Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination

Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination PDF Author: Robert Bruce Mullin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300066968
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
According to surveys, most Americans today believe in miracles. For many others, however, a belief in miracles seems incompatible with a modern world view. Why does interest in miracles persist even in a secular era? Why are miracles such a controversial part of Western religious thinking? In this fascinating book, Robert Bruce Mullin traces the debate about miracles from the Reformation to the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the years from 1860 to 1930. He examines the way preachers, faith healers, psychic researchers, scientists, historians, philosophers, and literary figures have grappled with issues of the miraculous. Before the mid-1800s, the author contends, Catholics had defended post-biblical miracles, while Protestants insisted true miracles were limited to the biblical era. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Protestant position had largely collapsed, and two opposing views emerged in its wake. Some Protestants wished to jettison all miracles - even those recorded in the Bible. Others took a new interest in modern miracles, believing that the presence of miracles could help ground contemporary religious faith. This transformation in attitudes toward miracles not only changed the Anglo-American religious landscape and created a new focus of debate, Mullin says, it also opened up a new basis for accord between Protestants and Catholics.

Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination

Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination PDF Author: Robert Bruce Mullin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300066968
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
According to surveys, most Americans today believe in miracles. For many others, however, a belief in miracles seems incompatible with a modern world view. Why does interest in miracles persist even in a secular era? Why are miracles such a controversial part of Western religious thinking? In this fascinating book, Robert Bruce Mullin traces the debate about miracles from the Reformation to the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the years from 1860 to 1930. He examines the way preachers, faith healers, psychic researchers, scientists, historians, philosophers, and literary figures have grappled with issues of the miraculous. Before the mid-1800s, the author contends, Catholics had defended post-biblical miracles, while Protestants insisted true miracles were limited to the biblical era. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Protestant position had largely collapsed, and two opposing views emerged in its wake. Some Protestants wished to jettison all miracles - even those recorded in the Bible. Others took a new interest in modern miracles, believing that the presence of miracles could help ground contemporary religious faith. This transformation in attitudes toward miracles not only changed the Anglo-American religious landscape and created a new focus of debate, Mullin says, it also opened up a new basis for accord between Protestants and Catholics.

A Century of Miracles

A Century of Miracles PDF Author: Harold Allen Drake
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199367418
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The fourth century of our common era began and ended with a miracle: Constantine's famous Vision of the Cross at one end and Theodosius' victory bearing prayer at the other. In this book, historian H. A. Drake shows how miracles in this century forever altered the way Christians, pagans, and Jews understood themselves and each other.

Miracles and Wonders

Miracles and Wonders PDF Author: Calvin Miller
Publisher: FaithWords
ISBN: 0446561584
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
* Jesus Loves Me, Calvin Miller's most recent novel, was published by Warner Faith in 4/02. His previous book, Into the Depths of God (Bethany House, 4/01), sold 38,000 copies and was chosen as a Featured Main Selection by Insight for Living. * Calvin Miller has more than 30 published books to his credit. His first fiction series, The Singer Trilogy, sold over one million copies and was a bestseller. With Wings Like Eagles, (Thomas Nelson, 1998), which he wrote with Thomas Kinkade, was also a bestseller, selling over 85,000 copies. * A pastor, poet, theologian, and painter, Calvin Miller currently serves as a professor of preaching and pastoral ministries at Beeson Divinity School in Alabama.

The Political Lives of Saints

The Political Lives of Saints PDF Author: Angie Heo
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520297989
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Since the Arab Spring in 2011 and ISIS’s rise in 2014, Egypt’s Copts have attracted attention worldwide as the collateral damage of revolution and as victims of sectarian strife. Countering the din of persecution rhetoric and Islamophobia, The Political Lives of Saints journeys into the quieter corners of divine intercession to consider what martyrs, miracles, and mysteries have to do with the routine challenges faced by Christians and Muslims living together under the modern nation-state. Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork, Angie Heo argues for understanding popular saints as material media that organize social relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt toward varying political ends. With an ethnographer’s eye for traces of antiquity, she deciphers how long-cherished imaginaries of holiness broker bonds of revolutionary sacrifice, reconfigure national sites of sacred territory, and pose sectarian threats to security and order. A study of tradition and nationhood at their limits, The Political Lives of Saints shows that Coptic Orthodoxy is a core domain of minoritarian regulation and authoritarian rule, powerfully reversing the recurrent thesis of its impending extinction in the Arab Muslim world.

