Download or read book Extinction and Religion written by Jeremy H. Kidwell and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human-caused extinctions have never been so prominent in our political and cultural landscape. Extinction and Religion is a collection of wide-ranging chapters that explore the implications for religious faith and experience as it relates to a "sixth mass extinction" in Earth's history. Further it seeks to answer the question as to how religious and spiritual practices are shaping responses to the crisis? Edited by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire, this collection aims to set a new postsecular agenda, articulating the questions, challenges, and ways forward for thinking about religion in an age of mass extinction rather than provide responses from world religions in isolation. It covers subjects such as the multitude of challenges posed by mass extinction to beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life. Wide ranging and incisive, Extinction and Religion amply demonstrates the many ways in which the threat of extinction profoundly affects our faith and religious life worlds.
Download or read book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms written by Gerard Russell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities. Historically a tolerant faith, Islam has, since the early 20th century, witnessed the rise of militant, extremist sects. This development, along with the rippling effects of Western invasion, now pose existential threats to these minority faiths. And as more and more of their youth flee to the West in search of greater freedoms and job prospects, these religions face the dire possibility of extinction. Drawing on his extensive travels and archival research, Russell provides an essential record of the past, present, and perilous future of these remarkable religions.
Download or read book Extinction and Religion written by Jeremy H. Kidwell and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human-caused extinctions have never been so prominent in our political and cultural landscape. Extinction and Religion is a collection of wide-ranging chapters that explore the implications for religious faith and experience as it relates to a "sixth mass extinction" in Earth's history. Further it seeks to answer the question as to how religious and spiritual practices are shaping responses to the crisis? Edited by Jeremy H. Kidwell and Stefan Skrimshire, this collection aims to set a new postsecular agenda, articulating the questions, challenges, and ways forward for thinking about religion in an age of mass extinction rather than provide responses from world religions in isolation. It covers subjects such as the multitude of challenges posed by mass extinction to beliefs about the future of humanity, death and the afterlife, the integrity of creation, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life. Wide ranging and incisive, Extinction and Religion amply demonstrates the many ways in which the threat of extinction profoundly affects our faith and religious life worlds.
Download or read book The Extinction of the Christian Churches in North Africa written by Leonard Ralph Holme and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Biblical Bullshit written by Theo van Gogh and published by Bookbaby. This book was released on 2017-12-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how close the world came to nuclear catastrophe under President Reagan and how this was prompted by what the author calls 'biblical BS'. The book begins with a brief survey for the purpose of clarifying to the reader the nature of their own religious belief. It then continues into an explanation of the pre-historic religious impulse. After defining what is meant by 'biblical BS' in chapter 3, the author looks at the topics of 'objectivity', 'biblical criticism', and the social effects of 'biblical BS' in chapters 4, 5 and 6 respectively. Chapter 7 is a kind of pivot point in the book and the longest chapter on how Christian fundamentalism nearly brought the world to the brink of disaster and what the effects of such a disaster would be on our planet. Chapter 8 discusses who bears the burden of proof in a religious argument. Chapters 9 and 10 tie all the loose ends together with perhaps a surprise ending.
Download or read book The Meaning of Human Existence written by Edward O. Wilson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham.
Download or read book Resurrection Science written by M. R. O'Connor and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **A Library Journal Best Book of 2015 ** **A Christian Science Monitor Top Ten Book of September** In a world dominated by people and rapid climate change, species large and small are increasingly vulnerable to extinction. In Resurrection Science, journalist M. R. O'Connor explores the extreme measures scientists are taking to try and save them, from captive breeding and genetic management to de-extinction. Paradoxically, the more we intervene to save species, the less wild they often become. In stories of sixteenth-century galleon excavations, panther-tracking in Florida swamps, ancient African rainforests, Neanderthal tool-making, and cryogenic DNA banks, O'Connor investigates the philosophical questions of an age in which we "play god" with earth's biodiversity. Each chapter in this beautifully written book focuses on a unique species--from the charismatic northern white rhinoceros to the infamous passenger pigeon--and the people entwined in the animals' fates. Incorporating natural history and evolutionary biology with conversations with eminent ethicists, O'Connor's narrative goes to the heart of the human enterprise: What should we preserve of wilderness as we hurtle toward a future in which technology is present in nearly every aspect of our lives? How can we co-exist with species when our existence and their survival appear to be pitted against one another?
Download or read book Immortality or Extinction written by Paul Badham and published by Springer. This book was released on 1982-03-25 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth written by Eric Kaufmann and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dawkins and Hitchens have convinced many western intellectuals that secularism is the way forward. But most people don't read their books before deciding whether to be religious. Instead, they inherit their faith from their parents, who often innoculate them against the elegant arguments of secularists. And what no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have. The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularisation process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families. Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox may achieve majority status over their liberal counterparts by mid-century. Islamist Muslims have won the culture war in much of the Muslim world, and their success provides a glimpse of what awaits the Christian West and Israel. Based on a wealth of demographic research, considering questions of multiculturalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises - and what this means for the future of western modernity.
