Western Culture Today and Tomorrow

Western Culture Today and Tomorrow PDF Author: Joseph Ratzinger
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1621643166
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Well known for his important scholarly contributions to dogmatic theology and biblical commentary, Joseph Ratzinger has also written penetrating observations of our times. Formerly titled Europe Today and Tomorrow in a previous edition, this book includes some of his keen insights about the social and political challenges confronting modern Western societies. Writing most of these chapters just before his election as pope, Ratzinger sought to remind Europeans, who at the time were crafting a new constitution, that the civilizational project we call “the West” is a cultural achievement with a history. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome were the three foundation stones upon which Western civilization was built, he wrote. Their invaluable contributions form the basis for the Western understanding of human dignity and human rights, which spread from Europe to the United States and beyond.

Western Culture Today and Tomorrow

Western Culture Today and Tomorrow PDF Author: Joseph Ratzinger
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1621643166
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book Here

Book Description
Well known for his important scholarly contributions to dogmatic theology and biblical commentary, Joseph Ratzinger has also written penetrating observations of our times. Formerly titled Europe Today and Tomorrow in a previous edition, this book includes some of his keen insights about the social and political challenges confronting modern Western societies. Writing most of these chapters just before his election as pope, Ratzinger sought to remind Europeans, who at the time were crafting a new constitution, that the civilizational project we call “the West” is a cultural achievement with a history. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome were the three foundation stones upon which Western civilization was built, he wrote. Their invaluable contributions form the basis for the Western understanding of human dignity and human rights, which spread from Europe to the United States and beyond.

Western Culture Today and Tomorrow

Western Culture Today and Tomorrow PDF Author: Joseph Ratzinger
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1642290874
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book Here

Book Description
Well known for his important scholarly contributions to dogmatic theology and biblical commentary, Joseph Ratzinger has also written penetrating observations of our times. This book includes some of his keen insights about the social and political challenges confronting modern Western societies. Writing most of these chapters just before his election as pope, Ratzinger sought to remind Europeans, who at the time were crafting a new constitution, that the civilizational project we call “the West” is a cultural achievement with a history. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome were the three foundation stones upon which Western civilization was built, he wrote. Their invaluable contributions form the basis for the Western understanding of human dignity and human rights, which spread from Europe to the United States and beyond. This book also includes, as an epilogue, a new essay by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on clerical sex abuse, which traces the moral disorder that preys upon the young to the collapse of faith both inside and outside the Church. “The witness of Christian lives nobly lived is the beginning of reconversion (or, in many cases, conversion) of the West—and that return to the truths taught by the God of the Bible is essential if the great Western civilizational project is not to crumble because of its current, postmodern incoherence. Joseph Ratzinger understood that danger long before many others. It would be well to attend to his prescription.” —George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, from the Foreword

A Turning Point For Europe?

A Turning Point For Europe? PDF Author: Joseph Ratzinger
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681490285
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Foreword by James Schall, S.J. Cardinal Ratzinger addresses the challenges and responsibilities that both the Church and society in Europe face after the collapse of Marxism. Both liberalism and Marxism have denied religion the right to have any influence on public affairs and the common future of humanity. Since there is also a great spiritual emptiness growing in the West with the increased secularization, consumerism and hedonism, Ratzingerಙs comments apply as much, if not more, to the United States as well. With the downfall of Marxism, religion has been discovered anew as an ineradicable force for both the individual and society. While there is renewed interest in religion, the dangers also exist to lay hold of religion as an instrument to serve various political ideas. Ratzinger, whose theological work has often dealt with the ಜreasons for our faith,ಝ reflects upon the various problems facing humanity at this turning point of our history and offers genuine hope based upon a deep Christian faith. He also addressed the critical role that the Church has in relationship to the world and the essential task of bringing Christ back into our culture. ಜIn the present situation it is an absolute obligation for the theologian and for the pastor of the Church to enter the disputation about the correct understanding of the present time, and to both clarify faithಙs own proper sphere and to do justice to the share of responsibility that lies on him at this hour.ಝ Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Roots of Western Culture

Roots of Western Culture PDF Author: Herman Dooyeweerd
Publisher: Paideia Press
ISBN: 9780888152213
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Confronted with the implications of a biblical understanding of the human condition, human society and the place and calling of scholarly reflection, Dooyeweerd contends that humanism has done more for the recognition of human freedom for religious convictions than did 17th-century Calvinism.

The Superiority of an Evangelical Model of Religious Liberty

The Superiority of an Evangelical Model of Religious Liberty PDF Author: Daniel J. Trippie
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666745367
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Religious liberty is America’s first freedom. But in recent years, challenges to religious liberty have abounded. For example, some claim that religious freedom promotes intolerance and bigotry, while others contend religious freedom condemns people to hell. And others weaponize religious liberty for culture warring. Nevertheless, evangelicals believe that religious liberty is fundamentally a matter of human dignity; thus, religious liberty is a right we must preserve for all people. This book will explore how evangelical anthropology, cosmology, and eschatology offer the most stable basis for religious freedom. Secular and Roman Catholic theories may positively contribute to religious liberty, but the evangelical model is superior because it answers fundamental questions left unanswered in other models.

