Laboratories of Faith

Laboratories of Faith PDF Author: John Warne Monroe
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in séances and magic rituals were seekers after experimental data as well as spiritual truth. A young astronomy student wrote of his quest: "I am not in the presence or under the influence of any evil spirit: I study Spiritism as I study mathematics." He did not see himself as an ecstatic visionary but rather as a sober observer. For him, the darkened room of occult practice was as much laboratory as church. In an evocative history of alternative religious practices in France in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, John Warne Monroe tells the interconnected stories of three movements—Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism. Adherents of these groups, Monroe reveals, attempted to "modernize" faith by providing empirical support for metaphysical concepts. Instead of trusting theological speculation about the nature of the soul, these believers attempted to gather tangible evidence through Mesmeric experiments, séances, and ceremonial magic. While few French people were active Mesmerists, Spiritists, or Occultists, large segments of the educated general public were familiar with these movements and often regarded them as fascinating expressions of the "modern condition," a notable contrast to the Catholicism and secular materialism that prevailed in their culture. Featuring eerie spirit photographs, amusing Daumier lithographs, and a posthumous autograph from Voltaire, as well as extensive documentary evidence, Laboratories of Faith gives readers a sense of what being in a séance or a secret-society ritual might actually have felt like and why these feelings attracted participants. While they never achieved the transformation of human consciousness for which they strove, these thinkers and believers nevertheless pioneered a way of "being religious" that has become an enduring part of the Western cultural vocabulary.

Laboratories of Faith

Laboratories of Faith PDF Author: John Warne Monroe
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461715
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
At a fascinating moment in French intellectual history, an interest in matters occult was not equivalent to a rejection of scientific thought; participants in séances and magic rituals were seekers after experimental data as well as spiritual truth. A young astronomy student wrote of his quest: "I am not in the presence or under the influence of any evil spirit: I study Spiritism as I study mathematics." He did not see himself as an ecstatic visionary but rather as a sober observer. For him, the darkened room of occult practice was as much laboratory as church. In an evocative history of alternative religious practices in France in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, John Warne Monroe tells the interconnected stories of three movements—Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism. Adherents of these groups, Monroe reveals, attempted to "modernize" faith by providing empirical support for metaphysical concepts. Instead of trusting theological speculation about the nature of the soul, these believers attempted to gather tangible evidence through Mesmeric experiments, séances, and ceremonial magic. While few French people were active Mesmerists, Spiritists, or Occultists, large segments of the educated general public were familiar with these movements and often regarded them as fascinating expressions of the "modern condition," a notable contrast to the Catholicism and secular materialism that prevailed in their culture. Featuring eerie spirit photographs, amusing Daumier lithographs, and a posthumous autograph from Voltaire, as well as extensive documentary evidence, Laboratories of Faith gives readers a sense of what being in a séance or a secret-society ritual might actually have felt like and why these feelings attracted participants. While they never achieved the transformation of human consciousness for which they strove, these thinkers and believers nevertheless pioneered a way of "being religious" that has become an enduring part of the Western cultural vocabulary.

People of Faith

People of Faith PDF Author: John Schmalzbauer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501718355
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, a host of critics have accused American journalism and higher education of being indifferent, even openly hostile, to religious concerns. These professions, more than any others, are said to drive a wedge between facts and values, faith and knowledge, the sacred and the secular. However, a growing number of observers are calling attention to a religious resurgence—journalists are covering religion more frequently and religious scholars in academia are increasingly visible.John Schmalzbauer provides a compelling investigation of the role of Catholic and evangelical Protestant beliefs in the newsroom and the classroom. His interviews with forty prominent journalists and academics reveal how some people of faith seek to preserve their religious identities in purportedly secular professions. What impact, he asks, does their Christianity have on their jobs? What is the place of personal religious conviction in professional life? Individuals featured include the journalists Fred Barnes, Cokie Roberts, Peter Steinfels, Cal Thomas, and Kenneth Woodward, and the scholars John DiIulio, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Andrew Greeley, George Marsden, and Mark Noll.Some of the journalists and academics with whom Schmalzbauer spoke qualified displays of personal religious belief with reminders of their own professional credibility, drawing a line between advocacy and objectivity. Schmalzbauer highlights the persistent tensions between the worlds of public endeavor and private belief, yet he maintains there is room for faith even in professional environments that have tended to prize empiricism and detachment over expressions of personal conviction.

