More Than Belief PDF Download

Author: Manuel A. Vasquez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197541682
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the centrality of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion.

Author: Josh McDowell
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 9780842380096
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
If the church doesn't act now, we will lose a whole generation to postmodernism. Most young people believe that truth is relative to individual beliefs. McDowell insists that truth matters, and that truth changes who we are and how we act. McDowell introduces "relational apologetics, " proving that objective truth is founded on a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Author: Bernardo Kastrup
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785352881
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This book is a three-part journey into the rabbit hole we call the nature of reality. Its ultimate destination is a plausible, living validation of transcendence. Each of its three parts is like a turn of a spiral, exploring recurring ideas through the prisms of religious myth, truth and belief, respectively. With each turn, the book seeks to convey a more nuanced and complete understanding of the many facets of transcendence. Part I puts forward the controversial notion that many religious myths are actually true; and not just allegorically so. Part II argues that our own inner storytelling plays a surprising role in creating the seeming concreteness of things and the tangibility of history. Part III suggests, in the form of a myth, how deeply ingrained belief systems create the world we live in. The three themes, myth, truth and belief, flow into and interpenetrate each other throughout the book.

Author: Cami Ostman
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580054420
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
"With stories by women from a wide range of religious communities--including Evangelical Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Calvinist, Moonie, the Unification Church, and Jehovah's Witnesses--the writers in Beyond Belief pull back a heavy curtain to reveal what they love about their lives within these communities, along with the pain that comes from the rigid expectations and diminishment of women so often built into religious orthodoxy."--Back cover.

Author: Joey Green
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767922980
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Is Everything You Know Wrong? Set the record straight! Debunk myths! Learn the truth behind fallacies, falsehoods, hearsay, and lies! Isn’t it time you knew the honest-to-goodness truth? We’ve all come to believe hundreds of “false facts”—myths that we’ve blindly accepted as truth, misconceptions that we’ve ignorantly retold to others—Contrary to Popular Belief provides an instant remedy for your pounding head full of misinformation, giving you quick relief with enlightening and entertaining facts. Inside you’ll learn: George Washington was not the first president of the United States. Leap year does not occur every four years. The ostrich does not bury its head in the sand. Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. Ship captains cannot perform marriages at sea. Sound does not travel at the speed of sound. The needle on a compass does not point to the North Pole. Leonardo da Vinci did not paint the Mona Lisa. And more than two hundred other bits of conventional “wisdom” that are completely bunk.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Author: Margaret Placentra Johnston
Publisher: Quest Books
ISBN: 0835609057
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Faith Beyond Belief gives a much-needed voice to the “good” people who have left their church but whose spirituality continues to mature. Johnston uses first-person stories as well as known spiritual authorities in describing various stages of religious growth. Some of these real-life accounts are by nonbelievers; others are by those among the growing numbers of the “spiritual but not religious.” All are thoughtful people with too much integrity to live what they consider a lie. The stories of the nonbelievers-including an ex-Catholic, a former Mormon, and a clandestine Muslim apostate who left his community after the attacks of 9/11-show how complete confidence in human reason can lead away from literal religious interpretation. But, while that step is a necessary one on the spiritual path, it is only intermediate. Her second set of stories are of people at the “mystic” level who can tolerate paradox and see truth and reality as multidimensional. Johnston’s book will help doubters to see things in a new light as well as those who are struggling to clarify their own spiritual vision. It also points beyond the atheist/believer controversy wrecking such divisive havoc in our culture today.

Author: Elaine Pagels
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 140007908X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In Beyond Belief, renowned religion scholar Elaine Pagels continues her groundbreaking examination of the earliest Christian texts, arguing for an ongoing assessment of faith and a questioning of religious orthodoxy. Spurred on by personal tragedy and new scholarship from an international group of researchers, Pagels returns to her investigation of the “secret” Gospel of Thomas, and breathes new life into writings once thought heretical. As she arrives at an ever-deeper conviction in her own faith, Pagels reveals how faith allows for a diversity of interpretations, and that the “rogue” voices of Christianity encourage and sustain “the recognition of the light within us all.”

Author: Kelly James Clark
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619094
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A fundamental question in philosophy of religion is whether religious belief must be based on evidence in order to be properly held. In recent years two prominent positions on this issue have been staked out: evidentialism, which claims that proper religious belief requires evidence; and Reformed epistemology, which claims that it does not. Evidence and Religious Belief contains eleven chapters by prominent philosophers which push the discussion in new directions. The volume has three parts. The first part explores the demand for evidence: some chapters object to it while others seek to restate it or find space for compromise between Reformed epistemology and evidentialism. The second part explores ways in which beliefs are related to evidence; that is, ways in which the evidence for or against religious belief that is available to a person can depend on that person's background beliefs and other circumstances. The third part contains chapters that discuss actual evidence for and against religious belief. Evidence for belief in God includes the so-called common consent of the human race and the way that such belief makes sense of the moral life; evidence against it includes profound puzzles about divine freedom which suggest that it is impossible for a being to be morally perfect.

Author: Tim Crane
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674982738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
“[A] lucid and thoughtful book... In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers.” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review Contemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The Meaning of Belief offers a way out of this stalemate. An atheist himself, Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists’ basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience, even if it cannot be explicitly articulated. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists’ conventional conception of religion emerges. The Meaning of Belief does not assess the truth or falsehood of religion. Rather, it looks at the meaning of religious belief and offers a way of understanding it that both makes sense of current debate and also suggests what more intellectually responsible and practically effective attitudes atheists might take to the phenomenon of religion.