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Author: Andrew Byers Publisher: InterVarsity Press ISBN: 0830868526 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Cynicism has become almost a cliché. It pervades the culture and defines the age--and threatens to derail faith. Andrew Byers identifies the primary factors in the church that inspire disillusionment rather than faith, but he goes beyond that to help struggling cynics channel their frustrations into the redemptive vocations found in the Bible: the prophet, the sage, the tragic poet. These all find their fulfillment in Jesus, and he in turn inspires cynics from the apostle Paul to you and me to embrace our saintly calling--hopeful realism.
Author: Andrew Byers Publisher: InterVarsity Press ISBN: 0830868526 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Cynicism has become almost a cliché. It pervades the culture and defines the age--and threatens to derail faith. Andrew Byers identifies the primary factors in the church that inspire disillusionment rather than faith, but he goes beyond that to help struggling cynics channel their frustrations into the redemptive vocations found in the Bible: the prophet, the sage, the tragic poet. These all find their fulfillment in Jesus, and he in turn inspires cynics from the apostle Paul to you and me to embrace our saintly calling--hopeful realism.
Author: Alex Rosenberg Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393083330 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
A book for nonbelievers who embrace the reality-driven life. We can't avoid the persistent questions about the meaning of life-and the nature of reality. Philosopher Alex Rosenberg maintains that science is the only thing that can really answer them—all of them. His bracing and ultimately upbeat book takes physics seriously as the complete description of reality and accepts all its consequences. He shows how physics makes Darwinian natural selection the only way life can emerge, and how that deprives nature of purpose, and human action of meaning, while it exposes conscious illusions such as free will and the self. The science that makes us nonbelievers provides the insight into the real difference between right and wrong, the nature of the mind, even the direction of human history. The Atheist's Guide to Reality draws powerful implications for the ethical and political issues that roil contemporary life. The result is nice nihilism, a surprisingly sanguine perspective atheists can happily embrace.
Author: David T. Koyzis Publisher: InterVarsity Press ISBN: 083087206X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 339
Book Description
What you believe about politics matters. The decades since the Cold War, with new alignments of post–9/11 global politics and the chaos of the late 2010s, are swirling with alternative visions of political life, ranging from ethnic nationalism to individualistic liberalism. Political ideologies are not merely a matter of governmental efficacy, but are intrinsically and inescapably religious: each carries certain assumptions about the nature of reality, individuals and society, as well as a particular vision for the common good. These fundamental beliefs transcend the political sphere, and the astute Christian observer can discern the ways—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—in which ideologies are rooted in idolatrous worldviews. In this freshly updated, comprehensive study, political scientist David Koyzis surveys the key political ideologies of our era, including liberalism, conservatism, nationalism, democracy, and socialism. Koyzis gives each philosophy careful analysis and fair critique, unpacking the worldview issues inherent to each and pointing out essential strengths and weaknesses, as well as revealing the "narrative structure" of each—the stories they tell to make sense of public life and the direction of history. Koyzis concludes by proposing alternative models that flow out of Christianity's historic engagement with the public square, retrieving approaches for both individuals and the global, institutional church that hold promise for the complex political realities of the twenty-first century. Writing with broad international perspective and keen analytical insight, Koyzis is a sane and sensible guide for Christians working in the public square, culture watchers, political pundits, and all students of modern political thought.
Author: Sam Harris Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451636032 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s latest New York Times bestseller is a guide to meditation as a rational practice informed by neuroscience and psychology. From Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of numerous New York Times bestselling books, Waking Up is for the twenty percent of Americans who follow no religion but who suspect that important truths can be found in the experiences of such figures as Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history. Throughout this book, Harris argues that there is more to understanding reality than science and secular culture generally allow, and that how we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the quality of our lives. Waking Up is part memoir and part exploration of the scientific underpinnings of spirituality. No other book marries contemplative wisdom and modern science in this way, and no author other than Sam Harris—a scientist, philosopher, and famous skeptic—could write it.
Author: Louis E. Wolcher Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317518357 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
The founding premise of this book is that the nimbus of prestige, which once surrounded the idea of justice, has now been dimmed to such a degree that it is no longer sufficient to secure the possibility of a good conscience for those who undertake, in good faith, to make the world a better place in the spheres of politics and law. The many decent human beings who have noticed and experienced this diminishment of justice’s prestige find themselves in a thoroughly disenchanted existential situation. For them, the attempt to do justice without the illusion of being grounded in something beyond the sheer facticity of their own performances is a distinctly ethical theme, which cries out to be investigated in its own right. Heeding the cry, this book asks and attempts to answer the following fundamental ethical question: is a life in the law – even one spent in the pursuit of justice – worth living, and if so, how can a disenchanted person come to bear the living of it without constantly having to engage in self-deception? If Nietzsche is right that living without illusions is impossible for human beings, then the most important ethical implication of this essentially anthropological fact goes far beyond the question of what illusions we ought to choose. It must also include the question of whether we should succumb to that most seductive and pernicious of all illusions: namely, the belief that exercising great care and responsibility in choosing our illusions – which we might then call our ‘principles of justice’ – excuses us ethically for what we do to others in their name. The culmination of a 10 year legal-philosophical project, this book will appeal to graduate students, scholars and curious non-academic intellectuals interested in continental philosophy, critical legal theory, postmodern theology, the philosophy of human rights and the study of individual ethics in the context of law.
Author: Daniel M. Wegner Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262290553 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 725
Book Description
A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Author: Richard Allan Beck Publisher: Leafwood Publishers & Acu Press ISBN: 9780891123507 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
A popular strategy among contemporary critics of religion is to explain religiosity as an evolutionary adaptation -- a behavior pattern that exists simply because it helped our early human ancestors thrive. An effective response to this type of argument requires the ability to integrate social scientific research, philosophical viewpoints, and theological beliefs. Using social scientific research, Beck identifies the flaws in Freud's dismissal of religion as a neurotic defense against mortal dread. Instead, Beck draws on the writings of William James to show the complexity of religious belief, which emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual believer. Written in a way that is accessible to readers who aren't trained in social scientific research, but rigorous in meeting the standards of the social sciences, The Authenticity of Faith is a masterful example of the "new apologetics." (Steven V. Rouse).
Author: Anthony Tyrrell Hanson Publisher: Trinity PressIntl ISBN: 9780334001010 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 150
Book Description
This book has been prompted by the dishonesty of much contemporary treatment of the Bible. It is not a 'debunking' of the Bible, but an attempt to show what qualities and what preliminary assumptions are needed for the Bible to be genuinely understood and interpreted. Honest scholarship and honest interpretations must acknowledge that a revolution has taken place in the understanding of the Bible during the last two hundred years and that to try to deny or play down or disguise the results of this revolution is to be faithful neither to God nor to ourselves. With that conviction, and with their customary panache, the authors then go on to look at the facts about the Bible; the New Testament interpretation of scripture; the interpretation of the Bible in the early church; historical criticism; fundamentalism; and prophecy. 'They analyse the books of the Bible, examine the canon and the Bible as norm and as the church's book, consider the role of faith and conclude with a chapter 'In Praise of the Bible'. Here, in the last book together, the Professors Hanson are indeed on top of their form.
Author: Andrew Byers
Author: Andrew Byers
Author: Christopher Hodge Evans
Author: Alex Rosenberg
Author: David T. Koyzis
Author: Sam Harris
Author: Louis E. Wolcher
Author: Sigmund Freud
Author: Daniel M. Wegner
Author: Richard Allan Beck
Author: Anthony Tyrrell Hanson