Teaching and Christian Practices

Teaching and Christian Practices PDF Author: David Smith
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802866859
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
In Teaching and Christian Practices several university professors describe and reflect on their efforts to allow historic Christian practices to reshape and redirect their pedagogical strategies. Whether allowing spiritually formative reading to enhance a literature course, employing table fellowship and shared meals to reinforce concepts in a pre-nursing nutrition course, or using Christian hermeneutical practices to interpret data in an economics course, these teacher-authors envision ways of teaching and learning that are rooted in the rich tradition of Christian practices, as together they reconceive classrooms and laboratories as vital arenas for faith and spiritual growth.

Dynamics of Faith

Dynamics of Faith PDF Author: Paul Tillich
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0060937130
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
One of the greatest books ever written on the subject, Dynamics of Faithis a primer in the philosophy of religion. Paul Tillich, a leading theologian of the twentieth century, explores the idea of faith in all its dimensions, while defining the concept in the process. This graceful and accessible volume contains a new introduction by Marion Pauck, Tillich's biographer.

A Faith Of Our Own

A Faith Of Our Own PDF Author: Sharon Kim
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813549477
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Second-generation Korean Americans, demonstrating an unparalleled entrepreneurial fervor, are establishing new churches with a goal of shaping the future of American Christianity. A Faith of Our Own investigates the development and growth of these houses of worship, a recent and rapidly increasing phenomenon in major cities throughout the United States. Immigration historians have depicted the second-generation as a transitional generation--on the steady march toward the inevitable decline of ethnic identity and allegiance. Sharon Kim suggests an alternative path. By harnessing religion and innovatively creating hybrid religious institutions, second-generation Korean Americans are assertively defining and shaping their own ethnic and religious futures. Rather than assimilating into mainstream American evangelical churches or inheriting the churches of their immigrant parents, second-generation pastors are creating their own hybrid third space--new autonomous churches that are shaped by multiple frames of reference. Including data gathered over ten years at twenty-two churches, A Faith of Our Own is the most comprehensive study of this topic that addresses generational, identity, political, racial, and empowerment issues.

A Faith and Culture Devotional

A Faith and Culture Devotional PDF Author: Kelly Monroe Kullberg
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310309131
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Renew Your Sense of Wonder Refresh Your Education Learn and Grow with Christian Thought Leaders including: • Dallas Willard • John Eldredge • Michael Behe • Frederica Matthews-Green • Darrell Bock • William Lane Craig • R. C. Sproul • Randy Alcorn • J. P. Moreland Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington offer a daily guided tour through many of the paintings, laboratories, rock arenas, great books, mass movements, and private lives that have shaped the ways in which we think and live. This cultural devotional will inspire us to go beyond critique to creativity as we make something true, good, and beautiful of the lives and the world God has given us. Explore significant ideas, people, and events from a Christian worldview in a format that fits your busy life. A Faith and Culture Devotional will help bridge the artificial gap between learning truth and loving God—inspiring you with the wonder at the genius, power, and beauty of Jesus Christ.

