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Author: Ari L. Goldman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345377060
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR In 1985 Ari L. Goldman took a year’s leave from his job as a religion reporter for The New York Times and enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School. What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. In his year at Harvard, Goldman found to his surprise that his fellow students were not straitlaced, somber clerics, but a diverse, vibrant, and sometimes embattled group from every major religion, united by their deep spiritual commitment. Even more surprising was the spiritual climate of the Divinity School itself: Far from being an ivory tower or a bastion of old-time Christian piety, the school was a forum for passionate debate on the relationships between religion and politics, social mores and sexuality. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today. Praise for The Search for God at Harvard: “Personal yet informative, warm and humorous, beautifully written. In a word, superb.” –Elie Wiesel “Is it possible to honor the truth of one’s own religion while being genuinely open to others? In The Search for God at Harvard, Ari Goldman tells his story in so fine a manner that he helps us to understand why the answer must be yes.” –The New York Times Book Review “Excellent: intelligent, informative, infused with humor.” –Cleveland Plain Dealer “Enriching . . . well-written, absorbing.” –The Boston Globe “A valuable and unique contribution.” –The Washington Post Book World
Author: Ari L. Goldman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345377060
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Get Book Here
Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR In 1985 Ari L. Goldman took a year’s leave from his job as a religion reporter for The New York Times and enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School. What began as a project to deepen his knowledge of the world’s sacred beliefs turned out to be an extraordinary journey of spiritual illumination, one in which Goldman reexamined his own faith as an Orthodox Jew and opened his mind to the great religions of the world. In his year at Harvard, Goldman found to his surprise that his fellow students were not straitlaced, somber clerics, but a diverse, vibrant, and sometimes embattled group from every major religion, united by their deep spiritual commitment. Even more surprising was the spiritual climate of the Divinity School itself: Far from being an ivory tower or a bastion of old-time Christian piety, the school was a forum for passionate debate on the relationships between religion and politics, social mores and sexuality. Written with warmth, humor, and penetrating clarity, The Search for God at Harvard is a book for anyone who has wrestled with the question of what it means to take religion seriously today. Praise for The Search for God at Harvard: “Personal yet informative, warm and humorous, beautifully written. In a word, superb.” –Elie Wiesel “Is it possible to honor the truth of one’s own religion while being genuinely open to others? In The Search for God at Harvard, Ari Goldman tells his story in so fine a manner that he helps us to understand why the answer must be yes.” –The New York Times Book Review “Excellent: intelligent, informative, infused with humor.” –Cleveland Plain Dealer “Enriching . . . well-written, absorbing.” –The Boston Globe “A valuable and unique contribution.” –The Washington Post Book World
Author: Kelly K. Monroe
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 9780310219224
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Kelly Monroe presents forty-two compelling testimonies from faculty members, former students, and orators at Harvard University whose reflections explode the myth that Christian faith cannot survive a rigorous intellectual environment.
Author: Michael Rosen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674276043
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
A bold and beautifully written exploration of the “afterlife” of God, showing how apparently secular habits of mind in fact retain the structure of religious thought. Once in the West, our lives were bounded by religion. Then we were guided out of the darkness of faith, we are often told, by the cold light of science and reason. To be modern was to reject the religious for the secular and rational. In a bold retelling of philosophical history, Michael Rosen explains the limits of this story, showing that many modern and apparently secular ways of seeing the world were in fact profoundly shaped by religion. The key thinkers, Rosen argues, were the German Idealists, as they sought to reconcile reason and religion. It was central to Kant’s philosophy that, if God is both just and assigns us to heaven or hell for eternity, we must know what is required of us and be able to choose freely. In trying to live moral lives, Kant argued, we are engaged in a collective enterprise as members of a “Church invisible” working together to achieve justice in history. As later Idealists moved away from Kant’s ideas about personal immortality, this idea of “historical immortality” took center stage. Through social projects that outlive us we maintain a kind of presence after death. Conceptions of historical immortality moved not just into the universalistic ideologies of liberalism and revolutionary socialism but into nationalist and racist doctrines that opposed them. But how, after global wars and genocide, can we retain faith in any conception of shared moral progress and, if not, what is to become of the idea of historical immortality? That is our present predicament. A seamless blend of philosophy and intellectual history, The Shadow of God is a profound exploration of secular modernity’s theistic inheritance.
Author: William J Baker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674020448
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Like no other nation on earth, Americans eagerly blend their religion and sports. This book traces this dynamic relationship from the Puritan condemnation of games as sinful in the seventeenth century to the near deification of athletic contests in our own day.
