This book explores how Christianity began by tracing its earliest texts, including the Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered in Egypt in 1945.When her infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, Pagels' spiritual and intellectual quest took on a new urgency, leading her to explore historical and archaeological sources and to investigate what Jesus and his teachings meant to his followers before the invention of Christianity. The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, along with more than 50 other early Christian texts, some unknown since antiquity, offers clues. She compares such sources as Thomas' gospel (which claims to give Jesus' secret teaching and finds its closest affinities with kabbalah) with the canon to show how Christian leaders chose to include some gospels and exclude others from the collection many call the New Testament. To stabilize the emerging church in times of persecution, church fathers constructed the canon, creed and hierarchy - and, in the process, suppressed many of its spiritual resources.Drawing on new scholarship - her own and that of an international group of scholars - that has come to light since the 1979 publication of The Gnostic Gospels, she shows that what matters about Christianity involves much more than any one set of beliefs. Traditions embodied in Judaism and Christianity can powerfully affect us in heart, mind and spirit, inspire visions of a new society based on practising justice and love, even heal and transform us.Provocative and moving, Beyond Belief, the most personal of her books to date, shows how the impulse to seek god overflows the narrow banks of a single tradition. She writes, "What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions - and the communities that sustain them - is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery, encouraging us, in Jesus' words, to 'seek, and you shall find.'"CONTENTSFrom the feast of Agape to the Nicene CreedGospels in conflict: John and Thomas God's word or human words?The canon of truth and the triumph of JohnConstantine and the Catholic Church AcknowledgementsNotesIndex

    With a timeless message and the ability to explain success principles and how they work in an entertaining style, her writings are still considered the leaders in prosperity literature today.

    Since his death in 1987, countless readers have been challenged to encounter DeMellos message.

    Repelled and repulsed by those who ostensibly represented the Christian faith in his juvenescence, Klaus Kenneth naturally looked elsewhere for the solution to his lonely and tortured existence. In his sincere search for escape from rejection and abuse, Klaus found himself on an odyssey that took him around the world several times, lured him into a vortex of pleasure and power, and initiated him into the great philosophies and religious traditions of our times. Having tried it all, and reaching the very brink of the abyss of despair and the desire for nonexistence, Klaus encounters the One whom he had never thought to look for, the One that he had always discounted: the great I AM, the God of Love and healing, the God of regeneration and eternal life.Klaus KennethKlaus Kenneth was born in a small village west of Prague (Czech Republic), and lives with his wife in Switzerland. In addition to German, his mother tongue, he is fluent in English and French. Desirous to share his remarkable story, Klaus spends most of his time on tour in Europe and the USA, bearing witness to his unexpected discovery of Hope and Love.Published here for the first time in English, Born to Hate, Reborn to Love is already a best seller in several other languages.

    "God did not make us," he says. "We made God." He explains the ways in which religion is immoral: We damage our children by indoctrinating them. It is a cause of sexual repression, violence, and ignorance. It is a distortion of our origins and the cosmos. In the place of religion, Hitchens offers the promise of a new enlightenment through science and reason, a realm in which hope and wonder can be found through a strand of DNA or a gaze through the Hubble Telescope. As Hitchens sees it, you needn't get the blues once you discover the heavens are empty.

    Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths.Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.

    He brings to his treatment of these questions the same courage, scrupulous logic, and lofty wisdom for which his other work as philosopher, writer, and teacher has been famous. These qualities make the essays included in this book perhaps the most graceful and moving presentation of the freethinker's position since the days of Hume and Voltaire. "I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue," Russell declares in his Preface, and his reasoned opposition to any system or dogma which he feels may shackle man's mind runs through all the essays in this book, whether they were written as early as 1899 or as late as 1954. The book has been edited, with Lord Russell's full approval and cooperation, by Professor Paul Edwards of the Philosophy Department of New York University. In an Appendix, Professor Edwards contributes a full account of the highly controversial "Bertrand Russell Case" of 1940, in which Russell was judicially declared "unfit" to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York. Whether the reader shares or rejects Bertrand Russell's views, he will find this book an invigorating challenge to set notions, a masterly statement of a philosophical position, and a pure joy to read.Why I am not a Christian --Has religion made useful contributions to civilization? --What I believe --Do we survive death? --Seems, madam? Nay, it is --Free man's worship --On Catholic and Protestant skeptics --Life in the Middle Ages --Fate of Thomas Paine --Nice people --New generation --Our sexual ethics --Freedom and the colleges --Can religion cure our troubles? --Religion and morals --Appendix: How Bertrand Russell was prevented from teaching at the College of the City of New York

    A staunch atheist and rationalist, she is profoundly shaken by the implications of her life-long search. Part memoir, part philosophical and spiritual inquiry, Living with a Wild God brings an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's uninhibited musings on the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. Ehrenreich's most personal book ever will spark a lively and heated conversation about religion and spirituality, science and morality, and the "meaning of life." Certain to be a classic, Living with a Wild God combines intellectual rigor with a frank account of the inexplicable, in Ehrenreich's singular voice, to produce a true literary achievement.