Magic, Miracles, and Religion

Magic, Miracles, and Religion PDF Author: Ilkka Pyysiäinen
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 0759115567
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Can scientists study religion? Ilkka PyysiSinen says that they can. While the study of religion cannot be reduced to other disciplines, it must not ignore what other disciplines have learned about human thought and behavior. In this collection of essays, PyysiSinen shows how findings from cognitive science can offer new directions to debates in religion. After providing a historical and theoretical overview of the cognitive science of religion, PyysiSinen demonstrates how knowledge of the mind's workings can help deconstruct such concepts as 'god,' 'ideology,' 'culture,' 'magic,' 'miracles,' and 'religion.' For scholars of religion or for scholars of the mind-brain, Magic, Miracles, and Religion provides a helpful overview to this emerging field.

Miracles

Miracles PDF Author: Patrick J. Hayes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
Miracles give hope to the hopeless and exemplify the intersection of the divine and the mundane. They have shaped world history and continue to influence us through their presence in films, television, novels, and popular culture. This encyclopedia provides a unique resource on the philosophical, historical, religious, and cross-cultural conceptions of miracles that cut across denominational lines. Multidisciplinary in approach, this informative yet entertaining encyclopedia covers major aspects of miraculous phenomena through more than 150 alphabetically arranged entries that document how humanity's belief in religious miracles over multiple places, periods, and faiths have affected society—even changed the course of history. Written for high school students and general readers, the coverage enables readers to learn about different civilizations and cultures, the controversies surrounding different beliefs, and the often uncomfortable engagement of religion with science. This single-volume book provides a one-stop ready-reference that addresses a broad variety of subject matter on miraculous phenomena and guides further investigations into the subject. Helpful illustrations and lucid explanations of the ancillary concepts associated with miraculous phenomena make learning about this topic more engaging. Readers will be able to link the doctrinal concepts, such as "grace" or "prayer," with the descriptions of miraculous events, especially those associated with saints or holy objects. The examination of the controversial aspects of different belief systems along with the book's balanced coverage of the interpretation of miracles will encourage students to weigh different explanations, thus fostering the development of their critical thinking skills.

Miracles

Miracles PDF Author: David L. Weddle
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814794165
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Examines miracle stories from five religions, focusing on Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and discussing how each religion views miracles.

Episcopal Vision/American Reality

Episcopal Vision/American Reality PDF Author: Robert Bruce Mullin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300034875
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The first book to study the Episcopal high church movement within the context of nineteenth-century American culture. Mullin traces the history of the Episcopal Church from its rise in the early nineteenth century, when it was seen as a refuge from the excesses of evangelical Protestantism, to 1870, when the antebellum high church synthesis had largely collapsed. His book not only sheds light on the reasons for the flourishing of this alternative social and intellectual vision but also helps to account for the general crisis confronting religion in America at the turn of the century.

Faith in the Great Physician

Faith in the Great Physician PDF Author: Heather D. Curtis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801886864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Recipient of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History for 2007 Faith in the Great Physician tells the story of how participants in the evangelical divine healing movement of the late nineteenth century transformed the ways Americans coped with physical affliction and pursued bodily health. Examining the politics of sickness, health, and healing during this period, Heather D. Curtis encourages critical reflection on the theological, cultural, and social forces that come into play when one questions the purpose of suffering and the possibility of healing. Curtis finds that advocates of divine healing worked to revise a deep-seated Christian ethic that linked physical suffering with spiritual holiness. By engaging in devotional disciplines and participating in social reform efforts, proponents of faith cure embraced a model of spiritual experience that endorsed active service, rather than passive endurance, as the proper Christian response to illness and pain. Emphasizing the centrality of religious practices to the enterprise of divine healing, Curtis sheds light on the relationship among Christian faith, medical science, and the changing meanings of suffering and healing in American culture.

Mortal Remains

Mortal Remains PDF Author: Nancy Isenberg
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Mortal Remains introduces new methods of analyzing death and its crucial meanings over a 240-year period, from 1620 to 1860, untangling its influence on other forms of cultural expression, from religion and politics to race relations and the nature of war. In this volume historians and literary scholars join forces to explore how, in a medically primitive and politically evolving environment, mortality became an issue that was inseparable from national self-definition. Attempting to make sense of their suffering and loss while imagining a future of cultural permanence and spiritual value, early Americans crafted metaphors of death in particular ways that have shaped the national mythology. As the authors show, the American fascination with murder, dismembered bodies, and scenes of death, the allure of angel sightings, the rural cemetery movement, and the enshrinement of George Washington as a saintly father, constituted a distinct sensibility. Moreover, by exploring the idea of the vanishing Indian and the brutality of slavery, the authors demonstrate how a culture of violence and death had an early effect on the American collective consciousness. Mortal Remains draws on a range of primary sources—from personal diaries and public addresses, satire and accounts of sensational crime—and makes a needed contribution to neglected aspects of cultural history. It illustrates the profound ways in which experiences with death and the imagery associated with it became enmeshed in American society, politics, and culture.