Author: Franco Ferrucci
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022607482X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
“Blessed are the readers, for this tale of God’s long insomnia will keep them happily awake . . . An extraordinary story.” —Umberto Eco, international bestselling, award-winning author At the center of Franco Ferrucci’s inspired novel is a tender, troubled God. In the beginning is God’s solitude, and because God is lonely he creates the world. He falls in love with earth, plunges into the oceans, lives as plant and reptile and bird. His every thought and mood serve to populate the planet, with consequences that run away from him—sometimes delightfully, sometimes unfortunately. When a new arrival emerges from the apes, God believes he has finally found the companion he needs to help him make sense of his unruly creation. Yet, as the centuries pass, God feels more and more out of place in the world he has created; by the close of his memoir, he is packing his bags. Highly praised and widely reviewed, The Life of God is a playful, wondrous, and irresistible book, recounting thousands of years of religious and philosophical thought. “‘God’s only excuse is that he does not exist,’ wrote Stendhal, but now Franco Ferrucci has provided the Supreme Being with another sort of alibi.” —James Morrow, The Washington Post Book World “The Life of God is, in truth, the synthesis of a charming writer’s . . . expression of his boundless hopes for, and poignant disappointments in, his own human kind.” —Jack Miles, The New York Times Book Review “Rather endearing . . . This exceedingly amusing novel . . . is a continuous provocation and delight; there isn’t a dull page in it.” —Kirkus Reviews
Author: David Heller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226326365
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
How do children imagine God? Surprisingly, few researchers have asked this question. In crayon drawings, doll-play, letters, and carefully designed interviews, the forty children in David Heller's study reveal a rich array of spiritual imagery. Though Heller does find some differing views attributable to age, gender, and religious background (the children were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Hindu), he discovers to a surprising degree a common vision of God that cuts across ethnic and religious differences. He also considers related issues of school prayer and the psychology of religion.
Author: Wendy Cadge
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922138
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
While the modern science of medicine often seems nothing short of miraculous, religion still plays an important role in the past and present of many hospitals. When three-quarters of Americans believe that God can cure people who have been given little or no chance of survival by their doctors, how do today’s technologically sophisticated health care organizations address spirituality and faith? Through a combination of interviews with nurses, doctors, and chaplains across the United States and close observation of their daily routines, Wendy Cadge takes readers inside major academic medical institutions to explore how today’s doctors and hospitals address prayer and other forms of religion and spirituality. From chapels to intensive care units to the morgue, hospital caregivers speak directly in these pages about how religion is part of their daily work in visible and invisible ways. In Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine, Cadge shifts attention away from the ongoing controversy about whether faith and spirituality should play a role in health care and back to the many ways that these powerful forces already function in healthcare today.
Author: Mark C. Taylor
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226791718
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 483
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Book Description
"With fundamentalists dominating the headlines and scientists arguing about the biological and neurological basis of faith, religion is the topic of the day. But religion, Mark C. Taylor shows, is more complicated than either its defenders or critics think and, indeed, is much more influential than any of us realize. Our world, Taylor maintains, is shaped by religion even when it is least obvious. Faith and value, he insists, are unavoidable and inextricably interrelated for believers and nonbelievers alike. Using scientific theories of dynamical systems and complex adaptive networks for cultural and theological analysis, After God redefines religion for our contemporary age. Taylor begins by asking a critical question: What is religion? He then proceeds to explain how Protestant ideas in particular undergird the character and structure of our global information society--the Reformation, Taylor argues, was an information and communications revolution that effectively prepared the way for the media revolution at the end of the twentieth century. Taylor s breathtaking account of religious ideas allows us to understand for the first time that contemporary notions of atheism and the secular are already implicit in classical Christology and Trinitarian theology. Weaving together theoretical analysis and historical interpretation, Taylor demonstrates the codependence and coevolution of traditional religious beliefs and practices with modern literature, art, architecture, information technologies, media, financial markets, and theoretical biology. After God concludes with prescriptions for new ways of thinking and acting. If we are to negotiate the perils of the twenty-first century, Taylor contends, we must refigure the symbolic networks that inform our policies and guide our actions. A religion without God creates the possibility of an ethics without absolutes that leads to the promotion of creativity and life in an ever more fragile world"--Publisher description.
