Download or read book Making and Breaking the Gods written by Troels Myrup Kristensen and published by Aarhus Universitetsforlag. This book was released on 2013-06-30 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basic premise of the book at hand is that there is meaning to be 'excavated' (in both meanings of the word) from Christian responses to pagan sculpture in the period from the fourth to the sixth century. More than mindless acts of religious violence by fanatical mobs, these responses are revelatory of contemporary conceptions of images and the different ways in which the material manifestations of the pagan past could be negotiated in Late Antiquity. Statues were important to the social, political and religious life of cities across the Mediterranean, as well as part of a culture of representation that was intricately bound to bodily taxonomies and visual practices.
Download or read book Making and Breaking the Gods written by Troels Myrup Kristensen and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on both textual and archaeological sources, this book discusses how Christians in Late Antiquity negotiated the sculptural environment of cities and sanctuaries in a variety of ways, ranging from creative transformations to iconoclastic performances. Their responses to pagan sculpture present a rich window into the mechanisms through which society and culture changed under the influence of Christianity. The book thus demonstrates how Christian responses to pagan sculpture rhetorically continued an old tradition of discussing visual practices and the materiality of divine representations. Focusing in particular on the Egypt and the Near East, it furthermore argues that Christian responses encompass much more than mindless violence and need to be contextualised against other social and political developments, as well as local traditions of representation."--
Download or read book Hindu Gods in an American Landscape written by E. Allen Richardson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In India, Hindu images have been cast for millennia through the lost wax process and brought to life by priests--becoming not merely venerated icons but actual embodiments of gods. Second and third generation Hindu Americans have increasingly adopted a more worldly perspective toward religious objects, viewing them as symbolic rather than actual presences of the deity. The author traces the origins of this important shift, and examines Western attitudes regarding sacred objects, as well as the complex layering of traditional and modern Hindu attitudes in a globalized world.
Download or read book shiny gods written by Mike Slaughter and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Help your church create a culture and a lifestyle of giving.
Download or read book Breaking Gods written by D. J. Molles and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-10 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Leave it to DJ Molles to change the genre with a breakneck action novel that had me turning the pages while thinking, why the hell didn't I write this!"--Nicholas Sansbury Smith, NYT and USA Today Bestselling Author of the Hell Divers and Extinction Cycle series. In the beginning, the gods destroyed the world. Five hundred years later, things haven't gotten much better for humans. The demigods that were left behind to guard over humanity have been using them as fodder for an endless civil war between themselves, and the humans just go on dutifully slaughtering each other, battle after battle. It's not all bad, though. Perry McGown makes his living off those bloody, stinking battlefields. He works on a crew that reclaims all the spent shell casings. They reload them into new cartridges, and then sell them in towns. It's a good gig, it puts a few gold coins in Perry's pocket, and best of all, no one asks too many questions about his past. Which is ideal, because if anyone found out that he was a deserter from the war, he'd be executed for heresy. Then some bad blood between crewmembers leads to one man with his brains dashed in, and Perry heading for the hangman's noose. Through a flurry of gunfire and blood, Perry manages a narrow escape, but only with the help of the two people he likes least: A girl named Teran that asks far too many questions about his past; and an ex-legionnaire named Stuber, whose penchant for gleeful violence brings back bad memories for Perry. On the run and pursued by a ruthless demigod, Perry is forced to confront the demons of a past that he thought he'd left behind him--and learn truths about himself and his family that have been buried for decades. But the more Perry learns, the more dangerous his journey becomes. Because the truth about Perry could break the gods. "Breaking Gods is one of those books I couldn't put down. Molles filled the pages with gritty, intense action that drove the story to a satisfying conclusion and left me eager for more." - Jason Anspach, bestselling author of Galaxy's Edge.
