This viewpoint is even making inroads into the church. How are Christians to respond to such accusations? And how are we to reconcile the seemingly disconnected natures of God portrayed in the two testaments?In this timely and readable book, apologist Paul Copan takes on some of the most vexing accusations of our time, including: God is arrogant and jealousGod punishes people too harshlyGod is guilty of ethnic cleansingGod oppresses womenGod endorses slaveryChristianity causes violenceand moreCopan not only answers God's critics, he also shows how to read both the Old and New Testaments faithfully, seeing an unchanging, righteous, and loving God in both.

    You see, those Gospels were written for first century readers already familiar with many of the persons, places, parties, and politics that colored events in those long-past days. Not so modern readers, twenty centuries later! Which is why Fr. Ralph Gorman has here crafted for us a single detailed narrative out of the four Gospels, weaving into his narrative relevant Old Testament passages and prophecies, and facts from Jewish and Roman history, laws, beliefs, traditions, and practices, plus helpful first century military, political, geographical, and archaeological information. Faithful to the Gospels while drawing on the best commentaries on them in English, Latin, French, German, and Italian, these rich pages provide you a refreshing reading of the Gospels supplemented by reliable archaeological, historical, and theological information about the period, places, and persons involved. Plus, you have the benefit of Fr. Gorman's keen depictions of the Gospel places based on his three years' residence there.You can read this book straight through, or one chapter a day as spiritual reading before Mass or during Lent. Either way, you'll come to understand better the malice of the crowds, the dismay and confusion of Christ's friends, and the speed with which the deadly events unfolded. Most of all, you'll come to grasp anew the depths of Christ's love for you, awakening in you greater devotion to Him than ever before.

    Yet over the course of the thousand-year Biblical Era, encounters with God changed dramatically. As James L. Kugel argues, this transition allows us to glimpse a massive shift in human experience—the emergence of the modern, Western sense of self. In this landmark work, Kugel fuses revelatory close readings of ancient texts with modern scholarship from a range of fields, including neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology, to explain the origins of belief, worship, and the sense of self, and the changing nature of God through history. In the tradition of books like The Swerve and The Better Angels of Our Nature,The Great Shift tells the story of a revolution in human consciousness and the enchantment of everyday life. This book will make believers and seekers think differently not just about the Bible, but about the entire history of the human imagination.

    Driven to explore th origins of the kaddish, from the ancient legend of a wayeard ghost to a 17th-century Ukranian pogrom, he offers as well a mourner's response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred up in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Kaddish is suffused with love: a son's embracing of the traditon bequethed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring of its beauty, and a writer's revealing it, proudly unadorned, to the reader.

    Crumb, the legendary illustrator, reveals here the story of Genesis in a profoundly honest and deeply moving way. Originally thinking that he would do a take off of Adam and Eve, Crumb became so fascinated by the Bible’s language, “a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions,” that he decided instead to do a literal interpretation using the text word for word in a version primarily assembled from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James bible.As Crumb writes in his introduction, “the stories of these people, the Hebrews, were something more than just stories. They were the foundation, the source, in writing of religious and political power, handed down by God himself.” Crumb’s Book of Genesis, the culmination of 5 years of painstaking work, is a tapestry of detail and storytelling.

    These “pagans” were actually pious Greeks, Romans, Syrians, and Gauls who observed the traditions of their ancestors. To these devout polytheists, Christians who worshipped only one deity were immoral atheists who believed that a splash of water on the deathbed could erase a lifetime of sin.Religious scholar James J. O’Donnell takes us on a lively tour of the Ancient Roman world through the fourth century CE, when Romans of every nationality, social class, and religious preference found their world suddenly constrained by rulers who preferred a strange new god. Some joined this new cult, while others denied its power, erroneously believing it was little more than a passing fad.In Pagans, O’Donnell brings to life various pagan rites and essential features of Roman religion and life, offers fresh portraits of iconic historical figures, including Constantine, Julian, and Augustine, and explores important themes—Rome versus the east, civilization versus barbarism, plurality versus unity, rich versus poor, and tradition versus innovation—in this startling account.

    A loving home, shared with squabbling siblings, overseen by devoted parents. Yet in other ways it was the precise opposite: a revolving door of TV camera crews and documentary makers, a world of extreme discipline, of siblings vanishing in the night.Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church - the fire-and-brimstone religious sect at once aggressively homophobic and anti-Semitic, rejoiceful for AIDS and natural disasters, and notorious for its picketing the funerals of American soldiers. From her first public protest, aged five, to her instrumental role in spreading the church's invective via social media, her formative years brought their difficulties. But being reviled was not one of them. She was preaching God's truth. She was, in her words, 'all in'.In November 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she left the church, her family, and her life behind. Unfollow is a story about the rarest thing of all: a person changing their mind. It is a fascinating insight into a closed world of extreme belief, a biography of a complex family, and a hope-inspiring memoir of a young woman finding the courage to find compassion for others, as well as herself.

