A Problem of Presence PDF Download

Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520940040
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The Friday Masowe apostolics of Zimbabwe refer to themselves as "the Christians who don’t read the Bible." They claim they do not need the Bible because they receive the Word of God "live and direct" from the Holy Spirit. In this insightful and sensitive historical ethnography, Matthew Engelke documents how this rejection of scripture speaks to longstanding concerns within Christianity over mediation and authority. The Bible, of course, has been a key medium through which Christians have recognized God’s presence. But the apostolics perceive scripture as an unnecessary, even dangerous, mediator. For them, the materiality of the Bible marks a distance from the divine and prohibits the realization of a live and direct faith. Situating the Masowe case within a broad comparative framework, Engelke shows how their rejection of textual authority poses a problem of presence—which is to say, how the religious subject defines, and claims to construct, a relationship with the spiritual world through the semiotic potentials of language, actions, and objects. Written in a lively and accessible style, A Problem of Presence makes important contributions to the anthropology of Christianity, the history of religions in Africa, semiotics, and material culture studies.

Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520249046
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Author: Matthew Eric Engelke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520249035
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"Matthew Engelke has crafted a fascinating, insightful, and sensitive study of the ways in which the Friday Masowe attempt to achieve religious transcendence. Drawing thoughtfully on the findings of other researchers across a wide spectrum of sociological and theological contexts, A Problem of Presence makes a valuable contribution to the comparative study of Christianity, and to the anthropology of religion in general."--Webb Keane, author of Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter "In this impressive work, Engelke describes the Friday Masowe of Zimbabwe with real ethnographic sensitivity and adds wide resonance through authoritative and unpretentious theoretical elaboration. A Problem of Presence is a model of how to make an apparently oblique socio-cultural phenomenon illuminate very wide problems, without sacrificing ethnographic complexity and texture."--James Clifford, author of The Predicament of Culture "A beautifully written book. Engelke creates a new ethnographic field, that of biblical publicity, by following its ambitions in the high street, in politics, and in a Christian think-tank. He forces us--subtly but firmly--to rethink the location of religion in post-secular England and beyond."--Simon Coleman, University of Toronto

Author: Bill Johnson
Publisher: Destiny Image Publishers
ISBN: 076848832X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Let the Spirit live inside you! Are you hungry for an encounter with Jesus? Do you want to make an impact on the world? In this power-packed book, Bill Johnson discusses how you can be a person who hosts the Presence of God. Though all believers obviously have the Spirit of God within them, there is more that enables you to be so full that you overflow His Spirit into your world. Take a journey and meet many great prophets and kings from the Old Testament who were known as people of the Presence—people who, in Johnson’s words, “God wanted to be with.” In this succinct and powerful book, Johnson encourages you toward a pursuit of the Presence of God above all else. In this book, you will discover: How to pay attention to the Holy Spirit and respond to Him. How the Holy Spirit manifests Himself. Biblical figures who were hungry for more of God’s Spirit and learned to host Him. Stories of Presence-filled revivalists and personal encounters with the Presence! Bill Johnson writes: “We are enabled to partner with the Kingdom of Heaven and see it released here on earth! The Presence of God within us will bring reformation to the world around us—encountering a loving God!” Host more of Him today!

Author: R. Zachary Manis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190929278
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Why would a perfectly good and loving God consign anyone to eternal suffering in hell? In Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, R. Zachary Manis examines in detail the various facets of the problem of hell, considers the reasons why the usual responses to the problem are unsatisfying, and suggests how an adequate solution to the problem can be constructed. Historically, there are four standard explanations of the nature and purpose of hell: traditionalism, annihilationism, the choice model, and universalism. In Manis's assessment, all are deficient in some crucial respect. The alternative view that he develops and defends, the divine presence model, stands within the tradition that understands hell to be a state of eternal conscious suffering, but, Manis contends, avoids the worst problems of its competitors. The key idea is that the suffering of hell is not the result of a divine act that aims to inflict it, but rather is the way in which a sinful creature necessarily experiences the unmitigated presence of a holy God. Heaven and hell are not two "places" to which the saved and damned are consigned, respectively, but rather are two radically different ways in which different persons will experience the same reality of God's omnipresence once the barrier of divine hiddenness is finally removed.

Author: Anthony J. Godzieba
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814663826
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
In a consumer-driven and technologized world, can we still experience the mystery of God? This book answers yes by exploring the rich resources of the Christian tradition of thinking and speaking about God. Focusing on God’s dialectical character—divine availability (“presence”) and divine excess (“absence”)—and the belief that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), professor Anthony J. Godzieba tracks how God became a problem in Western culture, then responds by showing how human experience is open to divine transcendence and how that openness encounters the revelation of God as Trinity. The book’s contemporary edge comes from its insistence that belief as embodied performance is the most authentic way to participate in the mystery of God’s love, which is “the answer to the mystery of the world and human beings” (Walter Kasper).

Author: Webb Keane
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520939212
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.

Author: Ernest E. Larkin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781936742233
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Until recently, discernment has not been a high priority among Catholics. We have lived off rules of thumb in doctrine and practice, preferring assembly line religion to a personal and custom-made response to God from deep within our own lives. Contemplation and personal discernment are recognized today as normal developments in the spiritual life. Contemplation and discernment deal directly with the mysterious, incomprehensible God who appears among us and is experienced in himself (in contemplation) or in a given human situation (in discernment). Discernment asks us to be contempla­tives in action, in our human choices, finding the same God outside whom we discover in silent prayer. The challenge of identifying that Presence in such a way as to interpret the course of action we should take is a formidable one. This book begins a theology of discernment by reviewing the traditional theory that has come down to us from Scripture and the Fathers of the Desert. Seeing this body of teaching in its simplest lines, using the form as presented to us by Ignatius of Loyola, will provide a framework in which to critique the process in the light of present perspectives.

Author: Michael Brown
Publisher: Namaste Publishing
ISBN: 9781897238462
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Why is it so difficult to simply be present? The reason is that our deeply suppressed emotional imprints from childhood which Eckhart Tolle calls the pain-body distract from an awareness of the present moment. We re not broken and don t need to be healed but rather, our discomfort needs to be integrated. The Presence Process is a journey that guides readers into taking responsibility for our emotional integration. It is a way to consciously grow up and become responsible for determining the quality of our personal experience. The book teaches readers how to exercise authentic personal responsibility in a practical manner and reveals the mechanics that shape the way they feel about their lives. It offers a simple, practical approach to accomplishing and maintaining personal peace in the midst of globally accelerating change, discomfort, conflict, and chaos."

Author: David Shoemaker
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191062294
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility is a series of volumes presenting outstanding new work on a set of connected themes, investigating such questions as: · What does it mean to be an agent? · What is the nature of moral responsibility? Of criminal responsibility? What is the relation between moral and criminal responsibility (if any)? · What is the relation between responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free will? · What do various psychological disorders tell us about agency and responsibility? · How do moral agents develop? How does this developmental story bear on questions about the nature of moral judgment and responsibility? · What do the results from neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions about agency and responsibility? OSAR thus straddles the areas of moral philosophy and philosophy of action, but also draws from a diverse range of cross-disciplinary sources, including moral psychology, psychology proper (including experimental and developmental), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics, political philosophy, and more. It is unified by its focus on who we are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.