Author: Jean-Luc Marion
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226505669
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Jean-Luc Marion is one of the world’s foremost philosophers of religion as well as one of the leading Catholic thinkers of modern times. In God Without Being, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of traditional philosophy, theology, and metaphysics: that God, before all else, must be. Taking a characteristically postmodern stance and engaging in passionate dialogue with Heidegger, he locates a “God without Being” in the realm of agape, or Christian charity and love. If God is love, Marion contends, then God loves before he actually is. First translated into English in 1991, God Without Being continues to be a key book for discussions of the nature of God. This second edition contains a new preface by Marion as well as his 2003 essay on Thomas Aquinas. Offering a controversial, contemporary perspective, God Without Being will remain essential reading for scholars and students of philosophy and religion. “Daring and profound. . . . In matters most central to his thesis, [Marion]’s control is admirable, and his attunement to the nuances of other major postmodern thinkers is impressive.”—Theological Studies “A truly remarkable work.”—First Things “Very rewarding reading.”—Religious Studies Review
Author: John H. Evans
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226222615
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Framework for Understanding the Thinning of a Public Debate2. Setting the Stage: The Eugenicists and the Challenge from Theologians3. Gene Therapy, Advisory Commissions, and the Birth of the Bioethics Profession4. The President's Commission: The "Neutral" Triumph of Formal Rationality5. Regaining Lost Jurisdictional Ground and the Triumph of the Bioethics Profession6. "Reproduction" as the New Jurisdictional Metaphor: Autonomy and the Internal Threat to the Bioethics/Science Jurisdiction7. Conclusion: The Future of Public Bioethics and the HGE DebateAppendix: Methods and TablesNotesWorks CitedIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Author: Ray L. Hart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635962X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a speculative theology that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of God. Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God. Breaking out of the classical doctrine of divine persons, Hart reimagines Trinity as composed of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony an emerging Godhead in relation to origins, temporal creation, and human existence. The book s ultimate import is that all of Being and Nonbeing emerges together in interrelation and interdependence. This divine reality, Hart explains, is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of a living-dying process that implicates all things, existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. Doctrinal closuresomething that every orthodox theology requiresthus becomes impossible, and rightly so. Hart confronts those orthodoxies by asking: How can thinking of God reach closure when the divine is itself unfinished and its appearance to us always amounts to new creation? Hart s insights open the potencies of the nothing to the actualization of freedomthe freedom to create. That is, the nothing is not for nothingit is procreative. In the domain of radical speculative theology, then, Hart offers a fully deconstructive revisioning of the Christian God as ever an emerging and self-transfiguring actuality. It is a work with which all serious students of theology will wish to contend."
Author: Deji Komolafe
Publisher: Overpond
ISBN: 9781736310403
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.After a decade away, I recently had the opportunity to return home, to the city of my birth andthe place where the foundation of my faith was formed.I have been through a lot since I lived in Chicago. The city has been through a lot since I left. Inever left my faith, but I see it differently now. The communities of faith across this city'sneighborhoods never left, but I look at them differently now.Many of the cornerstones of my life were molded in faith communities: Longtime friendships, important mentors, inspirations for my career, training as my first employer, training for myunderstanding of race and class in this city.Having moved in and around communities of faith for over three decades, I am neither objectivein my observations nor oblivious in my opinions about them. This book was written both tochallenge the misperceptions about these spaces and to celebrate the humanity of the peoplewho gather in them.Join me as I consider questions of life, spirituality, and beliefs about God during my year-longjourney visiting 35 faith communities in Chicago
Author: Barbara J. King
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022636092X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
The author of How Animals Grieve “contends that religion . . . is a consequence of primate evolution” in this “brilliant book” (Booklist, starred review). Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves. But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins. Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys. Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals. “Her interpretations result in a provocative hypothesis about the evolution of spirituality.” —The Dallas Morning News
Author: George William Foote
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : God
Languages : en
Pages : 4
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