Download or read book Bulwarks of Unbelief written by Joseph Minich and published by Lexham Academic. This book was released on 2023-04-12 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How modernity creates atheists—and what the church must do about it. Millions of people in the West identify as atheists. Christians often respond to this reality with proofs of God's existence, as though rational arguments for atheism were the root cause of unbelief. In Bulwarks of Unbelief, Joseph Minich argues that a felt absence of God, as experienced by the modern individual, offers a better explanation for the rise in atheism. Recent technological and cultural shifts in the modern West have produced a perceived challenge to God's existence. As modern technoculture reshapes our awareness of reality and belief in the invisible, it in turn amplifies God's apparent silence. In this new context, atheism is a natural result. And absent of meaning from without, we have turned within. Christians cannot escape this aspect of modern life. Minich argues that we must consciously and actively return to reality. If we reattune ourselves to God's story, reintegrate the whole person, and reinhabit the world, faith can thrive in this age of unbelief.
Download or read book Bulwarks of Unbelief Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age written by Joseph Minich and published by Lexham Academic. This book was released on 2023-04-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How modernity creates atheists--and what the church must do about it. Millions of people in the West identify as atheists. Christians often respond to this reality with proofs of God's existence, as though rational arguments for atheism were the root cause of unbelief. In Bulwarks of Unbelief, Joseph Minich argues that a felt absence of God, as experienced by the modern individual, offers a better explanation for the rise in atheism. Recent technological and cultural shifts in the modern West have produced a perceived challenge to God's existence. As modern technoculture reshapes our awareness of reality and belief in the invisible, it in turn amplifies God's apparent silence. In this new context, atheism is a natural result. And absent of meaning from without, we have turned within. Christians cannot escape this aspect of modern life. Minich argues that we must consciously and actively return to reality. If we reattune ourselves to God's story, reintegrate the whole person, and reinhabit the world, faith can thrive in this age of unbelief.
Download or read book Enduring Divine Absence written by Joseph Minich and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, millions of people in the modern West identify as atheists. And even for believers, the intellectual and spiritual temptations to deny the existence of God seem greater than ever. Too often we respond to this pressure by seeking more and more rational proofs of God's existence, but what if a lack of reason to believe is not our main problem? In this volume, Joseph Minich argues that our real challenge is existential and imaginative-a felt absence of God that is more visceral in our modern world than for most generations past, and the sense that if God cannot be sensed, He cannot be there. Why are we so haunted and disoriented today by this sense of God's absence? And how can we learn to sustain and strengthen our faith in the face of it? In these pages, Minich charts a way back to a renewal of our hearts and imaginations that can enable us to embrace the challenge of finding and being found by the hidden God.
Download or read book Bulwarks of Unbelief written by Joseph Thomas Minich and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I attempt to account for the fact that God’s absence or invisibility has, since at least the middle of the 19th century, been seen as plausibly accounted for by the fact that God does not exist. That is, rather than a mere item of theodicy (i.e. Where is God when I am suffering?), divine absence has become part of a philosophical arsenal in support of God’s non-existence as such. Granting that, for most theists, God has presumably always been (for the most part) invisible, this more recent association between divine invisibility and divine non-existence, in my judgment, reflects a shifting plausibility structure during the above period until the present – a still-occurring shift in which all late modern persons are caught up. In Chapter 1 of my dissertation, I situate my own argument in the context of recent scholarship concerning the emergence of atheism and secularization, the so-called disenchantment of the world, and the nature of whatever we term “modernity.” Therein, I argue that the accounts on offer (both those that emphasize intellectual and those that emphasize practical causes) need supplementation. Specifically, I argue that the emergent plausibility of atheism or materialism is related to the development of what I term modern “technoculture,” the world as conceived in the mirror of modern labor-systems, technological artifice, and their inter-relationship. In Chapter 2, I show that there is enough circumstantial linkage between the rise of atheism on the one hand, and the rise of this modern technoculture on the other hand, to at least make the case that these two phenomena are strongly correlated. In Chapter 3, I go on to argue that the latter has a causal relationship to the former. In dialogue with philosophers of technology and labor, I argue that the relationship between technology and culture has always shaped human perception of the basic structures of reality, and I attempt to show how their modern arrangement has attuned us to the world in such a way that