Encountering Naturalism

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780979111105
Total Pages : 103 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Encountering Naturalism by : Thomas W. Clark

Download or read book Encountering Naturalism written by Thomas W. Clark and published by . This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Good and Real

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262042339
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Good and Real by : Gary L. Drescher

Download or read book Good and Real written by Gary L. Drescher and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, and other topics, Good and Real tries to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our subjective impressions of our own existence. In Good and Real, Gary Drescher examines a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, quantum mechanics, and other topics, in an effort to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our subjective impressions of our own existence. Many scientists suspect that the universe can ultimately be described by a simple (perhaps even deterministic) formalism; all that is real unfolds mechanically according to that formalism. But how, then, is it possible for us to be conscious, or to make genuine choices? And how can there be an ethical dimension to such choices? Drescher sketches computational models of consciousness, choice, and subjunctive reasoning--what would happen if this or that were to occur? --to show how such phenomena are compatible with a mechanical, even deterministic universe. Analyses of Newcomb's Problem (a paradox about choice) and the Prisoner's Dilemma (a paradox about self-interest vs. altruism, arguably reducible to Newcomb's Problem) help bring the problems and proposed solutions into focus. Regarding quantum mechanics, Drescher builds on Everett's relative-state formulation--but presenting a simplified formalism, accessible to laypersons--to argue that, contrary to some popular impressions, quantum mechanics is compatible with an objective, deterministic physical reality, and that there is no special connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness. In each of several disparate but intertwined topics ranging from physics to ethics, Drescher argues that a missing technical linchpin can make the quest for objectivity seem impossible, until the elusive technical fix is at hand.

Suffering and Evil in Nature

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793621756
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (936 download)

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Book Synopsis Suffering and Evil in Nature by : Joseph E. Harroff

Download or read book Suffering and Evil in Nature written by Joseph E. Harroff and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-12-27 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suffering and Evil in Nature: Comparative Responses from Ecstatic Naturalism and Healing Cultures, edited by Joseph E. Harroff and Jea Sophia Oh, provides many unique experiments in thinking through the implications of ecstatic naturalism. This collection of essays directly addresses the importance of values sustaining cultures of healing and offers a variety of perspectives inducing radical hope requisite for cultivating moral and political imaginings of democracy-to-come as a regulative ideal. Through its invocation of “healing cultures,” the collection foregrounds the significance of the active, gerundive, and processual nature of ecstatic naturalism as a creative horizon for realizing values of intersubjective flourishing, while also highlighting the significance of culture as an always unfinished project of making discursive, interpretive and ethical space open for the subaltern and voiceless. Each contribution gives voice to the tensions and contradictions felt by living participants in emergent communities of interpretation—namely those who risk replacing authoritarian tendencies and fascist prejudices with a faith in future-oriented archetypes of healing to make possible truth and reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed, victimizers and victims of violence and trauma. These essays then let loose the radical hope of healing from suffering in a ceaseless community of communication within a horizon of creative democratic interpretation.

American Naturalism and the Jews

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252092171
Total Pages : 111 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis American Naturalism and the Jews by : Donald Pizer

Download or read book American Naturalism and the Jews written by Donald Pizer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Naturalism and the Jews examines the unabashed anti-Semitism of five notable American naturalist novelists otherwise known for their progressive social values. Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser all pushed for social improvements for the poor and oppressed, while Edith Wharton and Willa Cather both advanced the public status of women. But they all also expressed strong prejudices against the Jewish race and faith throughout their fiction, essays, letters, and other writings, producing a contradiction in American literary history that has stymied scholars and, until now, gone largely unexamined. In this breakthrough study, Donald Pizer confronts this disconcerting strain of anti-Semitism pervading American letters and culture, illustrating how easily prejudice can coexist with even the most progressive ideals. Pizer shows how these writers' racist impulses represented more than just personal biases, but resonated with larger social and ideological movements within American culture. Anti-Semitic sentiment motivated such various movements as the western farmers' populist revolt and the East Coast patricians' revulsion against immigration, both of which Pizer discusses here. This antagonism toward Jews and other non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicities intersected not only with these authors' social reform agendas but also with their literary method of representing the overpowering forces of heredity, social or natural environment, and savage instinct.