Western Culture in Gospel Context

Western Culture in Gospel Context PDF Author: David J. Kettle
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1610971841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Approaching us in sovereign freedom, God comes alive to us, we come alive to God, and all creation comes alive as a sign pointing to God. In the gospel of Jesus Christ, God gives and discloses himself in this immediate way as our ultimate context and host, within the provisional medium of creation. This life-giving gospel is met by blindness, however, among those who live today in a collapsing Western culture. This is because their imaginative world is shaped by habitual assumptions and practices that lie--largely unacknowledged--deep within that culture, and that preclude openness to the gospel. Moreover, Western Christians themselves widely share these assumptions, betraying the gospel into cultural captivity. God calls for the conversion of Western culture to the living gospel. Crucially this must include, as Lesslie Newbigin recognized, a repentance from modern Western assumptions about knowledge. Part One explores seeking, knowing, and serving God, as providing a true paradigm for understanding all human enquiry, knowledge, and action. Part Two examines ten resulting "hot spots" where conversion from prevailing cultural assumptions is vital for authentic mission to Western culture.

Understanding Chinese and Western Cultures

Understanding Chinese and Western Cultures PDF Author: Tang Yijie
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000646378
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The title is a collection of essays centering on the topic of intercultural communication between Chinese and Western cultures by Tang Yijie, one of the most renowned philosophy scholars in China. Comprised of five parts, the author discusses how Chinese culture should modernize itself through borrowing from Western culture premised on a self-awareness of Chinese culture per se. The book begins by critiquing theories of the so-called clash of civilizations and new empires and argues for the coexistence of cultures and a global consciousness instead. Chapters in the second part revisit contemporary Chinese culture in transition and call for the cultural integration of China and the West, with China defined in both its ancient and modern guises. By providing reflections on the cultural trends of the 1980s and 1990s, the third part illustrates the inevitable growth of diversified cultural development while analyzing cases of cultural dialogue in history, philosophy and religion. The fourth part demonstrates the significance of culture diversity and interaction while the fifth provides thoughts and reflections on some real-life cultural issues. This title will appeal to all levels of readers interested in Chinese culture, cross-cultural studies and topics of cultural pluralism.

Tonality in Western Culture

Tonality in Western Culture PDF Author: Richard Norton
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This book initiates "the first critical appraisal of the whole of Western tonal consciousness, from the discoveries of Pythagoras to the latest popular song." While tonality has been unwittingly championed as the product of the bourgeois age in Europe and America from 1600 to 1900, Norton states, key-centered music is understood here merely to exhibit components of an encompassing sonic expressivity as durable as any language. The author analyzes fundamental components of Western tonal phenomena that have persisted in music from ancient Jewish cantillation to the so-called atonal procedures of the Schoenberg school and beyond. Norton isolates the role of traditional music theory in the creation of models that attempted to explain tonality solely in terms of the concretized and limited objectivity of the musical score. The author evaluates and discards those features of logical positivism, scientific empiricism, idealism, and vitalism that in his view have encumbered virtually all speculation on tonality. With this negation, his aim is to restore the composer as a creator subject to his own sonic object. The book's approach is particularly indebted to the thought of Theodor Adorno, the member of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists that Norton finds most capable of suggesting an authentic dialectic of tonality. The author interprets the activities of both theorists and composers from various periods within the context of their mutual and conflicting historical interests. Ranging through the fields of physics, acoustics, psychology, sociology, economics, and historical musicology and criticism, Norton demonstrates that the cognitive abilities and disabilities of humans as tonal hearers form a necessary ground for understanding the remarkable vitality of tonality as historical process. Current theories of human tonal activity are hopelessly limited, the book concludes, however self-preserving they have become through the sanction of academic respectability. In short, tonal science, as it is commonly practiced, is not tonal truth. In its place the author urges a thoroughgoing critique of the language and methodology of contemporary tonal speculation, an abandonment of its confining sphere of interest, and a new and liberating approach to tonal consciousness that incorporates all relevant data of human sonic cognition. This approach assumes that tonality is not merely the result of the physical unfolding of natural appearance--the overtone series that so enchanted Rameau, Schenker, Hindemith, and others--and the submission of composers to its assumed authority. Tonality is, rather, Norton contends, a decision made against the chaos of pitch and for the human potential to create works of music that speak with integrity and beauty, that as aesthetic creations neither lag behind nor rush ahead of human enjoyment and understanding.

How the Doctrine of Incarnation Shaped Western Culture

How the Doctrine of Incarnation Shaped Western Culture PDF Author: Patricia Ranft
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739174339
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In recent years numerous scholars in disciplines not traditionally associated with theology have promoted an interesting thesis. They maintain that one particular Christian doctrine, the Incarnation, had an inordinate influence on the shape of Western culture. The doctrine, they say, was so radical that it mandated an epistemological break with pagan society’s perception of the universe and forced Christians to form a new culture. As medieval society worked out the consequences of the doctrine, it gave birth to those attitudes, institutions, and actions that define modern Western culture. The claims are well argued, but it is a historically untested thesis. How the Doctrine of Incarnation Shaped Western Culture is a response to the situation. It investigates whether the presence of the doctrine had the definitive effect on Western culture that so many scholars claim it did. It searches early Christian and medieval sources for evidence and concludes that the doctrine had a dominant effect on the developing culture. No other idea was as omnipresent or pervasive in Western society during its formative stage as the Incarnation doctrine. The doctrine was influential in the establishment of every major facet of Western culture. Its paradox, irrationality, and juxtaposition of opposites created a tension that cried out for resolution, and society responded accordingly. The ideas within the doctrine acted as catalysts for cultural change. As a result, the West developed its most characteristic traits and forged a path that was uniquely its own.

Nippon Today and Tomorrow

Nippon Today and Tomorrow PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 680

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Book Description
Nos. 1- include section "Books on Japan."