it manifests as devoid of inherent meaning or agency. Therefore, discourse which would speak of “God in the mirror of the world” or anything mind-like behind all phenomena, increasingly feels implausible to modern persons whose “lived world” renders such discourse tacitly foreign. Having accounted for this shift in plausibility structures, I conclude that I have offered a deflationary argument with respect to the veracity of modern atheism because it renders the latter relative to historical circumstance (rather than being a warranted intellectual default). Nevertheless, objectifying our plausibility structures does not eradicate them. As such, in Chapter 4, I attempt to speak from within and towards practitioners of my own orthodox Protestantism, offering (in conversation especially with Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer) suggestions about what it might mean to find religious orientation in this historical moment. A proper response to modern atheism, I argue, requires a proper response to those features of the world that render it plausible in the first place (per the argument of Chapters 2-3). I claim that, despite its temptations (from my perspective), there are many good things about the modern order, and that it presents us with an opportunity to unite our intellectual and affective capacities (mediated by our will) in order to achieve disciplined attunement to those realities that we confess. Toward this end, I address the problems of modern alienation from labor, technological anxiety, and (what is under-estimated) our alienation from the history to which we nevertheless always belong. Finally, in the conclusion – after summarizing the argument – I address the elephant in the room of modern pluralism. Recognizing that my evaluative reflections irreducibly possess what many have called “the scandal of particularity,” I attempt a final act of rhetorical calibration in order to assuage (but also redirect) these concerns while clarifying the immediate and most basic calling of the human being relative to them.
Download or read book An Eirenicon written by Edward Bouverie Pusey and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The beliefs of unbelief written by William Henry Fitchett and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Secular Age written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
Download or read book The End of Work written by John Hughes and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys twentieth century theologies of work, contrasting differing approaches to consider the “problem of labor” from a theological perspective. Aimed at theologians concerned with how Christianity might engage in social criticism, as well those who are interested in the connection between Marxist and Christian traditions Explores debates about labor under capitalism and considers the relationship between divine and human work Through a thorough reading of Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, argues that the triumph of the "spirit of utility" is crucial to understanding modern notions of work Draws on the work of various twentieth century Catholic thinkers, including Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Eric Gill, and David Jones Published in the new and prestigious Illuminations series.
Download or read book MacLaren s Commentary Expositions of Holy Scripture written by Alexander MacLaren and published by Delmarva Publications, Inc.. This book was released on with total page 13578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All thirty-two of the original volumes are included in this one volume. There are two linked indexes in this volume, a main index at the front of this volume that will take you to the beginning each of the books of the bible and another index at the beginning of each book there is a linked scripture index leading to the particular subject. MacLaren’s Expositions of Holy Scripture is considered one of the greatest expositor’s commentary of all time. This commentary has more than 1,500 sermons arranged in canonical order with more than 46,000 scriptural references, making this collection one of the fullest expositor’s commentary ever. For his work MacLaren drew praise from many. A. T. Robertson Said of MacLaren “His matchless discourses are the fruit of the most exact scholarship and spiritual enthusiasm.” F. B. Meyer said “As an expository preacher none of them equaled MacLaren of Manchester, and no other sermons were so widely read the world around.” MacLaren was born in Glasgow on February 11, 1826, and died in Manchester on May 5, 1910. He had been for almost sixty-five years a minister, entirely devoted to his calling. He lived more than almost any of the great preachers of his time between his study, his pulpit, his pen. His ministry fell into a quiet routine for which he was always grateful: two sermons on Sunday, a Monday prayer meeting and a Thursday service and lecture. His parishioners thought his sermons to them were the best he ever preached. In April 1858 he was called to be minister at Union Chapel in Manchester. No ministry could have been happier. The church prospered and a new building had to be erected to seat 1,500; every sitting was taken. His renown as preacher spread throughout the English-speaking world. His pulpit became his throne. He was twice elected President of the Baptist Union. He resigned as pastor in 1905 after a ministry of forty-five years. MacLaren’s religious life was hid with Christ in God. He walked with God day by day. He loved Jesus Christ with a reverent, holy love and lived to make Him known. In his farewell sermon at Union he said: "To efface oneself is one of a preacher’s first duties."
