Provides detailed and satisfying answers to 19 general and 16 historical objections raised by Jews.

    Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. But eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught. So where did the ideas come from? In clear and compelling terms, Bart Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. Some of these accounts take the form of near death experiences, the oldest on record, with intriguing similarities to those reported today. One of Ehrman’s startling conclusions is that there never was a single Greek, Jewish, or Christian understanding of the afterlife, but numerous competing views. Moreover, these views did not come from nowhere; they were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. Only later, in the early Christian centuries, did they develop into the notions of eternal bliss or damnation widely accepted today. As a historian, Ehrman obviously cannot provide a definitive answer to the question of what happens after death. In Heaven and Hell, he does the next best thing: by helping us reflect on where our ideas of the afterlife come from, he assures us that even if there may be something to hope for when we die, there is certainly nothing to fear.

    E.P. Sanders, an influential Pauline scholar, analyzes the fundamental beliefs and vigorous contradictions in Paul's thought, discovering a philosophy that is less of a monolithic system than the apostle's convictions would seem to suggest. This volume offers an incisive summation of Paul's career, as well as his role in the development of early Christianity. Both lucid and judicious, it is the most compelling short introduction to Paul now available.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

    This book presents Prophet Muhammad in the different roles he assumed within his community as a father, husband, statesman, chief of staff, and an individual with utmost compassion, wisdom, grace, humility, and trustworthiness.

    Segal weaves together biblical & literary scholarship, sociology, history & philosophy. A scholar, he examines the maps of the afterlife found in Western religious texts & reveals not only what various cultures believed but how their notions reflected their societies' realities & ideals, & why those beliefs changed over time. He maintains that the afterlife is the mirror in which a society arranges its concept of the self. The composition process for Judaism, Xianity & Islam begins in grief & ends in the victory of the self over death. Arguing that in all religious traditions the afterlife represents the ultimate reward for the good, he combines historical & anthropological data with insights gleaned from religious & philosophical writings to explain the following mysteries: why Egyptians insisted on a heavenly afterlife, while the body was embalmed in a tomb; why Babylonians viewed the dead as living in underground prisons; why Hebrews remained silent about life after death during the 1st Temple period, yet embraced it in the 2nd Temple period (534 BCE-70 CE); & why Xianity placed the afterlife in the center of its belief system. He discusses the inner dialogs & arguments within Judaism & Xianity, showing the underlying dynamic behind them, as well as the ideas marking the differences between the two. In an examination of the influence of biblical views of heaven & martyrdom on Islamic beliefs, he offers a perspective on the current rise of Islamic fundamentalism. In tracing the organic, historical relationships between sacred texts & communities of belief & comparing the visions of life after death that have emerged historically, he sheds light on the intimate connections between afterlife notions, the societies that produced them & the search for life's meaning.

    For many years Powers's nearly 600-page Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism has served as the field's most authoritative and comprehensive overview of Tibet's distinctive Buddhist tradition. A Concise Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism explains the core Buddhist doctrines and the practices of meditation and tantra and provides a survey of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

    Coping with grief and experiencing loss overwhelms us in ways that seem both hopeless and endless. In painful moments like these, we must make a choice: Will we allow the difficulties we face to become forces of destruction in our lives, or will we find a way to begin learning from loss, transforming our suffering into a source of strength?A theologian with the heart of a poet, Rabbi David Wolpe explores the meaning of loss, and the way we can use its inevitable appearance in our lives as a source of strength rather than a source of despair. In this national bestseller, Wolpe creates a remarkably fluid account of how we might find a way out of overwhelming feelings of helplessness and instead begin understanding grief in all its forms and learn to create meaning in difficult times.

    For good and for evil, religion is the single greatest influence in the world. We accept as self-evident that competing economic systems (capitalist or communist) or clashing political parties (Republican or Democratic) propose very different solutions to our planet's problems. So why do we pretend that the world's religious traditions are different paths to the same God? We blur the sharp distinctions between religions at our own peril, argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, and it is time to replace naÏve hopes of interreligious unity with deeper knowledge of religious differences. In Religious Literacy, Prothero demonstrated how little Americans know about their own religious traditions and why the world's religions should be taught in public schools. Now, in God Is Not One, Prothero provides readers with this much-needed content about each of the eight great religions. To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. For example: –Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission –Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation –Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order –Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening –Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God Prothero reveals each of these traditions on its own terms to create an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to better understand the big questions human beings have asked for millennia—and the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today. A bold polemical response to a generation of misguided scholarship, God Is Not One creates a new context for understanding religion in the twenty-first century and disproves the assumptions most of us make about the way the world's religions work.

