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Claiming Society For God
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Book Synopsis Claiming Society for God by : Nancy Jean Davis
Download or read book Claiming Society for God written by Nancy Jean Davis and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claiming Society for God focuses on common strategies employed by religiously orthodox, fundamentalist movements around the world. Rather than employing terrorism, as much of post-9/11 thinking suggests, these movements use a patient, under-the-radar strategy of infiltrating and subtly transforming civil society. Nancy J. Davis and Robert V. Robinson tell the story of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Shas in Israel, Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, and the Salvation Army in the United States. They show how these movements build massive grassroots networks of religiously based social service agencies, hospitals, schools, and businesses to bring their own brand of faith to popular and political fronts.
Book Synopsis Society Without God by : Phil Zuckerman
Download or read book Society Without God written by Phil Zuckerman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-06-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are lawyers, by their very nature, agents of the state, of capital, of institutions of power? Or are there ways in which they can work constructively or transformatively for the disempowered, the working class, the underprivileged? Lawyers in a Postmodern World explores how lawyers actively create the forms of power which they and others deploy. Through engaging case studies, the book examines how lawyers work within and for powerful institutions and provides suggestions--both general and practical--for ways in which the practice of law can be made to work with and for the powerless. Individuals chapters address such subjects as the contradictions of radical law practice; legal work in South Africa; the economics and politics of negotiating justice; feminist legal scholarship and women's gendered lives; the overlapping worlds of law, business, and politics; theories of legal practice; and how lawyers are constitutive of gender relations. Contributing to the book are Maureen Cain (University of West Indies), Yves Dezalay (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), Martha Fineman (Columbia University), Sue Lees (University of North London), Doreen McBarnet (Wolfson College, Oxford), Frank Munger (SUNY, Buffalo), Wilfried Scharf (University of Cape Town), Stuart Scheingold (University of Washington), David Sugarman (Lancaster University), and Sally Wheeler (University of Nottingham).
Book Synopsis Making Sense of God by : Timothy Keller
Download or read book Making Sense of God written by Timothy Keller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.
Book Synopsis Claiming All Things for God by : George D. McClain
Download or read book Claiming All Things for God written by George D. McClain and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a Christian social activist, George McClain found himself yearning for a sense of integration between his active life and his spiritual life. At one point, not knowing what spiritual direction really was, he enrolled in a training program for spiritual directors. In the inner dialogue between that course and his social activism, he recognized the importance of a focused spiritual life in augmenting one's social witness. McClain surveyed other social activists and found that they too responded as he once had - making decisions in the arena of social witness in terms of what they should do, making personal decisions on the basis of what they discerned that God wanted them to do. This book is McClain's attempt to name this disjuncture in the lives of people of faith, to build on the growing intersection in people's lives of action for justice and the inner journey in the Spirit, and to offer rituals groups can use to begin to be religious together.
Download or read book The Problem of God written by Mark Clark and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Problem of God explores answers to the most difficult questions raised against Christianity. A skeptic who became a Christian and then a pastor, author Mark Clark grew up in an atheistic home. After his father's death, he began a skeptical search for truth through the fields of science, philosophy, and history, eventually finding answers in the last place he expected: Christianity. In a winsome, persuasive, and humble voice, The Problem of God responds to the top ten interrogations people bring against God, and Christianity, including: Does God even exist in the first place? What do we do with Christianity's violent history? Is Jesus just another myth? Can the Bible be trusted? Why should we believe in Hell anymore today? Each chapter answers the specific challenge using a mix of theology, philosophy, and science. Filled with compelling stories and anecdotes, The Problem of God presents an organized and easy-to-understand range of apologetics, focused on both convincing the skeptic and informing the Christian. The book concluding with Christianity's most audacious assertion: how should we respond to Jesus' claim that he is God and the only way to salvation.
Book Synopsis God Is Not Great by : Christopher Hitchens
Download or read book God Is Not Great written by Christopher Hitchens and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2008-11-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.
