The theme of the testimony of the Spirit of God is found in various Biblical writings, but it has received inadequate attention in recent theology, Biblical studies, and the philosophy of religion. This book corrects that inadequacy from an interdisciplinary perspective, including theology, Biblical studies, philosophy of religion, ethics, psychology, aesthetics, and apologetics. The book includes previously unpublished work on the topic of the testimony of the Spirit in connection with: its role in Biblical literature, an ontology of the Spirit, conscience and the voice of God, moral knowledge, religious diversity and spiritual testimony, psychology and neuroscience, community and language, art and beauty, desire and gender, apologetics, and the church and discernment. The book includes a General Introduction that identifies some key theological and philosophical topics that bear on the topic of the testimony of the Spirit, and it concludes with a bibliography on the testimony of the Spirit. The book pursues its topics in a manner accessible to a wide range of readers from various disciplines, including college students, educated non-academics, and researchers.

Conversations with God took its readers on an inspirational journey, teaching them how to conduct a dialogue with God and reach a better understanding of themselves, others and the world we all inhabit. In Neale Donald Walsch's latest book, they will travel further on this journey towards a greater relationship, and ultimately friendship, with God.

Rodney Stark's provocative new book argues that, whether we like it or not, people acting for the glory of God have formed our modern culture. Continuing his project of identifying the widespread consequences of monotheism, Stark shows that the Christian conception of God resulted--almost inevitably and for the same reasons--in the Protestant Reformation, the rise of modern science, the European witch-hunts, and the Western abolition of slavery. In the process, he explains why Christian and Islamic images of God yielded such different cultural results, leading Christians but not Muslims to foster science, burn "witches," and denounce slavery.

With his usual clarity and skepticism toward the received wisdom, Stark finds the origins of these disparate phenomena within monotheistic religious organizations. Endemic in such organizations are pressures to maintain religious intensity, which lead to intense conflicts and schisms that have far-reaching social results.

Along the way, Stark debunks many commonly accepted ideas. He interprets the sixteenth-century flowering of science not as a sudden revolution that burst religious barriers, but as the normal, gradual, and direct outgrowth of medieval theology. He also shows that the very ideas about God that sustained the rise of science led also to intense witch-hunting by otherwise clear-headed Europeans, including some celebrated scientists. This conception of God likewise yielded the Christian denunciation of slavery as an abomination--and some of the fiercest witch-hunters were devoted participants in successful abolitionist movements on both sides of the Atlantic.

"For the Glory of God" is an engrossing narrative that accounts for the very different histories of the Christian and Muslim worlds. It fundamentally changes our understanding of religion's role in history and the forces behind much of what we point to as secular progress.