Download or read book Religion in Science Fiction written by Steven Hrotic and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in Science Fiction investigates the history of the representations of religion in science fiction literature. Space travel, futuristic societies, and non-human cultures are traditional themes in science fiction. Speculating on the societal impacts of as-yet-undiscovered technologies is, after all, one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction literature. A more surprising theme may be a parallel exploration of religion: its institutional nature, social functions, and the tensions between religious and scientific worldviews. Steven Hrotic investigates the representations of religion in 19th century proto-science fiction, and genre science fiction from the 1920s through the end of the century. Taken together, he argues that these stories tell an overarching story-a 'metanarrative'-of an evolving respect for religion, paralleling a decline in the belief that science will lead us to an ideal (and religion-free) future. Science fiction's metanarrative represents more than simply a shift in popular perceptions of religion: it also serves as a model for cognitive anthropology, providing new insights into how groups and identities form in a globalized world, and into how crucial a role narratives may play. Ironically, this same perspective suggests that science fiction, as it was in the 20th century, may no longer exist.
Download or read book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not written by Robert N. McCauley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparison of the cognitive foundations of religion and science and an argument that religion is cognitively natural and that science is cognitively unnatural.
Download or read book The Extinction of the Christian Churches in North Africa written by Leonard Ralph Holme and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-20 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Race to Save the Lord God Bird written by Phillip Hoose and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tragedy of extinction is explained through the dramatic story of a legendary bird, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and of those who tried to possess it, paint it, shoot it, sell it, and, in a last-ditch effort, save it. A powerful saga that sweeps through two hundred years of history, it introduces artists like John James Audubon, bird collectors like William Brewster, and finally a new breed of scientist in Cornell's Arthur A. "Doc" Allen and his young ornithology student, James Tanner, whose quest to save the Ivory-bill culminates in one of the first great conservation showdowns in U.S. history, an early round in what is now a worldwide effort to save species. As hope for the Ivory-bill fades in the United States, the bird is last spotted in Cuba in 1987, and Cuban scientists join in the race to save it. All this, plus Mr. Hoose's wonderful story-telling skills, comes together to give us what David Allen Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds calls "the most thorough and readable account to date of the personalities, fashions, economics, and politics that combined to bring about the demise of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker." The Race to Save the Lord God Bird is the winner of the 2005 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2005 Bank Street - Flora Stieglitz Award.
Download or read book Faith after the Anthropocene written by Matthew Wickman and published by MDPI. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have brought to light the staggering ubiquity of human activity upon Earth and the startling fragility of our planet and its life systems. This is so momentous that many scientists and scholars now argue that we have left the relative climactic stability of the Holocene and have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. This emerging epoch may prompt us not only to reconsider our understanding of Earth systems, but also to reimagine ourselves and what it means to be human. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways, mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality.
Download or read book Religion in the Anthropocene written by Celia Deane-Drummond and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in the Anthropocene charts a new direction in humanities scholarship through serious engagement with the geopolitical concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on religious studies, theology, social science, history, philosophy, and what can be broadly termed as environmental humanities, this collection represents a groundbreaking critical analysis of diverse narratives on the Anthropocene. The contributors to this volume recognize that the Anthropocene began as a geological concept, the age of the humans, but that its implications are much wider than this. Does the Anthropocene idea challenge the possibility of a sacred Nature, or is it a secularized theological anthropology more properly dealt with through traditional concepts from Roman Catholic social teaching on human ecology? Not all contributors to this volume agree about the answers to these and many more different questions. Readers will be challenged, provoked, and stimulated by this book.
Download or read book The Extinction of Evolution written by Darek Isaacs and published by Bridge Logos Fndtn. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Extinction of Evolution explores what the world would be like if the theory of evolution were actually true. What it reveals will surprise you. Evolution, implemented to its logical conclusion, has severe ramifications for humankind. When one rejects the foundational truth of God and embraces Darwins alternative to our origins, a disastrous chain of events is triggered. As you dive deeply into this worldview of evolution, you will be exposed to the most frightening environment imaginable where the rape, murder and exploitation of the weak are not to be punished but to be applauded. In the misguided words of Charles Darwin, let the strongest live and the weakest die. After traveling through the abyss of evolution, a miserable philosophical failure, The Extinction of Evolution, brings you back to a place of hope where Christ stands above all as the Creator of this remarkable thing we call life. The Extinction of Evolution has been compared to The Screwtape Letters, a classic work of C.S. Lewis.
Download or read book Religion in Human Evolution written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. “Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’” —Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review “Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.” —Richard L. Wood, Commonweal