    

    Updated Edition "A Trip Into The Supernatural" Paperback With (141 Pages).

    Written by a pastor with years of teaching and counseling experience, Why We Pray doesn't simply tell us why we should pray, but instead focuses on four blessing-filled reasons that will help us want to pray.Rather than feeling discouraged and disheartened by their inconsistency in prayer, you'll feel reinvigorated to approach God with confidence and joy, delighted by the privilege of talking directly to our loving heavenly Father.

    In distinguishing religions from belief systems, Carse works to reveal how belief—with its restriction on thought and encouragement of hostility—has corrupted religion and spawned violence the world over. Galileo, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ—using their stories Carse creates his own brand of parable and establishes a new vocabulary with which to study conflict in the modern world. The Religious Case Against Belief introduces three kinds of ignorance: ordinary ignorance (a mundane lack of knowledge, such as ignorance of tomorrow’s weather or the reason why your stove is malfunctioning), willful ignorance (an intentional avoidance of accessible knowledge), and finally higher ignorance (a learned understanding that no matter how many truths we may accumulate, our knowledge falls infinitely short of the truth). While ordinary ignorance is common to all people, Carse associates the strongest manifestation of willful ignorance with the most fervent (and dangerous) of believers. He points to the historic conflict between Martin Luther and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V both to reveal this seemingly religious collision as a clash of belief and to identify belief ’s inherently destructive characteristics. From Luther to the contemporary Christian right, we learn that believers construct identity by erecting boundaries and by fostering aggression between the believer and the other. This is why belief systems choose—at great cost—to remain locked in bloody conflict rather than to engage in dialogue, recognizing the great deal they have in common. This is willful ignorance. In fierce contrast to willful ignorance, higher ignorance is an acquired state enhanced by religion. Those traveling the path to higher ignorance recognize faith teachings (such as the Bible) as poetry intended to promote contemplation, interpretation, and a sense of wonder. For evidence of religion’s deeply embedded rejection of singular truth and its acceptance of diverse dialogue, Carse looks to the many faces of Jesus presented in the books of the Bible and elsewhere. Uncontaminated by belief systems, religion rejects the imagined boundaries that falsely divide people and ideas, working to expand horizons. The Religious Case Against Belief exposes a world in which religion and belief have become erroneously (and terrifyingly) conflated. In strengthening their association with powerful belief systems, religions have departed from their essential purpose as agencies of higher ignorance. Carse uses his wideranging understanding of religion to find a viable and vital path away from what he calls the Age of Faith II and toward open-ended global dialogue. Far from abstract philosophical musing, The Religious Case Against Belief is required reading for our age.

    We are creatures of intense desire.  We emerge from the womb longing for touch and affection.  Desire pulsates within us every waking moment of our lives.  Our hearts are fueled by hungry yearnings for connection, for relationship, for a sense of belonging.  We plunge into life, giving ourselves away to him or her, to this or that, drinking in every promise of fulfillment.  And yet, we always emerge from the quest for love still feeling a persistent and insatiable desire for something more.  A God Named Desire is about that something more.  There are some books that speak with an unusual level of clarity to the deepest issues that press the human heart.  This is one of those rare books.  You will never see god, or yourself, the same after the insights of A God Named Desire are introduced into your mind.

    Elizabeth Johnson offers an interpretation of Mary that is theologically sound, spiritually empowering, ethically challenging, socially liberating, and ecumenically fruitful. In particular, she sees the image of Mary as a blessing rather than a blight for women's lives in both religious and political terms."If you read only one book on Mary in your lifetime, let this be the one." American Catholic Booksellers'

    This exceptional work, by one of the world's leading Biblical scholars, provides a full account of how the different parts of the Bible came to be written; how some writings which were regarded as holy became canonical and were included in the Bible, and others were not; what the relationship is of the different parts of the Bible to each other; and how, once it became a stable text, the Bible has been disseminated and interpreted around the world. It gives full weight to discussion of the importance of the Tanakh (Old Testament) in Judaism as in Christianity. It also demonstrates the degree to which, contrary to widespread belief, both Judaism and Christianity are not faiths drawn from the Bible texts but from other sources and traditions. It shows that if we are to regard the Bible as 'authoritative' it cannot be as believers have so often done in the past.