Book Synopsis Society without God, Second Edition by : Phil Zuckerman
Download or read book Society without God, Second Edition written by Phil Zuckerman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated edition showcasing the social health of the least religious nations in the world Religious conservatives around the world often claim that a society without a strong foundation of faith would necessarily be an immoral one, bereft of ethics, values, and meaning. Indeed, the Christian Right in the United States has argued that a society without God would be hell on earth. In Society without God, Second Edition sociologist Phil Zuckerman challenges these claims. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with more than 150 citizens of Denmark and Sweden, among the least religious countries in the world, he shows that, far from being inhumane, crime-infested, and dysfunctional, highly secular societies are healthier, safer, greener, less violent, and more democratic and egalitarian than highly religious ones. Society without God provides a rich portrait of life in a secular society, exploring how a culture without faith copes with death, grapples with the meaning of life, and remains content through everyday ups and downs. This updated edition incorporates new data from recent studies, updated statistics, and a revised Introduction, as well as framing around the now more highly developed field of secular studies. It addresses the dramatic surge of irreligion in the United States and the rise of the “nones,” and adds data on societal health in specific US states, along with fascinating context regarding which are the most religious and which the most secular.
Book Synopsis The Case for God by : Karen Armstrong
Download or read book The Case for God written by Karen Armstrong and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2009-09-22 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of A History of God and The Great Transformation comes a balanced, nuanced understanding of the role religion plays in human life and the trajectory of faith in modern times. Why has God become incredible? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors? Moving from the Paleolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the lengths to which humankind has gone to experience a sacred reality that it called God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. She examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. With her trademark depth of knowledge and profound insight, Armstrong elucidates how the changing world has necessarily altered the importance of religion at both societal and individual levels. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for structuring a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age.
Book Synopsis Society Without God by : Phil Zuckerman
Download or read book Society Without God written by Phil Zuckerman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Silver” Winner of the 2008 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, Religion Category Before he began his recent travels, it seemed to Phil Zuckerman as if humans all over the globe were “getting religion”—praising deities, performing holy rites, and soberly defending the world from sin. But most residents of Denmark and Sweden, he found, don’t worship any god at all, don’t pray, and don’t give much credence to religious dogma of any kind. Instead of being bastions of sin and corruption, however, as the Christian Right has suggested a godless society would be, these countries are filled with residents who score at the very top of the “happiness index” and enjoy their healthy societies, which boast some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world (along with some of the lowest levels of corruption), excellent educational systems, strong economies, well-supported arts, free health care, egalitarian social policies, outstanding bike paths, and great beer. Zuckerman formally interviewed nearly 150 Danes and Swedes of all ages and educational backgrounds over the course of fourteen months. He was particularly interested in the worldviews of people who live their lives without religious orientation. How do they think about and cope with death? Are they worried about an afterlife? What he found is that nearly all of his interviewees live their lives without much fear of the Grim Reaper or worries about the hereafter. This led him to wonder how and why it is that certain societies are non-religious in a world that seems to be marked by increasing religiosity. Drawing on prominent sociological theories and his own extensive research, Zuckerman ventures some interesting answers. This fascinating approach directly counters the claims of outspoken, conservative American Christians who argue that a society without God would be hell on earth. It is crucial, Zuckerman believes, for Americans to know that “society without God is not only possible, but it can be quite civil and pleasant.”
Book Synopsis The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies by : James Cox
Download or read book The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies written by James Cox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indigenous societies around the world have been historically disparaged by European explorers, colonial officials and Christian missionaries. Nowhere was this more evident than in early descriptions of indigenous religions as savage, primitive, superstitious and fetishistic. Liberal intellectuals, both indigenous and colonial, reacted to this by claiming that, before indigenous peoples ever encountered Europeans, they all believed in a Supreme Being. The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies argues that, by alleging that God can be located at the core of pre-Christian cultures, this claim effectively invents a tradition which only makes sense theologically if God has never left himself without a witness. Examining a range of indigenous religions from North America, Africa and Australasia - the Shona of Zimbabwe, the "Rainbow Spirit Theology" in Australia, the Yupiit of Alaska, and the Māori of New Zealand – the book argues that the interests of indigenous societies are best served by carefully describing their religious beliefs and practices using historical and phenomenological methods – just as would be done in the study of any world religion.
Book Synopsis Battling the Gods by : Tim Whitmarsh
Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Book Synopsis Religion without God by : Ronald Dworkin
Download or read book Religion without God written by Ronald Dworkin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his last book, Ronald Dworkin addresses questions that men and women have asked through the ages: What is religion and what is God’s place in it? What is death and what is immortality? Based on the 2011 Einstein Lectures, Religion without God is inspired by remarks Einstein made that if religion consists of awe toward mysteries which “manifest themselves in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, and which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms,” then, he, Einstein, was a religious person. Dworkin joins Einstein’s sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. He rejects the metaphysics of naturalism—that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences. Belief in God is one manifestation of this deeper worldview, but not the only one. The conviction that God underwrites value presupposes a prior commitment to the independent reality of that value—a commitment that is available to nonbelievers as well. So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them. Freedom of religion should flow not from a respect for belief in God but from the right to ethical independence. Dworkin hoped that this short book would contribute to rational conversation and the softening of religious fear and hatred. Religion without God is the work of a humanist who recognized both the possibilities and limitations of humanity.