    Intended to provide a basis for discussion, this book evaluates the evidence of modern science in relation to the debate between the atheistic and theistic interpretations of the universe. Written like a scientific detective story, this excellent introduction to the current debate grew out of the author's lengthy experience of lecturing and debating on the subject.

    Published at Mother Teresa's personal request to share her message with the world, it contains personal stories, revealing insights and never-before-seen letters from Mother Teresa.

    Far more than a personality test, author Chris Heuertz writes, the enneagram is a sacred map to the soul. Lies about who we think we are keep us trapped in loops of self-defeat. But the enneagram offers a bright path to cutting through the internal clutter and finding our way back to God and to our true identity as God created us.Chris Heuertz’ life was forever changed after he learned about the enneagram 15 years ago. Today, he leads enneagram workshops all over the world. Join Chris as he shows you how this ancient tool can help you awaken to the gifts God has given you, find freedom from your personal patterns of sin and fear, and grow in acceptance of your identity as you grow with God.In conversational style with compelling stories, The Sacred Enneagram will show youHow to understand the 'why' behind your type, beyond caricatures and stereotypesHow to align your type with prayer posturesHow to identify and find freedom from self-destructive patternsHow to grow in spiritual discernmentHow to face your past wounds and step toward healingHow to awaken your unique gifts to serve today’s broken worldChris’s own journey with the enneagram is an accessible introduction and exploration of how the enneagram can change your life, because to the extent that we are transformed, the world will be transformed.

    Benedict was not interested in fame, power, or legacy. He was only interested in living the Christian life to the fullest and helping those around him to do the same. The rest is history—and the work of Providence. St. Benedict is regarded as the Father of the Benedictine Order of both religious men and women that follow his Rule, a key principle of which is ora et labora—pray and work. Today, many people wear holy medals of St. Benedict, invoking his intercession for protection against the powers of evil. Not only consecrated religious but also many lay people find inspiration in his call to balance, discipline, and prayer. Historically, St. Benedict helped bridge the early Church with the medieval period by standing on the shoulders of the fathers of the monastic tradition and bringing that tradition solidly into a new era.

    With unflinching openness and intellectual honesty, Hitchens describes the personal loss and philosophical curiosity that led him to burn his Bible at prep school and embrace atheism in its place. From there, he traces his experience as a journalist in Soviet Moscow, and the critical observations that left him with more questions than answers, and more despair than hope for how to live a meaningful life. With first-hand insight into the blurring of the line between politics and the Church, Hitchens reveals the reasons why an honest assessment of Atheism cannot sustain disbelief in God. In the process, he provides hope for all believers who, in the words of T. S. Eliot, may discover the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

    He embarked on a thousand-mile pilgrimage through the theological cradle of Christianity, exploring one of the biggest stories of our time: the collapse of religion in the world that it created. Egan sets out along the Via Francigena, once the major medieval trail leading the devout to Rome, and makes his way overland via the alpine peaks and small mountain towns of France, Switzerland and Italy. The goal: walking to St. Peter's Square, in hopes of meeting the galvanizing pope who is struggling to hold together the church through the worst crisis in half a millennium.Making his way through a landscape laced with some of the most important shrines to the faith, Egan finds a modern Canterbury Tale in the chapel where Queen Bertha introduced Christianity to pagan Britain; parses the supernatural in a French town built on miracles; and journeys to the oldest abbey in the Western world, founded in 515 and home to continuous prayer over the 1,500 years that have followed. He is accompanied by a quirky cast of fellow pilgrims and by some of the towering figures of the faith--Joan of Arc, Henry VIII, Martin Luther.A thrilling journey, a family story, and a revealing history, A Pilgrimage to Eternity looks for our future in its search for God.One of Oprah's Must-Read Books of Fall 2019

    He convincingly conveys the unique appeal and gifts of each of the traditions and reveals their hold on the human heart and imagination.