Author: Jason W. Stevens
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674058844
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism. Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion. Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.
Author: Armand Nicholi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743247856
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Compares and contrasts the beliefs of two famous thinkers, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, on topics ranging from the existence of God and morality to pain and suffering.
Author: Sarah Shortall
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674980107
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
A revelatory account of the nouvelle thologie, a clerical movement that revitalized the Catholic ChurchÕs role in twentieth-century French political life. Secularism has been a cornerstone of French political culture since 1905, when the republic formalized the separation of church and state. At times the barrier of secularism has seemed impenetrable, stifling religious actors wishing to take part in political life. Yet in other instances, secularism has actually nurtured movements of the faithful. Soldiers of God in a Secular World explores one such case, that of the nouvelle thologie, or new theology. Developed in the interwar years by Jesuits and Dominicans, the nouvelle thologie reimagined the ChurchÕs relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Nouveaux thologiens charted a path between the old alliance of throne and altar and secularismÕs demand for the privatization of religion. Envisioning a Church in but not of the public sphere, Catholic thinkers drew on theological principles to intervene in political questions while claiming to remain at armÕs length from politics proper. Sarah Shortall argues that this Òcounter-politicsÓ was central to the mission of the nouveaux thologiens: by recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, colonialism and nuclear war. This approach found its highest expression during the Second World War, when the nouveaux thologiens led the spiritual resistance against Nazism. Claiming a powerful public voice, they collectively forged a new role for the Church amid the momentous political shifts of the twentieth century.
Author: Bethany Moreton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256468
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 396
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Book Description
In the decades after World War II, evangelical Christianity nourished America’s devotion to free markets, free trade, and free enterprise. The history of Wal-Mart uncovers a complex network that united Sun Belt entrepreneurs, evangelical employees, Christian business students, overseas missionaries, and free-market activists. Through the stories of people linked by the world’s largest corporation, Bethany Moreton shows how a Christian service ethos powered capitalism at home and abroad. While industrial America was built by and for the urban North, rural Southerners comprised much of the labor, management, and consumers in the postwar service sector that raised the Sun Belt to national influence. These newcomers to the economic stage put down the plough to take up the bar-code scanner without ever passing through the assembly line. Industrial culture had been urban, modernist, sometimes radical, often Catholic and Jewish, and self-consciously international. Post-industrial culture, in contrast, spoke of Jesus with a drawl and of unions with a sneer, sang about Momma and the flag, and preached salvation in this world and the next. This extraordinary biography of Wal-Mart’s world shows how a Christian pro-business movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down, bolstering an economic vision that sanctifies corporate globalization. The author has assigned her royalties and subsidiary earnings to Interfaith Worker Justice (www.iwj.org) and its local affiliate in Athens, GA, the Economic Justice Coalition (www.econjustice.org).
Author: Michael J. Puett
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
Evidence from Shang oracle bones to memorials submitted to Western Han emperors attests to a long-lasting debate in early China over the proper relationship between humans and gods. One pole of the debate saw the human and divine realms as separate and agonistic and encouraged divination to determine the will of the gods and sacrifices to appease and influence them. The opposite pole saw the two realms as related and claimed that humans could achieve divinity and thus control the cosmos. This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the spirits, the proper demarcation between the human and the divine realms, and the types of power that humans and spirits can exercise. It is often claimed that the worldview of early China was unproblematically monistic and that hence China had avoided the tensions between gods and humans found in the West. By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Michael J. Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.
Author: Harvey Cox
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780618710546
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
In this urgently relevant, wholly enlightening discussion of modern moral decisions, the Harvard theology professor Harvey Cox considers Jesus"s contemporary significance. Moving far beyond the simple question "What Would Jesus Do?" Cox shows how we can extrapolate moral guidance from the parables of Jesus. As he did in his undergraduate class "Jesus and the Moral Life"-a course that grew so popular that the lectures were held in a theater often used for rock concerts-Cox holds contemporary dilemmas in the light of lessons gleaned from the Gospels. Delving into centuries of theological exploration, he "pulls off a near miracle as he gathers disparate scholarly and religious views of Jesus, while demonstrating respectful, deep knowledge of Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist traditions, and various Christian teachings" (Seattle Times). Invigorating and incisive, this book encourages an intellectual approach to faith and inspires a clear way of thinking about moral choices for all readers.