Book Synopsis Searching the Bible for Mother God by : Steve Disebastian
Download or read book Searching the Bible for Mother God written by Steve Disebastian and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-10-05 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The World Mission Society Church of God believes in God the Mother,” their website proclaims. In fact, Mother God lives today in South Korea.According to the World Mission Society Church of God's website, by 2008 they had one million registered members worldwide. With churches established in New York and Los Angeles, their presence in the U.S. is growing.They teach “salvation will never be given to those who are stuck on the name of Jesus” and all must accept “Christ Ahnsahnghong,” their founder, and Mother God for salvation.All of these teachings, they claim, are supported by biblical evidence.So, how do we test all things, especially teachings claiming to be from God? We test them against God's own written words:“But test everything; hold fast what is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16)Is the World Mission Society Church of God the one, true church? Is Mother God our only hope for salvation?In the tradition of Walter Martin's classic The Kingdom of the Cults, Searching the Bible forMother God scrutinizes the biblical claims of the World Mission Society Church of God and sees if they pass the test. This book will benefit those interested in biblical Christian theology, apologetics, and evangelism.Composed by God From the Machine, an online blog dedicated to promoting and defending biblical Christianity.
Book Synopsis God and the Folly of Faith by : Victor J. Stenger
Download or read book God and the Folly of Faith written by Victor J. Stenger and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at both historical and contemporary contexts, the author argues that religion has played a major role in suppressing scientific pursuit.
Download or read book Who Speaks for God? written by Jim Wallis and published by Delta. This book was released on 1997 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something is wrong in America. Our streets are not safe. Families are in crisis. Corporations value profit above all else. And in this time of partisan politics and divisive self-interest, where is the voice of integrity and authority? The Religious Right? The secular Left? In this visionary work, prominent social activist and pastor Jim Wallis cuts to the heart of the debate to offer a moral and spiritual alternative to both sides of the political spectrum. In a daring attack on the Religious Right, Wallis reveals how its extreme positions actually conflict with the Bible, yet wield an enormous, and dangerous, influence in Washington. He also exposes the emptiness of the policies of the secular Left--programs he feels are devoid of values and spirituality. Instead of platitudes, Wallis discusses real people; instead of slogans, he offers solutions, calling for a new politics of compassion, community, and civility--the three touchstones of a balanced society. Whether he talks about abortion, welfare, crime, or a new social agenda, he gives surprising, and provocative, answers to the questions that concern us all. Who Speaks For God? is a call to action for the millions of Americans who yearn for a more humane and spiritual national agenda. And in this transformational and practical book, Jim Wallis puts that vision within reach for all of us
Book Synopsis Ordering Love by : David L. Schindler
Download or read book Ordering Love written by David L. Schindler and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphysical study of God, love, technology, and culture in modern society Reality most basically and properly considered, says David L. Schindler, is an order of love a gift that finds its objective only in an entire way of life. Love is what first brings things into existence, and everything exists in, through, and for love. With this understanding of reality, Schindler explores how modern culture marginalizes love, regarding it at best as a matter of piety or goodwill rather than as the very stuff that makes our lives and the things of the world real. Schindler examines how Western civilization s fixation with technology especially its displacement of experience with experiment and its privileging of knowing and making has undermined its capacity to build an authentic human culture. Schindler sees this as a technological age not simply because of technological advancements but because of the way we think as the result of our technological orientation. He shows, within the context of politics, economics, science, and cultural and professional life generally, that God-centered love is what gives things their deepest and most proper order and meaning.
Book Synopsis The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Great Discoveries) by : David Quammen
Download or read book The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Great Discoveries) written by David Quammen and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-07-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Quammen brilliantly and powerfully re-creates the 19th century naturalist's intellectual and spiritual journey."--Los Angeles Times Book Review Twenty-one years passed between Charles Darwin's epiphany that "natural selection" formed the basis of evolution and the scientist's publication of On the Origin of Species. Why did Darwin delay, and what happened during the course of those two decades? The human drama and scientific basis of these years constitute a fascinating, tangled tale that elucidates the character of a cautious naturalist who initiated an intellectual revolution.
