Making Sense of God

Making Sense of God PDF Author: Timothy Keller
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525954155
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Making Sense of God

Making Sense of God PDF Author: Timothy Keller
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525954155
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Making Christian History

Making Christian History PDF Author: Michael Hollerich
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520295366
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.

God's Own Party

God's Own Party PDF Author: Daniel K. Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199929068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
In God's Own Party, Daniel K. Williams presents the first comprehensive history of the Christian Right, uncovering how evangelicals came to see the Republican Party as the vehicle through which they could reclaim America as a Christian nation.

Making Senses Out of Scripture

Making Senses Out of Scripture PDF Author: Mark Shea
Publisher: TAN Books
ISBN: 1505108438
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Reading the Bible in a way that is as old as Scripture itself, award-winning author Mark P. Shea takes us on a “fly-over” of the biblical story from Genesis to Revelation. He shows you how to explore the literal, allegorical, moral, and analogical sense of Scripture. Whether you have been studying Scripture for years, or are encountering it for the very first time,Making Senses Out of Scripture is an invaluable tool that it will help you see biblical revelation afresh, as Christians have done for 2000 years.

The Making of a Christian Aristocracy

The Making of a Christian Aristocracy PDF Author: Michele Renee Salzman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674043049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
What did it take to cause the Roman aristocracy to turn to Christianity, changing centuries-old beliefs and religious traditions? Michele Salzman takes a fresh approach to this much-debated question. Focusing on a sampling of individual aristocratic men and women as well as on writings and archeological evidence, she brings new understanding to the process by which pagan aristocrats became Christian, and Christianity became aristocratic. Roman aristocrats would seem to be unlikely candidates for conversion to Christianity. Pagan and civic traditions were deeply entrenched among the educated and politically well-connected. Indeed, men who held state offices often were also esteemed priests in the pagan state cults: these priesthoods were traditionally sought as a way to reinforce one's social position. Moreover, a religion whose texts taught love for one's neighbor and humility, with strictures on wealth and notions of equality, would not have obvious appeal for those at the top of a hierarchical society. Yet somehow in the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries Christianity and the Roman aristocracy met and merged. Examining the world of the ruling class--its institutions and resources, its values and style of life--Salzman paints a fascinating picture, especially of aristocratic women. Her study yields new insight into the religious revolution that transformed the late Roman Empire.

Creating Christian Indians

Creating Christian Indians PDF Author: Bonnie Sue Lewis
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806135168
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
"Creating Christian Indians takes issue with the widespread consensus that missions to North American indigenous peoples routinely destroyed native cultures and that becoming Christian was fundamentally incompatible with retaining traditional Indian identities"--from jkt.

Making Christians

Making Christians PDF Author: Denise Kimber Buell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691221529
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
How did second-century Christians vie with each other in seeking to produce an authoritative discourse of Christian identity? In this innovative book, Denise Buell argues that many early Christians deployed the metaphors of procreation and kinship in the struggle over claims to represent the truth of Christian interpretation, practice, and doctrine. In particular, she examines the intriguing works of the influential theologian Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-210 c.e.), for whom cultural assumptions about procreation and kinship played an important role in defining which Christians have the proper authority to teach, and which kinds of knowledge are authentic. Buell argues that metaphors of procreation and kinship can serve to make power differentials appear natural. She shows that early Christian authors recognized this and often turned to such metaphors to mark their own positions as legitimate and marginalize others as false. Attention to the functions of this language offers a way out of the trap of reconstructing the development of early Christianity along the axes of "heresy" and "orthodoxy," while not denying that early Christians employed this binary. Ultimately, Buell argues, strategic use of kinship language encouraged conformity over diversity and had a long lasting effect both on Christian thought and on the historiography of early Christianity. Aperceptive and closely argued contribution to early Christian studies, Making Christians also branches out to the areas of kinship studies and the social construction of gender.

The Imam of the Christians

The Imam of the Christians PDF Author: Philip Wood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691219958
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
How Christian leaders adapted the governmental practices and political thought of their Muslim rulers in the Abbasid caliphate The Imam of the Christians examines how Christian leaders adopted and adapted the political practices and ideas of their Muslim rulers between 750 and 850 in the Abbasid caliphate in the Jazira (modern eastern Turkey and northern Syria). Focusing on the writings of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, the patriarch of the Jacobite church, Philip Wood describes how this encounter produced an Islamicate Christianity that differed from the Christianities of Byzantium and western Europe in far more than just theology. In doing so, Wood opens a new window on the world of early Islam and Muslims’ interactions with other religious communities. Wood shows how Dionysius and other Christian clerics, by forging close ties with Muslim elites, were able to command greater power over their coreligionists, such as the right to issue canons regulating the lives of lay people, gather tithes, and use state troops to arrest opponents. In his writings, Dionysius advertises his ease in the courts of ʿAbd Allah ibn Tahir in Raqqa and the caliph al-Ma’mun in Baghdad, presenting himself as an effective advocate for the interests of his fellow Christians because of his knowledge of Arabic and his ability to redeploy Islamic ideas to his own advantage. Strikingly, Dionysius even claims that, like al-Ma’mun, he is an imam since he leads his people in prayer and rules them by popular consent. A wide-ranging examination of Middle Eastern Christian life during a critical period in the development of Islam, The Imam of the Christians is also a case study of the surprising workings of cultural and religious adaptation.

Making Amulets Christian

Making Amulets Christian PDF Author: Theodore de Bruyn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191511706
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Making Amulets Christian: Artefacts, Scribes, and Contexts examines Greek amulets with Christian elements from late antique Egypt in order to discern the processes whereby a customary practice—the writing of incantations on amulets—changed in an increasingly Christian context. It considers how the formulation of incantations and amulets changed as the Christian church became the prevailing religious institution in Egypt in the last centuries of the Roman empire. Theodore de Bruyn investigates what we can learn from incantations and amulets containing Christian elements about the cultural and social location of the people who wrote them. He shows how incantations and amulets were indebted to rituals or ritualizing behaviour of Christians. This study analyzes different types of amulets and the ways in which they incorporate Christian elements. By comparing the formulation and writing of individual amulets that are similar to one another, one can observe differences in the culture of the scribes of these materials. It argues for 'conditioned individuality' in the production of amulets. On the one hand, amulets manifest qualities that reflect the training and culture of the individual writer. On the other hand, amulets reveal that individual writers were shaped, whether consciously or inadvertently, by the resources they drew upon-by what is called 'tradition' in the field of religious studies.

Culture Making

Culture Making PDF Author: Andy Crouch
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 1514005778
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
The only way to change culture is to create culture. Andy Crouch says we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators God designed us to be. In this expanded edition of his award-winning book he unpacks how culture works and gives us tools to partner with God's own making and transforming of culture.