Author: Richard L. Cleary
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781622308767
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
There are essentially three views of life available to modern man. One might believe that God exists and provides a firm foundation for also believing that life has meaning, morality has warrant, human rights are not arbitrary, and that justice will ultimately prevail. Or one might believe that God does not exist but meaning, morality and the rest are possible nonetheless, or, thirdly, one might believe that God has "died" and that any hope for meaning, right and wrong, good and evil, human rights, etc. has died with him. In the Absence of God is the story of how, on a college campus in New England for three weeks in the beginning of one fall semester, the implications of these three views work themselves out. What kind of world do we create when we try to leave God out of it? Dick Cleary explores the fallout in this alternately haunting and hopeful tale of a university campus in turmoil. Packed with heroes, villains and plenty of seekers in between, this is a smart, generous novel you will not easily forget. Stephen Martin Author, The Messy Quest for Meaning Richard Cleary is a retired high school teacher of science and philosophy and currently teaches philosophy at several Pennsylvania colleges. His blog can be read at http: //clearysviewpoint.blogspot.com/
Author: Ingolf U. Dalferth
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161502057
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
Safeguarding the distinction between God and world has always been a basic interest of negative theology. But sometimes it has overemphasized divine transcendence in a way that made it difficult to account for the sense of God's present activity and experienced actuality. Criticisms of the Western metaphysics of presence have made this even more difficult to conceive. On the other hand, there has been a widespread attempt in recent years to base all theology on (religious) experience; the Christian church celebrates God's presence in its central sacraments of baptism and Eucharist; process thought has re-conceptualized God's presence in panentheistic terms; and some have argued that God might be poly-present, not omnipresent. But what does it mean to say that God is present or absent? For Jews, Christians, and Moslems alike God is not an inference, an absentee entity of which we can detect only faint traces in our world. On the contrary, God is present reality, indeed the most present of all realities. However, belief in God's presence cannot ignore the widespread experience of God's absence. Moreover, there is little sense in speaking of God's absence if it cannot be distinguished from God's non-presence or non-existence. So how are we to understand the sense of divine presence and absence in religious and everyday life? This is what the essays in this volume explore in the biblical traditions, in Jewish and Christian theology and philosophy, and in contemporary philosophy of religion.
Author: David Bowden
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 0718077687
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Why does God feel so far away? Why is my worship so empty? Has God left me? David Bowden knows these questions firsthand, having wrestled for years with God’s apparent absence and studying what the Bible says about it. In this new book, Bowden tackles the subject head-on, finding the key to understanding it in the Bible’s depiction of a God who is infinitely far from us, free to move where he wants, but who chooses to come near in the person of Jesus. A resource of encouragement for those who struggle with feeling God’s absence and a wake-up call to those who take God’s presence for granted, When God Isn’t There will forever change your understanding of why God sometimes seems to vanish and how he can be found again. Praise for the work of David Bowden “Awesome and inspiring.”—Blake Mycoskie, Founder and Chief Shoe Giver at TOMS Shoes “David brings a fresh, engaging and highly impactful approach to Scripture. His passion for the Word is both contagious and inspirational.” —Roy Peterson, President of American Bible Society
Author: Anthony J. Godzieba
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814663826
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 438
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Book Description
In a consumer-driven and technologized world, can we still experience the mystery of God? This book answers yes by exploring the rich resources of the Christian tradition of thinking and speaking about God. Focusing on God’s dialectical character—divine availability (“presence”) and divine excess (“absence”)—and the belief that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), professor Anthony J. Godzieba tracks how God became a problem in Western culture, then responds by showing how human experience is open to divine transcendence and how that openness encounters the revelation of God as Trinity. The book’s contemporary edge comes from its insistence that belief as embodied performance is the most authentic way to participate in the mystery of God’s love, which is “the answer to the mystery of the world and human beings” (Walter Kasper).
Author: John F. Kutsko
Publisher: Eisenbrauns
ISBN: 1575060418
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
How is Yahweh to be differentiated from other deities? What is Yahweh's relationship to Israel in exile?".
Author: Ronald Dworkin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728041
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 71
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Book Description
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.
Author: Joseph Minich
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999552780
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
Today, millions of people in the modern West identify as atheists. And even for believers, the intellectual and spiritual temptations to deny the existence of God seem greater than ever. Too often we respond to this pressure by seeking more and more rational proofs of God's existence, but what if a lack of reason to believe is not our main problem? In this volume, Joseph Minich argues that our real challenge is existential and imaginative-a felt absence of God that is more visceral in our modern world than for most generations past, and the sense that if God cannot be sensed, He cannot be there. Why are we so haunted and disoriented today by this sense of God's absence? And how can we learn to sustain and strengthen our faith in the face of it? In these pages, Minich charts a way back to a renewal of our hearts and imaginations that can enable us to embrace the challenge of finding and being found by the hidden God.
Author: Christos Yannaras
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780567088062
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Book Description
This book, one of the earliest by Christos Yannaras, was first published in 1967 and has become a contemporary classic. Yannaras begins by outlining Heidegger's analysis of the fate of western metaphysics, which ends, he argues, in a nihilistic atheism. Yannaras's response is largely to accept Heidegger's analysis, but to argue that, although it applies to the western tradition of what Heidegger calls "onto theology" (which regards God as a 'being', even if the highest), it does not take account of the Orthodox tradition of apophatic theology, of which Dionysius the Areopagite is a pre-eminent example. A God 'beyond being' escapes the criticism of Heidegger, and provides an alternative to Heidegger's nihilistic conclusion.
Author: Chloe T. Sun
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830854894
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
In the biblical canon, two books lack any explicit reference to the name of God: Song of Songs and Esther. What is the nature of God as revealed in texts that don't use his name? Exploring the often overlooked theological connections between these two Old Testament books, Chloe T. Sun takes on the challenges of God's absence and explores how we think of God when he is perceived to be silent.
Author: Fleming Rutledge
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467451479
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 584
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Book Description
Advent, says Fleming Rutledge, is not for the faint of heart. As the midnight of the Christian year, the season of Advent is rife with dark, gritty realities. In this book, with her trademark wit and wisdom, Rutledge explores Advent as a time of rich paradoxes, a season celebrating at once Christ’s incarnation and his second coming, and she masterfully unfolds the ethical and future-oriented significance of Advent for the church.
