The book God, Truth, and other Enigmas is a collection of eighteen essays that fall under four headings: (God's) Existence/Non-Existence, Omniscience, Truth, and Metaphysical Enigmas. The essays vary widely in topic and tone. They provide the reader with an overview of contemporary philosophical approaches to the subjects that are indicated in the title of the book.

Using the 1893 and the 1993 World's Parliament of Religions as a focus for probing intercultural religious communication, this study describes more than a century's preoccupation with a provocative phenomenon called universal religion. It presents 12 enduringly significant speakers whose rhetorical effectiveness, combined with their concepts of universal religion, forge an intercultural synthesis combining Eastern religions and Western thought. This volume will interest scholars and students of both religion and rhetoric as well as the general public. It provides a deeper appreciation of such well-known communicators as Emerson and Thoreau, as well as an introduction to the significant contributions of thinkers such as Roy, Sen, Besant, Vivekananda, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, Gandhi, Jenkins Lloyd Jones, John Haynes Holmes, and Preston Bradley. The 1893 Parliament of The World's Religions and the 1993 World's Parliament of Religions are described by contemporary historians as watersheds in human history and turning points in humanity's spiritual progress. These parliaments are the two occasions when the world's religious leaders have gathered, and the events symbolize a growing preoccupation with an emerging universal religion evolving through interreligious communication. The 1893 Parliament is recognized for commencing interreligious dialogue and encouraging comparative religion; the 1993 Parliament is remembered for networking the worldwide religious and spiritual communities. This volume describes a little-known but highly important minority movement in which a comparatively few communicators in India and the United States have progessively synthesized Eastern religion and Western thought. The work examines these speakers and their speeches by placing this distinctive rhetorical discourse within their historical times and cultural contexts; specifying the concepts about universal religion proposed by each speaker; and indicating their contributions to an emerging and evolving religion that is universal.

It is widely claimed that notions of gods and religious beliefs are irrelevant or inconsequential to early Chinese ("Confucian") moral and political thought. Rejecting the claim that religious practice plays a minimal philosophical role, Kelly James Clark and Justin Winslett offer a textual study that maps the religious terrain of early Chinese texts. They analyze the pantheon of extrahumans, from high gods to ancestor spirits, discussing their various representations, as well as examining conceptions of the afterlife and religious ritual. Demonstrating that religious beliefs in early China are both textually endorsed and ritually embodied, this book goes on to show how gods, ancestors and afterlife are philosophically salient. The summative chapter on the role of religious ritual in moral formation shows how religion forms a complex philosophical system capable of informing moral, social, and political conditions.

This book challenges the modern myth that tolerance grows as societies become less religious. The myth inseparably links the progress of toleration to the secularization of modern society. This volume scrutinizes this grand narrative theoretically and empirically, and proposes alternative accounts of the varied relationships between diverse interpretations of religion and secularity and multiple secularizations, desecularizations, and forms of toleration. The authors show how both secular and religious orthodoxies inform toleration and persecution, and how secularizations and desecularizations engender repressive or pluralistic regimes. Ultimately, the book offers an agency-focused perspective which links the variation in toleration and persecution to the actors of secularization and desecularization and their cultural programs.

Success by Choice Not By Chance gives a road map which clearly shows the potential for any one to succeed in life whether they came from Tupelo, Mississippi or was born on Wall Street. This book is about Ernie Tucker who defied the laws of success and has lived a charmed life by following the principles of having faith, repetition, imagination and above all persistence. He says "success has no room for excuses - it is all up to you." It is a choice one makes not a chance one takes, because chances is gambling and depends on the roll of the dice. It shows you that if you have a clearly defined objective and is willing to make the necessary sacrifices, in the long run your dream will become your reality. The book entails what he had faced, handled and triumphed over to become the success that he is. It is his dream to leave a legacy to the coming generations of whomsoever wishes to succeed be it family, friend or stranger. Embedded in the pages are elements of the will, wit and determination it took to get him there. It says that success is accessible but it is all up to you. To embrace the principles that took him there, you must follow his proven method for success. It shows you that success is a constant pursuit not an overnight affair. It is in fact for Ernie a true fulfillment of Martin Luther's dream that black men and white men could work together in unity. Since success is not a respecter of persons when Ernie's principles of faith are enacted, regardless of your color, creed, race or national origin, success will be attained when you step out in faith and have a vision of your goals.

The legacy of late medieval Franciscan thought is uncontested: for generations, the influence of late-13th and 14th century Franciscans on the development of modern thought has been celebrated by some and loathed by others. However, the legacy of early Franciscan thought, as it developed in the first generation of Franciscan thinkers who worked at the recently-founded University of Paris in the first half of the 13th century, is a virtually foreign concept in the relevant scholarship. The reason for this is that early Franciscans are widely regarded as mere codifiers and perpetrators of the earlier medieval, largely Augustinian, tradition, from which later Franciscans supposedly departed. In this study, leading scholars of both periods in the Franciscan intellectual tradition join forces to highlight the continuity between early and late Franciscan thinkers which is often overlooked by those who emphasize their discrepancies in terms of methodology and sources. At the same time, the contributors seek to paint a more nuanced picture of the tradition's legacy to Western thought, highlighting aspects of it that were passed down for generations to follow as well as the extremely different contexts and ends for which originally Franciscan ideas came to be employed in later medieval and modern thought.

