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Books > Religion & Spirituality > General > Philosophy of religion
Two weeks before Christmas in 1992, author Barbara Jean Judd had
a frightening, yet deeply amazing experience. While praying for
guidance to make it through a particularly difficult time in her
life, she fell asleep and had a near-death experience. She traveled
in a dark tunnel and saw a light ahead. When she woke, her life was
changed forever.
"Find the Diamond Light in You" shares Barbara Jean's dramatic
story and reveals how prophetic revelations and out-of-body
experiences indicate there is a God and a good Spirit in us all.
After her experience, Barbara Jean began to make the connections
between how certain symbols, people, and events in her life were
all spiritual in nature.
In addition, she shares how she developed her gift of spiritual
writing and began to explore premonitions, insights, and dreams.
More and more, she realized that God was showing her important
revelations as well as pointing her to the path she needed to take
in her life. From her great-grandmother's passing to her vision of
the Antichrist, Barbara Jean knew the Lord had blessed her with a
remarkable ability to "see" His will.
"Find the Diamond Light in You" encourages a deeper connection
with your inner thoughts and feelings, and shows how one woman
discovered God's plan for her life.
This is an upper-level introduction to the doctrine and
understanding of sin in modern theology. Christianity concerns
itself with salvation. But salvation implies something from which
one must be saved, as reconciliation implies an estrangement and
redemption a loss. The classical theological symbol naming the
problem to which salvation is the solution is sin. Interpreting the
meaning of sin, however, has become difficult for two reasons: sin
has become a taboo subject in popular discourse, and has acquired
an extremely broad meaning in recent theology. "Sin: A Guide for
the Perplexed" is intended as a mid-level, comprehensive
introduction to the notion of sin and its significance for
Christian theology. Nelson situates and interprets biblical
material on sin, and then offers a lucid history of the doctrine.
He elucidates Augustine's conception of original sin and defends it
against its many caricatures. Special attention is paid to sin as
an ordinary, yet highly interruptive, phenomenon in the lives of
individuals. This is supplemented by a careful look at the
non-individualistic dimensions of sin, and an appreciation of how
sin relates to other key theological commitments. "Continuum's
Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible
introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and
readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright
bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes
the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key
themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough
understanding of demanding material.
The past fifty years has seen the emergence of an energetic
dialogue between religion and the natural sciences that has
contributed to a growing desire for interdisciplinarity among many
constructive theologians. However, some have also resisted this
trend, in part because it seems that the price one must pay for
such engagement is much too high. Interdisciplinary work appears
overly abstract and methodologically restrictive, with little room
for systematic theologians self-consciously operating within a
particular historical tradition. In Interdisciplinary
Interpretation: Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Theology and
Science, Kenneth A. Reynhout seeks to address this concern by
constructing an alternative understanding of interdisciplinary
theology based on the hermeneutical thought of Paul Ricoeur,
generally recognized as one of the most interdisciplinary
philosophers of the twentieth century. Appealing to Ricoeur's view
of interpretation as the dialectical process of understanding
through explanation, Reynhout argues that theology's engagement
with the natural sciences is fundamentally hermeneutical in
character. As such, interdisciplinary theologians can faithfully
borrow meaning from the sciences through a process of
"interdisciplinary interpretation," a process that can honestly
attend to the legitimate challenges posed by the natural sciences
without automatically requiring the evacuation of theological norms
and convictions. Reynhout's creative appropriation of Ricoeur's
hermeneutics succeeds in providing a novel interdisciplinary
vision, not only for theology but also for interdisciplinary work
in general.
This volume aims to inspire a return to the energetics of
Nietzsche's prose and the critical intensity of his approach to
nihilism and to give back to the future its rightful futurity. The
book states that for too long contemporary thought has been
dominated by a depressed what is to be done?. All is regarded to be
in vain, nothing is deemed real, there is nothing new seen under
the sun. Such a postmodern lament is easily confounded with an
apathetic reluctance to think engagedly. Hence the contributors
draw on the variety of topical issues - the future of life, the
nature of life forms, the techno sciences, the body, religion - as
a way of tackling the question of nihilism's pertinence to us now.
This book is a comparative study of two major Shi'i thinkers Hamid
al-Din Kirmani from the Fatimid Egypt and Mulla Sadra from the
Safavid Iran, demonstrating the mutual empowerment of discourses on
knowledge formation and religio-political authority in certain
Isma'ili and Twelver contexts. The book investigates concepts,
narratives, and arguments that have contributed to the generation
and development of the discourse on the absolute authority of the
imam and his representatives. To demonstrate this, key passages
from primary texts in Arabic and Persian are translated and closely
analyzed to highlight the synthesis of philosophical, Sufi,
theological, and scriptural discourses. The book also discusses the
discursive influence of Nasir al-Din Tusi as a key to the
transmission of Isma'ili narratives of knowledge and authority to
later Shi'i philosophy and its continuation to modern and
contemporary times particularly in the narrative of the
guardianship of the jurist in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open
its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing
ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican
Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context
preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous
councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the
council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as
well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several
chapters discuss the role of women in the church before, during,
and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to
Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of
ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in
relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican
perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council's ongoing promise
and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues,
including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical
dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper.