Unruly Spirits

Unruly Spirits PDF Author: M. Brady Brower
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025203564X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Unruly Spirits connects the study of séances, telepathy, telekinesis, materializations, and other parapsychic phenomena in France during the age of Sigmund Freud to an epistemological crisis that would eventually yield the French adoption of psychoanalysis. Skillfully navigating experiments conducted by nineteenth-century French psychical researchers and the wide-ranging debates that surrounded their work, M. Brady Brower situates the institutional development of psychical research at the intersection of popular faith and the emergent discipline of psychology. Brower shows how spiritualist mediums were ignored by French academic scientists for nearly three decades. Only after the ideologues of the Third Republic turned to science to address what they took to be the excess of popular democracy would the marvels of mediumism begin to emerge as legitimate objects of scientific inquiry. Taken up by the most prominent physicists, physiologists, and psychologists of the last decades of the nineteenth century, psychical research would eventually stall in the 1920s as researchers struggled to come to terms with interpersonal phenomena (such as trust and good faith) that could not be measured within the framework of their experimental methods. In characterizing psychical research as something other than a mere echo of popular spirituality or an anomaly among the sciences, Brower argues that the questions surrounding mediums served to sustain the scientific project by forestalling the establishment of a closed and complete system of knowledge. By acknowledging persistent doubt about the intentions of its participants, psychical research would result in the realization of a subjectivity that was essentially indeterminate and would thus clear the way for the French reception of psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious and its more comprehensive account of subjective uncertainty.

People Whose Faith Got Them Into Trouble

People Whose Faith Got Them Into Trouble PDF Author: John W. Cowart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780830817375
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Entirely fearless. Absurdly happy. Always in trouble. This collection of true tales written by John W. Cowart shows how, throughout history, ordinary people have kept the faith in extraordinary ways. 149 pages, paper

The Old Faith and the Russian Land

The Old Faith and the Russian Land PDF Author: Douglas Rogers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457955
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
The Old Faith and the Russian Land is a historical ethnography that charts the ebbs and flows of ethical practice in a small Russian town over three centuries. The town of Sepych was settled in the late seventeenth century by religious dissenters who fled to the forests of the Urals to escape a world they believed to be in the clutches of the Antichrist. Factions of Old Believers, as these dissenters later came to be known, have maintained a presence in the town ever since. The townspeople of Sepych have also been serfs, free peasants, collective farmers, and, now, shareholders in a post-Soviet cooperative. Douglas Rogers traces connections between the town and some of the major transformations of Russian history, showing how townspeople have responded to a long series of attempts to change them and their communities: tsarist-era efforts to regulate family life and stamp out Old Belief on the Stroganov estates, Soviet collectivization drives and antireligious campaigns, and the marketization, religious revival, and ongoing political transformations of post-Soviet times. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival and manuscript sources, Rogers argues that religious, political, and economic practice are overlapping arenas in which the people of Sepych have striven to be ethical—in relation to labor and money, food and drink, prayers and rituals, religious books and manuscripts, and the surrounding material landscape. He tracks the ways in which ethical sensibilities—about work and prayer, hierarchy and inequality, gender and generation—have shifted and recombined over time. Rogers concludes that certain expectations about how to be an ethical person have continued to orient townspeople in Sepych over the course of nearly three centuries for specific, identifiable, and often unexpected reasons. Throughout, he demonstrates what a historical and ethnographic study of ethics might look like and uses this approach to ask new questions of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history.

Star Struck

Star Struck PDF Author: David Bradstreet
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 0310344190
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The heavens are beckoning us, telling us that this wonderful, mind-boggling cosmic display is indeed the work of the creator. And now, using rovers and satellites, we're venturing further out into the vastness of space than ever before. In Star Struck, Christian astronomer David Bradstreet and writer Steve Rabey take readers on a guided tour of the biggest story ever, offering both intriguing science lessons and powerful spiritual insights: As we discover more about cosmos, we understand more about the character of our Creator; The more we see the vastness and complexity of the universe, the more we experience awe, wonder, praise, gratitude and humility; Hundreds of Christian astronomers blaze the way into deep exploration of the universe today, discovering and proving God’s work in the heavens. Combining a respect and admiration for mainstream astronomy with a zeal for uncovering new details about God’s celestial handiwork at its core, this book about stars, planets, asteroids, nebulae, comets, dark matter, and the other fingerprints of God will tell you that all of the worlds around you are God’s and this world is his home for you.