In Orthodoxy, Gilbert K. Chesterton explains how and why he came to believe in Christianity and more specifically the Catholic Church's brand of orthodoxy. In the book, Chesterton takes the spiritually curious reader on an intellectual quest. While looking for the meaning of life, he finds truth that uniquely fulfills human needs. This is the truth revealed in Christianity. Chesterton likens this discovery to a man setting off from the south coast of England, journeying for many days, only to arrive at Brighton, the point he originally left from. Such a man, he proposes, would see the wondrous place he grew up in with newly appreciative eyes. This is a common theme in Chesterton's works, and one which he gave fictional embodiment to in Manalive. A truly lively and enlightening book!

This book defends antitheodicism, arguing that theodicies, seeking to excuse God for evil and suffering in the world, fail to ethically acknowledge the victims of suffering. The authors argue for this view using literary and philosophical resources, commencing with Immanuel Kant's 1791 "Theodicy Essay" and its reading of the Book of Job. Three important twentieth century antitheodicist positions are explored, including "Jewish" post-Holocaust ethical antitheodicism, Wittgensteinian antitheodicism exemplified by D.Z. Phillips and pragmatist antitheodicism defended by William James. The authors argue that these approaches to evil and suffering are fundamentally Kantian. Literary works such as Franz Kafka's The Trial, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, are examined in order to crucially advance the philosophical case for antitheodicism.

What is suspense, and why do we feel it? These questions are at the heart of the first part of this study. It develops and defends the 'imminence theory of suspense' - the view that suspense arises in situations that are structurally defined by something essential being imminent. Next, the study utilizes this theory as an interpretative key to Soren Kierkegaard's seminal work 'Frygt og Baeven' ('FB'). FB is an exploration of what it means to take the story of Abraham and Isaac as a paradigmatic example of faith. The study argues that a core aspect of how Kierkegaard conceptualizes faith through the figure of Abraham is suspense. The argument is built upon the observation that to have faith is to be a hero. To be hero means to belong to a story. Stories manifests different conceptualizations of time. Abraham's story, as FB frames it, is radically geared towards something imminent - it is characterized by an essential relation of suspense. The study then explores how suspense not only forms part of the conceptualization of faith, but is also part of how this conceptualization is communicated. Thus, the study argues that there exists a symmetry of suspense between the rhetorical and the conceptual levels of the text.

This book explores the philosophical issues arising from the distinctively Christian doctrines of the atonement, incarnation, and Trinity. To many philosophers and theologians, these doctrines raise considerable philosophical quandaries. In this volume, C. Stephen Layman explores such questions as: Why do these doctrines matter? Do they make sense? Do the historically influential theories about them hold up under scrutiny? To what extent do recent contributions by philosophers (e.g., Richard Swinburne, Thomas V. Morris, Stephen T. Davis, Brian Leftow, and Peter van Inwagen) shed light on these doctrines? This philosophical investigation illuminates how religious questions can be addressed with philosophical seriousness.

In "Abba's Way, " Jesus returns to set the world's religions straight.

Abba is the shockingly-familiar Aramaic name for God that Jesus uses in the Lord's Prayer. Jesus argues that this very Abba is within each of us, ready to change our lives for the better. If we only have eyes to see.

In 70 brief poetic essays, Jesus explains how we can move the world from its present violent precipice to a global society built around negotiation, individual achievement and openness to the presence of Abba in each person.

On the occasion of the publication of Stephen C. Rose's 'The Grass Roots Church," "The New York Times" called the author a new Martin Luther whose theses might change today's world.

Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul challenges the traditional reading of Paul. Troels Engberg-Pedersen argues that the usual, mainly cognitive and metaphorical, ways of understanding central Pauline concepts, such as 'being in Christ', 'having God's pneuma (spirit), Christ's pneuma, and Christ himself in one', must be supplemented by a literal understanding that directly reflects Paul's cosmology.
Engberg-Pedersen shows that Paul's cosmology, not least his understanding of the pneuma, was a materialist, bodily one: the pneuma was a physical element that would at the resurrection act directly on the ordinary human bodies of believers and transform them into 'pneumatic bodies'. This literal understanding of the future events is then traced back to the Pauline present as Engberg-Pedersen considers how Paul conceived in bodily terms of a range of central themes like his own conversion, his mission, the believers' reception of the pneuma in baptism, and the way the apostle took the pneuma to inform his own and their ways of life from the beginning to the projected end.
In developing this picture of Paul's world view, an explicitly philosophically oriented form of interpretation ('philosophical exegesis') is employed, in which the interpreter applies categories of interpretation that make sense philosophically, whether in an ancient or a modern context. For this enterprise Engberg-Pedersen draws in particular on ancient Stoic materialist and monistic physics and cosmology - as opposed to the Platonic, immaterialist and dualistic categories that underlie traditional readings of Paul - and on modern ideas on 'religious experience', 'self', 'body' and 'practice' derived from Foucault and Bourdieu. In this way Paul is shown to have spelled out philosophically his Jewish, 'apocalyptic' world view, which remains a central feature of his thought.
The book states the cosmological case for the author's earlier 'ethical' reading of Paul in his prize-winning book, Paul and the Stoics (2000).