Download or read book Imagining God written by Humberto Casanova and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ever-growing number of Christians are becoming more and more uncomfortable with the tenets of the church, the stories of the Bible, and the church’s worldview. Statistics show that these feelings easily escalate into a crisis of faith, and for now their predicament is being resolved by leaving the church. This book will certainly help dealing with the crisis by showing that the language of faith is built by a web of metaphors taken from the Ancient Near East. We do not need to take biblical language literally, but as parables for human values in need to be assessed critically.
Download or read book Imagining God written by Garrett Green and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Garrett Green examines the point at which divine revelation and human experience meet, where the priority of grace is acknowledged while allowing its dynamics to be described in analytical and comparative terms as a religious phenomenon.
Download or read book Imagine Heaven written by John Burke and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's obvious from the bookshelves and the big screen that heaven is on everyone's mind. All of us long to know what life after death will be like. Bestselling author John Burke is no exception. For decades, he has been studying accounts of people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs). While not every detail of individual NDEs correlate with Scripture, Burke shows how the common experiences shared by thousands of survivors clearly point to the God of the Bible and the exhilarating picture of heaven he promises. Imagine Heaven is an inspirational journey through the Bible's picture of heaven, colored in with the real-life stories of heaven's wonders. Burke compares gripping stories of NDEs to what Scripture says about our biggest questions of heaven: Will I be myself? Will I see friends and loved ones? What will it look like? What is God like? What will we do forever? What about children and pets? This book will propel readers into an experience that will forever change their view of the life to come and the way they live life today. It also tackles the tough questions of heavenly reward and hellish NDEs. Anyone interested in NDEs or longing to imagine heaven more clearly will enjoy this fascinating and hope-filled book.
Download or read book Imagining God written by Humberto Casanova and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ever-growing number of Christians are becoming more and more uncomfortable with the tenets of the church, the stories of the Bible, and the church's worldview. Statistics show that these feelings easily escalate into a crisis of faith, and for now their predicament is being resolved by leaving the church. This book will certainly help dealing with the crisis by showing that the language of faith is built by a web of metaphors taken from the Ancient Near East. We do not need to take biblical language literally, but as parables for human values in need to be assessed critically.
Download or read book Imagining God written by Hans-Georg Ziebertz and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the question of God still relevant for our time? Empirical studies from an international perspective show the fact that there are both indications of God's importance and disappearance. The articles in this book deal with questions related to the content, structure and function of images of God. The studies document the actual variety and forms of religious practice and highlight the issues of God present - out of necessity from an ecumenical and interdisciplinary point of view. If and how the question of God is asked is not only of denominational interest, but is also of a cultural importance for the individual and public life in Europe. The empirical studies in this collection were discussed at the "Wurzburg Research Days - Practical Theology" in December 2000.
Download or read book Imagining Theology written by Garrett Green and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imagination is where the Creator chooses to meet his creatures, says renowned theologian Garrett Green. The Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit set the imagination free for genuine and creative knowledge of God, the world, others, and the self. Green explains that theology is best understood as human imagination faithfully conformed to the Bible as the paradigmatic key to the Christian gospel. He unpacks the implications of the imagination for a variety of theological issues, such as interpretation, aesthetics, eschatology, and the relationship between church and culture.
Download or read book Imagining the Jewish God written by Leonard Kaplan and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-09-09 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God.This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book—a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the “text” as foundational for the imagined “people of the book.” That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.
Download or read book Imagining Jesus in His Own Culture written by Jerome H. Neyrey and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every disciple imagines Jesus; reading the Gospels we form images of him and of his surroundings. This has been constant practice for those who desire to know him more clearly. We, however, borrow stuff—from stained glass windows, book illustrations, and the like—which is always familiar to us, but which reflects our, not his, culture. This book invites readers to construct different scenarios about Jesus and his world from the study of his ancient culture. We do this with accuracy because of the advance of cultural studies of his and our worlds. Jesus should look different (wear different clothing, experience different grooming), in settings foreign to us (in houses and boats from his own world). Jesus should speak differently so that the meaning of his words can only be known in his culture. In this book readers travel through the Gospels with specific suggestions about what to see, namely, Jesus in his cultural world. Imagining Jesus also suggests how to listen to him in his cultural language. Did Jesus laugh? How did he pray? This is what the incarnation means: imagining Jesus socialized in a particular culture, at a time foreign to us and in a language strange to us.
Download or read book The Power of Imagination written by Andrew Wommack and published by Destiny Image Publishers. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too often believers pray for healing but never experience it. They pray for prosperity but never receive it. Why? Because they don’t know how to use a godly imagination correctly. They don’t see themselves healed. They don’t see themselves prosperous. They don’t see themselves victorious. In The Power of Imagination...
