Book picks similar to
Evil and the Augustinian Tradition by Charles T. Mathewes
theology
philosophy
political-science
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Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don't Know About Them
Bart D. Ehrman - 2009
Here Ehrman reveals what scholars have unearthed:•The authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was & how salvation works•The New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later•Jesus, Paul, Matthew & John all represented fundamentally different religions•Established Christian doctrines—such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus & the trinity—were the inventions of still later theologiansThese aren't idiosyncratic perspectives of just one scholar. They've been the standard widespread views of scholars across a full spectrum of denominations & traditions. Why is it most people have never heard such things? This is the book that pastors, educators & anyone interested in the Bible have been waiting for—a compelling account of the central challenges faced when attempting to reconstruct Jesus' life & message.
Theological-Political Treatise
Baruch Spinoza - 1670
True religion consists in practice of simple piety, independent of philosophical speculation.
Permission To Believe: Four Rational Approaches to God's Existence
Lawrence Kelemen - 1990
Four Approaches to God's Existence
The New Muslim's Field Guide
Theresa Corbin - 2018
The New Muslim's Field Guide offers a fresh approach to guiding Muslim converts, focused on helping them grow as Muslims while maintaining their identity and love for God. Drawing on their shared decades of experience, Theresa and Kaighla walk the new Muslim through the hills and the valleys they'll encounter on their journey, helping the newcomer navigate the sometimes slippery cliffs of culture, politics, and interpersonal relationships. Injected with a healthy dose of humor and candor, The New Muslim's Field Guide discusses some of the deeper meanings behind belief and ritual, clarifies common sticky issues, and tells stories of triumph and failure on the journey of Islam.
Economic Thought Before Adam Smith
Murray N. Rothbard - 1995
The scholastics, he argues, established and developed the subjective utility and scarcity theory of value, as well as the theory that prices, or the value of money, depend on its supply and demand. This continental, or 'pre-Austrian' tradition, was destroyed, rather than developed, by Adam Smith whose strong Calvinist tendencies towards glorifying labour, toil and thrift is contrasted with the emphasis in scholastic economic thought towards labour in the service of consumption.Tracing economic thought from the Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment, this book is notable for its inclusion of all the important figures in each school of thought with their theories assessed in historical context. Classical Economics, the second volume of Professor Rothbard's history of economic thought from an Austrian perspective, is also available.
On Human Nature
Roger Scruton - 2017
Confronting the views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. We are not only human animals; we are also persons, in essential relation with other persons, and bound to them by obligations and rights. Our world is a shared world, exhibiting freedom, value, and accountability, and to understand it we must address other people face to face and I to I.Scruton develops and defends his account of human nature by ranging widely across intellectual history, from Plato and Averroes to Darwin and Wittgenstein. The book begins with Kant's suggestion that we are distinguished by our ability to say "I"--by our sense of ourselves as the centers of self-conscious reflection. This fact is manifested in our emotions, interests, and relations. It is the foundation of the moral sense, as well as of the aesthetic and religious conceptions through which we shape the human world and endow it with meaning. And it lies outside the scope of modern materialist philosophy, even though it is a natural and not a supernatural fact. Ultimately, Scruton offers a new way of understanding how self-consciousness affects the question of how we should live.The result is a rich view of human nature that challenges some of today's most fashionable ideas about our species.
The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism
John Howard Yoder - 1971
Jesus gave his members a new way to deal with offenders, with violence, with money, with leadership, with a corrupt society. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, and an enlarged understanding of what it means to be human.This is the original revolution: the creation of a distinct community with its alternate set of values and its coherent way of incarnating them. Such a group is not only a novelty, but is also, if lived faithfully, the most powerful tool of social change.
Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization
Samuel Gregg - 2019
But today that synthesis is under attack—from the East by radical Islam (faith without reason) and from within the West itself by aggressive secularism (reason without faith). The stakes are incalculably high. The naïve and increasingly common assumption that reason and faith are incompatible is simply at odds with the facts of history. The revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures of a reasonable Creator imbued Judaism and Christianity with a conviction that the world is intelligible, leading to the flowering of reason and the invention of science in the West. It was no accident that the Enlightenment took place in the culture formed by the Jewish and Christian faiths. We can all see that faith without reason is benighted at best, fanatical and violent at worst. But too many forget that reason, stripped of faith, is subject to its own pathologies. A supposedly autonomous reason easily sinks into fanaticism, stifling dissent as bigoted and irrational and devouring the humane civilization fostered by the integration of reason and faith. The blood-soaked history of the twentieth century attests to the totalitarian forces unleashed by corrupted reason. But Samuel Gregg does more than lament the intellectual and spiritual ruin caused by the divorce of reason and faith. He shows that each of these foundational principles corrects the other’s excesses and enhances our comprehension of the truth in a continuous renewal of civilization. By recovering this balance, we can avoid a suicidal winner-take-all conflict between reason and faith and a future that will respect neither.
Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective
Peter J. Leithart - 2012
Using the subtle categories that arise from biblical narrative, Between Babel and Beast analyzes how the heresy of Americanism inspired America's rise to hegemony while blinding American Christians to our failures and abuses of power. The book demonstrates that the church best serves the genuine good of the United States by training witnesses—martyr-citizens of God's Abrahamic empire.
On Anarchism
Noam Chomsky - 2005
The book gathers his essays and interviews to provide a short, accessible introduction to his distinctively optimistic brand of anarchism. Refuting the notion of anarchism as a fixed idea, and disputing the traditional fault lines between anarchism and socialism, this is a book sure to challenge, provoke and inspire. Profoundly relevant to our times, it is a touchstone for political activists and anyone interested in deepening their understanding of anarchism, or of Chomsky's thought.'Arguably the most important intellectual alive' New York TimesNoam Chomsky is the author of numerous bestselling and influential political books, including Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, Interventions, What We Say Goes, Hopes and Prospects, Gaza in Crisis, Making the Future and Occupy.Nathan Schneider is the author of Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse and God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet.
The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology
Ernst H. Kantorowicz - 1957
In The King's Two Bodies, Kantorowicz traces the historical problem posed by the King's two bodies--the body politic and the body natural--back to the Middle Ages and demonstrates, by placing the concept in its proper setting of medieval thought and political theory, how the early-modern Western monarchies gradually began to develop a political theology.?The king's natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, naturally, as do all humans; but the king's other body, the spiritual body, transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. The notion of the two bodies allowed for the continuity of monarchy even when the monarch died, as summed up in the formulation The king is dead. Long live the king.Bringing together liturgical works, images, and polemical material, The King's Two Bodies explores the long Christian past behind this political theology. It provides a subtle history of how commonwealths developed symbolic means for establishing their sovereignty and, with such means, began to establish early forms of the nation-state.Kantorowicz fled Nazi Germany in 1938, after refusing to sign a Nazi loyalty oath, and settled in the United States. While teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he once again refused to sign an oath of allegiance, this one designed to identify Communist Party sympathizers. He was dismissed as a result of the controversy and moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he remained for the rest of his life, and where he wrote The King's Two Bodies.
The Opium of the Intellectuals
Raymond Aron - 1955
Aron shows how noble ideas can slide into the tyranny of "secular religion" and emphasizes how political thought has the profound responsibility of telling the truth about social and political reality-in all its mundane imperfections and tragic complexities.Aron explodes the three "myths" of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.For this new edition, prepared by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson as part of Transaction's ongoing "Aron Project," political scientist Harvey Mansfield provides a luminous introduction that underscores the permanent relevance of Aron's work. The new edition also includes as an appendix "Fanaticism, Prudence, and Faith," a remarkable essay that Aron wrote to defend Opium from its critics and to explain further his view of the proper role of political thinking. The book will be of interest to all students of political theory, history, and sociology.
I Went to Hell
Kenneth E. Hagin - 1982
Kenneth E. Hagin's stirring testimony of dying, going to hell, and being brought back to life for a ministry of love to mankind.
Holiness
John B. Webster - 2003
According to Webster, God's holiness is known not in his simple transcendence but in his gracious and free relationship to his people. Such holiness finds an echo in the holiness of the Christian community, especially in worship and witness, and in the life of the individual disciple.Profound yet readily accessible to a wide range of readers, Webster's Holiness offers an ideal entry into reflection on the Christian God.