    R.C. Sproul shows that we don’t have to give up our intellect in order to believe. In fact, logic and reason clearly demonstrate that God exists, and no one has an excuse for their unbelief. Dr. Sproul rebuts common arguments from atheists, exposing the inconsistency and illogical nature of denying the existence of God.The Crucial Questions booklet series by Dr. R.C. Sproul offers succinct answers to important questions often asked by Christians and thoughtful inquirers.

    Understanding its origin and development through the experiences of Wilford Woodruff will answer questions posed by individuals inside and outside of the Church. What is the relationship of temple ordinances and Old Testament rituals? Why have some ordinances been discontinued? Why did married women choose to be sealed to Joseph Smith? What is priesthood adoption? When were proxy ordinances introduced?Many books and articles address a specific temple ordinance or a period of time in Mormon history, but the development of all temple ordinances has never been included in a single volume - until now.Jennifer Mackley's meticulously researched biographical narrative chronicles the development of temple doctrine through the examination of Wilford Woodruff's personal life. The account unfolds in Woodruff's own words, drawn from primary sources including journals, discourses, and letters. Mackley elucidates the doctrine's sixty-year progression from Old Testament practices of washings and anointings in the 1830s, to the endowment, sealings, and priesthood adoptions in the 1840s, through all of the vicarious ordinances for the dead in the 1870s, to the sealing of multigenerational families in the 1890s. Her narrative is enhanced by 120 archival images (some previously unpublished), as well as extensive footnotes and citations for the reader's further study. More information can be found at www.wilfordwoodruff.info.

    In the meantime, science has sat on the sidelines and quietly watched this game of words march up and down the field. Despite the fact that science has revolutionized every aspect of human life and greatly clarified our understanding of the world, somehow the notion has arisen that it has nothing to say about the possibility of a supreme being, which much of humanity worships as the source of all reality. Physicist Victor J. Stenger contends that, if God exists, some evidence for this existence should be detectable by scientific means, especially considering the central role that God is alleged to play in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. Treating the traditional God concept, as conventionally presented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, like any other scientific hypothesis, Stenger examines all of the claims made for God's existence. He considers the latest Intelligent Design arguments as evidence of God's influence in biology. He looks at human behavior for evidence of immaterial souls and the possible effects of prayer. He discusses the findings of physics and astronomy in weighing the suggestions that the universe is the work of a creator and that humans are God's special creation. After evaluating all the scientific evidence, Stenger concludes that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God.

    Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century.This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

    This book helps to give an inside-out look at the protestant Christian culture in the United States, and it will hopefully encourage others as they deal with the difficult questions in their own journeys toward truth.

    The names Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frig/Freo have been preserved in place names and in the days of the week. The old Gods and the festivals and rituals associated with them lived on after the 'official' conversion to Christianity. Eostre, the Goddess associated with Spring, is still with us as Easter. The Yuletide celebrations which marked the turning of the year were deep-rooted so they were Christianised to give us Christmas. Ing the god associated with regrowth and renewal was replaced with Christ. Much the same happened with rituals for bringing fertility to the earth, and with healing charms. The author sifts through royal genealogy, charms, verse and other sources to find clues to the names and attributes of the Gods and Goddesses of the early English.

    NAILED sheds light on ten beloved Christian myths, and, with evidence gathered from historians across the theological spectrum, shows how they point to a Jesus Christ created solely through allegorical alchemy of hope and imagination; a messiah transformed from a purely literary, theological construct into the familiar figure of Jesus - in short, a purely mythic Christ.

    These beliefs are an essential part of a shared identity. They have a unique power to define - and to divide - us, and are a driving force in the politics of much of the world today. Throughout history they have most often been, in the widest sense, religious.Yet this book is not a history of religion, nor an argument in favour of faith. It is about the stories which give shape to our lives, and the different ways in which societies imagine their place in the world. Looking across history and around the globe, it interrogates objects, places and human activities to try to understand what shared beliefs can mean in the public life of a community or a nation, how they shape the relationship between the individual and the state, and how they help give us our sense of who we are.For in deciding how we live with our gods, we also decide how to live with each other.