Download or read book Imagining Religion written by Jonathan Z. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review
Download or read book Imaging God written by Douglas John Hall and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2004-03-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The deterioration of our natural environment under the impact of a rampant technological society is one of the major crises of our time. For many analysts, a primary cause of this crisis is the influence on Western culture of the Judaeo-Christian concept of the human being as having dominion over the rest of creation. In this book, Douglas John Hall does not attempt to exonerate historical Christianity from that charge. But, he argues, confession alone is not enough. The crisis of nature forces us to rethink our whole understanding of the relation between humanity and nature - an understanding that is based on the concept that human beings are created in the image of God ('imago Dei'). Hall carefully examines the biblical, historical, and theological meanings of this term, which, more than any other biblical expression, became Christianity's symbolic way of designating the essence of the human. Hall argues that the image of God is not an endowment - it is not something that human beings have; rather, it is a quality that pertains to our relationship with God. We should think of 'imago' as a verb, not a noun, he says. The human vocation within the created order is to image the Creator. When this is applied in a consistent and serious way, the idea of human dominion over all of nature must be radically reinterpreted. Taking the Lordship of Jesus as an authentic model for understanding our human relation to the natural order means that dominion is expressed not as mastery but as service - sacrificial service of the others with and for whom one is responsible. Thus the concept of dominion as stewardship eschews any idea of ownership or superiority in relation to nature, yet assumes a special accountability for its welfare. A provocative and original work, Hall's book retains the biblical centrality of 'homo sapiens' while at the same time raising both nature and God to a new kind of prominence in the dialogue that is life.
Download or read book The Power of God Given Imagination written by Ray McCollum and published by Whitaker House. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: God has already given you the power to create your own future…you just need to learn how to use it. The Power of God-Given Imagination awakens the dreamer within you by unveiling this incredible gift and explaining its quiet necessity in your life. No faith has ever sprouted and no prayer has ever been prayed without the use of imagination. For too long the power of imagination has been associated with New Age mysticism or the secular realm of “positive thinking.” Ray McCollum defies this trend by demonstrating that the power of the human mind and imagination belongs to the church—and God expects us to use it. Within the pages of this book, you will discover exactly what the power of imagination is, how it works, and how you can use it to both transform your personal life and transform the culture around you by releasing the kingdom of God.
Download or read book Formation for Knowing God written by F. Gerald Downing and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-04-29 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "God is Self-Revealed" we are assured by many Christians today. Yet this conviction stems only from eighteenth-century Enlightenment debates. Early and ongoing Christians, with their Jewish roots, trusted God as a committed and saving but heavily clouded presence (whether by God's choice, or our inadequacy, or both). Continuing Christian tradition has thus insisted that there is much more to this God than we can hope to get our heads round. Yet such Christians have trusted that this loving, saving, triune God's purpose is to transform us Godward. "The divine Word became as we are so we might become as he is." Meanwhile, some of us at least can find ourselves drawn to share with our predecessors and one another in imagining how this may be. And then we may be drawn to realize in practice what we imagine--in active service to God among fellow humans and all God's fragile creation. Then, we may hope, we may have been brought to know God more nearly as God is. Gerald Downing first argued this fifty years ago, and here he restates the issues with fresh insights and renewed hope.
Download or read book The Christian Imagination written by Willie James Jennings and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation-social, spatial, and racial-that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.
Download or read book God and the Creative Imagination written by Paul Avis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A mere metaphor', 'only symbolic', 'just a myth' - these tell tale phrases reveal how figurative language has been cheapened and devalued in our modern and postmodern culture. In God and the Creative Imagination, Paul Avis argues the contrary: we see that actually, metaphor, symbol and myth, are the key to a real knowledge of God and the sacred. Avis examines what he calls an alternative tradition, stemming from the Romantic poets Blake, Wordsworth and Keats and drawing on the thought of Cleridge and Newman, and experience in both modern philosophy and science. God and the Creative Imagination intriguingly draws on a number of non-theological disciplines, from literature to philosophy of science, to show us that God is appropriately likened to an artist or poet and that the greatest truths are expressed in an imaginative form. Anyone wishing to further their understanding of God, belief and the imagination will find this an inspiring work.
Download or read book Imagining and the Transformation of Man written by NEVILLE and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If one is looking for answers to the meaning of life and how to make a happier, richer existence (e.g., relationships, finances, health), then Nevilles teaching from personal experience, testimonies from students, and his amazing visions paralleling and explaining the mysteries of the Old and New Testament will answer those questions. Learn his techniques, unleash your power to create, believe in your imaginary acts, and no power in this world can stop the desired results from appearing in your world. Its the only creative power, one that everyone is operating moment to moment. Learning how to direct it deliberately is essential to producing loving, positive changes in ones life. These 1963 lectures also begin a nine-year odyssey of discovering the deepest meanings of six visions of the end that had unfolded in Neville (19591963). The visions are the signs that this long journey as limited man; the terrible opacity and contraction is over, that the purpose of human life has been completed; man has endured and overcome six thousand years of amnesia plus the fires of experience and has emerged victorious. Hes been transformed by his inner being (I Am or God) back into the divinity he truly is and always was.
Download or read book The Mortal God written by Milinda Banerjee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores how colonial India imagined human and divine figures to battle the nature and locus of sovereignty.