This book examines the speculative core of Karl Barth's theology,
reconsidering the relationship between theory and practice in
Barth's thinking. A consequence of this reconsideration is the
recognition that Barth's own account of his theological development
is largely correct. Sigurd Baark draws heavily on the philosophical
tradition of German Idealism, arguing that an important part of
what makes Barth a speculative theologian is the way his thinking
is informed by the nexus of self-consciousness, reason and,
freedom, which was most fully developed by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.
The book provides a new interpretation of Barth's theology, and
shows how a speculative understanding of theology is useful in
today's intellectual climate.
Provides an overview of the complex history of the interaction of
science and religion. Can science and religious belief co-exist?
Many people - including many practicing scientists - insist that
one can simultaneously follow the principles of the scientific
method and believe in a particular spiritual tradition. But
throughout history there have been people for whom science
challenges the very validity of religious belief. Whether called
atheists, agnostics, skeptics, or infidels, these individuals use
the naturalism of modern science to deny the existence of any
supernatural power. This book chronicles, in a balanced and
accessible way, the long history of the battle between adherents of
religious doctrines and the nonbelievers who adhere to the
naturalism of modern science. Science and Nonbelief provides a
nontechnical introduction to the leading questions that concern
science and religion today: what place does evolution hold in the
arguments of nonbelievers?; what does modern physics tell us about
the place of humanity in the natural world?; how do modern
neurosciences challenge traditional beliefs about mind and matter?;
what can scientific research about religion tell us and psychics?
The volume also addresses the political context of debates over
science and nonbelief, and questions about the nature of morality.
It includes a selection of provocative primary source documents
that illustrate the complexity and varieties of nonbelief. Part of
the Greenwood Guides to Science and Religion series, this book
includes a discussion of scientific attitudes to pseudo-science and
the paranormal. A primary source section illustrates views on the
relationship between science and belief. It adopts a balanced
approach to the questions raised.
Due to the diversity in Buddhism, its essence remains a puzzle.
This book investigates the Buddhist path to liberation from a
practical and critical perspective by searching for patterns found
in the Pali Nikayas and the Chinese Agamas. The early discourses
depict the Buddhist path as a network of routes leading to the same
goal: liberation from suffering. This book summarizes various
teachings in three aspects, provides a template theory for
systematically presenting the formulas of the sequential training
of the path, and analyses the differences and similarities among
diverse descriptions of the path in the early Buddhist texts. By
offering a comprehensive map of the Buddhist path, this book will
appeal to scholars and students of Buddhist studies as well as
those practitioners with a serious interest in the Buddhist path.
The Suffering of the Impassible God provides a major
reconsideration of the notion of divine impassibility in patristic
thought. The question whether, in what sense, and under what
circumstances suffering may be ascribed to God runs as a golden
thread through such major controversies as Docetism,
Patripassianism, Arianism, and Nestorianism. It is commonly claimed
that in these debates patristic theology fell prey to the
assumption of Hellenistic philosophy about the impassibility of God
and departed from the allegedly biblical view, according to which
God is passible. As a result, patristic theology is presented as
claiming that only the human nature of Christ suffered, while the
divine nature remained unaffected. Paul L. Gavrilyuk argues that
this standard view misrepresents the tradition. In contrast, he
construes the development of patristic thought as a series of
dialectical turning points taken to safeguard the paradox of God's
voluntary suffering in the flesh. For the Fathers the attribute of
divine impassibility functioned in a restricted sense as an
apophatic qualifier of all divine emotions and as an indicator of
God's full and undiminished divinity. The Fathers at the same time
admitted qualified divine passibility of the Son of God within the
framework of the Incarnation. Gavrilyuk shows that the Docetic,
Arian, and Nestorian alternatives represent different attempts at
dissolving the paradox of the Incarnation. These three alternatives
are alike in that they start with the presupposition of God's
unrestricted impassibility: the Docetic view proposes to give up
the reality of Christ's human experiences; the Arian position
sacrifices Christ's undiminished divinity; while the Nestorian
alternative isolates the experiences and sufferings of Christ's
humanity from his Godhead. In contrast to these alternatives, the
mind of the Church succeeded in keeping God's transcendence and
undiminished divinity in tension with God's intimate involvement in
human suffering. It is precisely because God's divinity and
transcendence are never lost in suffering that the Incarnation
becomes a genuine act of divine compassion, capable of transforming
and healing the human condition.
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