Religious Naturalism Today

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Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 0791475379
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (914 download)

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Book Synopsis Religious Naturalism Today by : Jerome A. Stone

Download or read book Religious Naturalism Today written by Jerome A. Stone and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the history and revival of religious naturalism, a spiritual path without a supreme being.

Against Moral Responsibility

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262016591
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Against Moral Responsibility by : Bruce N. Waller

Download or read book Against Moral Responsibility written by Bruce N. Waller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-10-14 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vigorous attack on moral responsibility in all its forms argues that the abolition of moral responsibility will be liberating and beneficial. In Against Moral Responsibility, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. Waller argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by contemporary thinkers, moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. The scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes that shape human character, he contends, leaves no room for moral responsibility. Waller argues that moral responsibility in all its forms—including criminal justice, distributive justice, and all claims of just deserts—is fundamentally unfair and harmful and that its abolition will be liberating and beneficial. What we really want—natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities—would survive and flourish without moral responsibility. In the course of his argument, Waller examines the origins of the basic belief in moral responsibility, proposes a naturalistic understanding of free will, offers a detailed argument against moral responsibility and critiques arguments in favor of it, gives a general account of what a world without moral responsibility would look like, and examines the social and psychological aspects of abolishing moral responsibility. Waller not only mounts a vigorous, and philosophically rigorous, attack on the moral responsibility system, but also celebrates the benefits that would result from its total abolition.

Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030663981
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze by : Tim Flanagan

Download or read book Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze written by Tim Flanagan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ​This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative. The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin’s 1928 monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy (to wit, in the respective forms by which thought is phrased, predicated, and proposed).The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim about predication itself – namely, that the aesthetics of agitation and hallucination so emblematic of the Baroque sensibility (as attested in its emblem-books) adduces an avowedly metaphysical ‘naturalism’ in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented by Barbara Cassin’s development of the concerted sense in which homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical claim here is that ‘the Baroque’ names the intervallic [διαστηματική] relation that thought establishes between things. On this account, any subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet – a state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience comprises as much seeing as reading (as St Jerome encountering Origen’s Hexapla).

A Philosophy of the Christian Religion

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Publisher : Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN 13 : 1611649285
Total Pages : 350 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (116 download)

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Book Synopsis A Philosophy of the Christian Religion by : Nancey Murphy

Download or read book A Philosophy of the Christian Religion written by Nancey Murphy and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each field of study comes with its own set of questions; each period of time refines and redirects those questions. The Christian religion as we find it in the twenty-first century presents a unique set of problems to be solved and questions to be answered. In this introduction to the philosophy of the Christian religion, eminent philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy applies the tools of philosophical analysis to a set of core yet contemporary religious questions: what does our historical moment mean for the possibility of knowing God? Is faith still possible? Does God intervene in human history? Is there such a thing as universal knowledge of God? Written with the needs of students encountering the philosophy of religion for the first time in mind, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental questions inherent in Christian faith. Murphy also provides tools for how to answer those questions.

A 21st Century Debate on Science and Religion

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527500535
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (275 download)

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Book Synopsis A 21st Century Debate on Science and Religion by : Shiva Khaili

Download or read book A 21st Century Debate on Science and Religion written by Shiva Khaili and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The progress of modern science and technology has led to remarkable insights into the nature of the universe and of human life. These insights have challenged and transformed former traditional worldviews and narratives. This book explores and addresses the challenges that arise at the interface of science and religion in the 21st century. How does science affect the way that religion is perceived? Do modern scientific findings confirm or invalidate the perspective of faith? How does science lead religious persons to revise the way they understand their faith and its practices? Is a mutually respectful and mutually beneficial dialogue possible between science and faith? Drawing from many disciplines, psychology, theology, philosophy, history, cognitive science, education, this book considers the crucial questions of how science and religion can help shape our worldviews and ways of life today.

Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters

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Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 1438488262
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters by : Robert E. Innis

Download or read book Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters written by Robert E. Innis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of "method of rotation" Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art.

Encountering Evil

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0567608093
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (676 download)

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Book Synopsis Encountering Evil by : Gwenn Davis

Download or read book Encountering Evil written by Gwenn Davis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1981-07-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerned with the serious intellectual and moral questions that evil presents to religious believers. Each essay is given a critique by the other contributors: John Roth, John Hick, David Griffen, Frederick Sontag, and Stephen Davis.

Reenchantment without Supernaturalism

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501725246
Total Pages : 441 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Reenchantment without Supernaturalism by : David Ray Griffin

Download or read book Reenchantment without Supernaturalism written by David Ray Griffin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne has made many distinctive contributions to the philosophy of religion. David Ray Griffin now offers the first full-scale philosophy of religion written from this perspective, discussing such topics as the relationship between science and religion, the validity of religious experience, the nature and existence of God, religious pluralism, creation and evolution, and the problem of evil. Griffin's clear and comprehensive book also serves as a valuable introduction to process philosophy itself.In his vigorous defense of a worldview that is fully naturalistic and fully religious, Griffin shows not only how this position reconciles naturalism with freedom, genuine religious experience, and even life after death, but also how its naturalistic theism "reenchants" the world in the sense of providing cosmic support for moral values.Highly original and sometimes controversial, Griffin's book develops its stance in conversation with influential proponents of other philosophical positions, including William P. Alston, Jürgen Habermas, John Hick, Colin McGinn, Alvin Plantinga, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, Ninian Smart, Jeffrey Stout, and Bernard Williams.

Universal Morality Reconsidered

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Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443870072
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Universal Morality Reconsidered by : Joseph Bankard

Download or read book Universal Morality Reconsidered written by Joseph Bankard and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many contemporary issues, moral discourse finds itself in the middle of a great divide. On one side of the chasm sits much of contemporary Western philosophy, moral psychology and the social sciences, which often view morality as a purely natural phenomenon. This view argues that human morality can be fully explained by appealing to naturalistic processes such as kin selection, reciprocal altruism, cultural evolution, and various models of social contract theory. In this context, God's e...

Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

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Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191526916
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (915 download)

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Book Synopsis Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? by : Nancey Murphy

Download or read book Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? written by Nancey Murphy and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If humans are purely physical, and if it is the brain that does the work formerly assigned to the mind or soul, then how can it fail to be the case that all of our thoughts and actions are determined by the laws of neurobiology? If this is the case, then free will, moral responsibility, and, indeed, reason itself would appear to be in jeopardy. Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown here defend a non-reductive version of physicalism whereby humans are (sometimes) the authors of their own thoughts and actions. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? brings together insights from both philosophy and the cognitive neurosciences to defeat neurobiological reductionism. One resource is a 'post-Cartesian' account of mind as essentially embodied and constituted by action-feedback-evaluation-action loops in the environment, and 'scaffolded' by cultural resources. Another is a non-mysterious account of downward (mental) causation explained in terms of a complex, higher-order system exercising constraints on lower-level causal processes. These resources are intrinsically related: the embeddedness of brain events in action-feedback loops is the key to their mentality, and those broader systems have causal effects on the brain itself. With these resources Murphy and Brown take on two problems in philosophy of mind: a response to the charges that physicalists cannot account for the meaningfulness of language nor the causal efficacy of the mental qua mental. Solutions to these problems are a prerequisite to addressing the central problem of the book: how can biological organisms be free and morally responsible? The authors argue that the free-will problem is badly framed if it is put in terms of neurobiological determinism; the real issue is neurobiological reductionism. If it is indeed possible to make sense of the notion of downward causation, then the relevant question is whether humans exert downward causation over some of their own parts and processes. If all organisms do this to some extent, what needs to be added to this animalian flexibility to constitute free and responsible action? The keys are sophisticated language and hierarchically ordered cognitive processes allowing (mature) humans to evaluate their own actions, motives, goals, and rational and moral principles.

Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000216748
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying by : Travis Timmerman

Download or read book Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying written by Travis Timmerman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives is the first book to offer students the full breadth of philosophical issues that are raised by the end of life. Included are many of the essential voices that have contributed to the philosophy of death and dying throughout history and in contemporary research. The 38 chapters in its nine sections contain classic texts (by authors such as Epicurus, Hume, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer) and new short argumentative essays, specially commissioned for this volume, by world-leading contemporary experts. Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying introduces students to both theoretical issues (whether we can survive death, whether death is truly bad for us, whether immortality would be desirable, etc.) and urgent practical issues (the ethics of suicide, the value of grief, the appropriate medical criteria for declaring death, etc.) raised by human mortality, enabling instructors to adapt it to a wide array of institutions and student audiences. As a pedagogical benefit, PowerPoints, discussion questions, and test questions for each chapter are included as online ancillary materials.

7 Ways of Looking at Religion

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300231415
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis 7 Ways of Looking at Religion by : Benjamin Schewel

Download or read book 7 Ways of Looking at Religion written by Benjamin Schewel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious scholar’s lucid analysis of religion’s shifting place in the modern world. Western intellectuals have long theorized that religion would undergo a process of marginalization and decline as the forces of modernity advanced. Yet recent events have disrupted this seductively straightforward story. As a result, while religion has somehow evolved from its tribal beginnings up through modernity and into the current global age, there is no consensus about what kind of narrative of religious change we should alternatively tell. Seeking clarity, Benjamin Schewel organizes and evaluates the prevalent narratives of religious history that scholars have deployed over the past century and are advancing today. He argues that contemporary scholarly discourse on religion can be categorized according to seven central narratives: subtraction, renewal, transsecular, postnaturalist, construct, perennial, and developmental. Examining the basic logic, insights, and limitations of each of these narratives, Schewel ranges from Martin Heidegger to Muhammad Iqbal, from Daniel Dennett to Charles Taylor, to offer an incisive, broad, and original perspective on religion in the modern world. “The book should be a widely read guide to the ideas that structure many of the debates scholars are having today about the meaning of postsecularism and future of religion.” —Geoffrey Cameron, Review of Faith and International Affairs "What is the future of religion and how should we narrate its past? For all readers interested in these questions, this balanced and concise book is a must read.” —Hans Joas, Humboldt University, Berlin, and University of Chicago

Hunting Magic Eels

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Publisher : Broadleaf Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (898 download)

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Book Synopsis Hunting Magic Eels by : Richard Beck

Download or read book Hunting Magic Eels written by Richard Beck and published by Broadleaf Books . This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a secular age, a world dominated by science and technology. Increasing numbers of us don't believe in God anymore. We don't expect miracles. We've grown up and left those fairy tales behind, culturally and personally. Yet five hundred years ago the world was very much enchanted. It was a world where God existed and the devil was real. It was a world full of angels and demons. It was a world of holy wells and magical eels. But since the Protestant Reformation and the beginning of the Enlightenment, the world--in the West, at least--has become increasingly disenchanted. While this might be taken as evidence of a crisis of belief, Richard Beck argues that it's actually a crisis of attention. God hasn't gone anywhere, but we've lost our capacity to see God. The rising tide of disenchantment has profoundly changed our religious imaginations and led to a loss of the holy expectation that we can be interrupted by the sacred and divine. But it doesn't have to be this way. Hunting Magic Eels shows us that with attention and an intentional, cultivated capacity to experience God as a living, vital presence in our lives, we can cultivate an enchanted faith in a skeptical age. This new paperback edition includes a foreword from Sean Palmer as well as four new, additional chapters, including "Why Good People Need God," "Live Your Beautiful Life," and "The Primacy of the Invisible."