darwinian evolutionists. Looking carefully at the
stories told and the tactics used by both sides, he analyzes all
available accounts of the original debate culminating in the 1860
Huxley/Wilberforce debate, the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and the
1981 Arkansas Creation-Science Trial. Professor Smout argues that
both sides in the controversy use various language strategies to
persuade the culture as a whole to see the world that they see and
to enact their position as public policy. As Smout illustrates, the
problem is that both sides rely on an inadequate conception of
language as a namer of timeless realities rather than as an
instrument used by human communities to achieve their goals. He
attempts to articulate a better view of language and to show how it
might help solve intractable arguments such as this. He argues that
we should see language as a tool that shapes what we see, and
definitions of terms as political acts rather than statements of
fact made by disciplinary experts. An important analysis for
students and scholars in rhetoric, history, religion, and
sociology.
Religious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and
dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct
experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith,
that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of
thinking about "experience" are given to us by phenomenology.
Poetry and Revelation is the first study of religious poetry
through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the
distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made
manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well
as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide
range of "religious poems", some medieval, some modern; some
written in English, others written in European languages; some from
America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart
provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and
the nature of revelation itself.
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