Download or read book Unbelief written by Fr. Nicolas J. Laforet and published by Sophia Institute Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic work praised by Pope Pius IX himself, Fr. Nicolas J. Laforet lays out the spiritual causes of unbelief, and shows the antidotes necessary to remedy each. Noting that unbelief is not a particularly modern phenomenon (after all, many people refused to believe in Jesus even after having witnessed his miracles), Fr. Laforet explains that unbelief is not merely a matter of the intellect; on the contrary, where unbelief prevails we almost always find its source in a person’s will. From the fruits of his spiritual and psychological analysis, Fr. LaForet then crafts a simple but powerful remedy — one that is sure to bring to Christ any reasonable person who honestly employs it. No wonder the great Cardinal James Gibbons treasured this book, writing: “I consider its value beyond price, and highly recommend it to all, especially in these days of doubt and denial.” Among the things you will learn here are: The spiritual roots of unbelief, and the main form it takes todayIf you can’t make yourself believe, why does the Church consider unbelief a vice?Why Christianity could conquer the brutal Roman Empire, but suffer even more defeats in our dayFaith and reason: learn how Christian faith purifies reason, strengthens it, extends it, and even elevates itTrue faith: why it isn’t blind — and can never beThe one thing that always opens the gates of faith — even to those who live in darknessDiscover the two forms of materialism — practical and dogmatic— and how each corrodes faith “This book will be a powerful aid to souls, helping them reject error and gain free access to truth.” Blessed Pope Pius IX
Download or read book The Church of England a Portion of Christ s One Holy Catholic Church and a Means of Restoring Visible Unity written by Edward Bouverie Pusey and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Humanitarian Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes written by Derrick Peterson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-02-17 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are all haunted by histories. They shape our presuppositions and ballast our judgments. In terms of science and religion this means most of us walk about haunted by rumors of a long war. However, there is no such thing as the “history of the conflict of science and Christianity,” and this is a book about it. In the last half of the twentieth century a sea change in the history of science and religion occurred, revealing not only that the perception of protracted warfare between religion and science was a curious set of mythologies that had been combined together into a sort of supermyth in need of debunking. It was also seen that this collective mythology arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by historians involved in many sides of the debates over Darwin’s discoveries, and from there latched onto the public imagination at large. Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes takes the reader on a journey showing how these myths were constructed, collected together, and eventually debunked. Join us for a story of flat earths and fake footnotes, to uncover the strange tale of how the conflict of science and Christianity was written into history.
Download or read book The Church of England written by Edward Bouverie Pusey and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.
Download or read book An Eirenicon Part 1 The Church of England a portion of Christ s one Holy Catholic Church and a means of restoring visible unity An Eirenicon in a letter to the author of The Christian Year Sixth thousand Part 2 First Letter to J H Newman in explanation chiefly in regard to the reverential love due to the ever blessed Theotokos and the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception with an analysis of Cardinal de Turrecremata s work on the Immaculate Conception Part 3 Is healthful Reunion impossible A second letter to J H Newman etc written by Edward Bouverie Pusey and published by . This book was released on 1865 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Expositions of Holy Scripture Deuteronomy Joshua Judges Ruth and First Book of Samuel written by Alexander Maclaren and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-11-29 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