Download or read book Man Seeks God written by Eric Weiner and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author of Geography of Bliss returns with this funny, illuminating chronicle of a globe-spanning spiritual quest to find a faith that fits. When a health scare puts him in the hospital, Eric Weiner-an agnostic by default-finds himself tangling with an unexpected question, posed to him by a well-meaning nurse. "Have you found your God yet?" The thought of it nags him, and prods him-and ultimately launches him on a far-flung journey to do just that. Weiner, a longtime "spiritual voyeur" and inveterate traveler, realizes that while he has been privy to a wide range of religious practices, he's never seriously considered these concepts in his own life. Face to face with his own mortality, and spurred on by the question of what spiritual principles to impart to his young daughter, he decides to correct this omission, undertaking a worldwide exploration of religions and hoping to come, if he can, to a personal understanding of the divine. The journey that results is rich in insight, humor, and heart. Willing to do anything to better understand faith, and to find the god or gods that speak to him, he travels to Nepal, where he meditates with Tibetan lamas and a guy named Wayne. He sojourns to Turkey, where he whirls (not so well, as it turns out) with Sufi dervishes. He heads to China, where he attempts to unblock his chi; to Israel, where he studies Kabbalah, sans Madonna; and to Las Vegas, where he has a close encounter with Raelians (followers of the world's largest UFO-based religion). At each stop along the way, Weiner tackles our most pressing spiritual questions: Where do we come from? What happens when we die? How should we live our lives? Where do all the missing socks go? With his trademark wit and warmth, he leaves no stone unturned. At a time when more Americans than ever are choosing a new faith, and when spiritual questions loom large in the modern age, Man Seeks God presents a perspective on religion that is sure to delight, inspire, and entertain.
Download or read book Playing God written by Andy Crouch and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2013-09-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Playing God, Andy Crouch opens the subject of power, elucidating its subtle activity in our relationships and institutions. He gives us much more than a warning against abuse, though. Turning the notion of "playing God" on its head, Crouch celebrates power as the gift by which we join in God's creative, redeeming work in the world.
Download or read book Gods Concubine written by Sara Douglass and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ancient Greece they came, remnants of the glorious Trojans. Led by Brutus, Kingman, holder of the bands of gold that wield the very magic of the Gods, these travelers are bowed but not broken, and they have come to Albion to begin anew. A vision of beauty called them to create a new Troy, and when they landed on the shores of the land that became Britain, they found an old magic that was fading. And so they began to construct a new Labyrinth, a place of magic that will bring unimaginable power to those who can control it. The temptress who brought Brutus to this land seeks to use him for her own purposes, but in that she fails, for it is the bride of Brutus who dooms the completion of the labyrinth . . . and sends all the players in this drama---handsome Brutus, his beautiful wife, Cornelia, and the sensuous and deadly Genvissa---into a hell of death and rebirth, until the Labyrinth is completed and the ancient magic is set free. A thousand years pass. Cathedrals rise in place of mud and wattle huts, hymns to saints replace odes to Celtic and Greek gods. But the magic from the dawn of time waits, and the players are not yet done with their destinies. They have new faces and new bodies, but old souls---and not all who have come back remember their parts in this drama. There are kings and princes, deadly court intrigues, and ancient powers awoken. And a warrior across the sea who only waits for his opportunity to finish what was started centuries before . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Stealing from God written by Frank Turek and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2014 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you think atheists have reason, evidence, and science on their side, think again! Award-winning author Dr. Frank Turek (I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist) will show you how atheists steal reason, evidence, science, and other arguments from God in trying to make their case for atheism. If that sounds contradictory, it's because it is! Atheists can't make their case without appealing to realities only theism can explain. In an engaging and memorable way,Stealing from God exposes these intellectual crimes atheists are committing and then provides four powerful reasons for why Christianity is true.
Download or read book Machines for Making Gods written by Jon Bialecki and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mormon faith may seem so different from aspirations to transcend the human through technological means that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion through which an imaginative group of young Mormons and ex-Mormons have found new ways of understanding the world. The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism’s promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing on a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis—of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism’s relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes. Charting the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism, Bialecki shows how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith and even such formations as queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA’s speculative account of God and technology together has helped to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West. A fascinating ethnography of a group with much to say about crucial junctures of modern culture, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.
Download or read book God and Gold written by Walter Russell Mead and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-10-14 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunningly insightful account of the global political and economic system, sustained first by Britain and now by America, that has created the modern world. The key to the two countries' predominance, Mead argues, lies in the individualistic ideology inherent in the Anglo-American religion. Over the years Britain and America's liberal democratic system has been repeatedly challeged—by Catholic Spain and Louis XIV, the Nazis, communists, and Al Qaeda—and for the most part, it has prevailed. But the current conflicts in the Middle East threaten to change that record unless we foster a deeper understanding of the conflicts between the liberal world system and its foes.
Download or read book Secular Nations under New Gods written by Willem H. Vanderburg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ongoing political muscle-flexing of diverse Christian communities in North America raises some deeply troubling questions regarding their roles among us. Earlier analyses including Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew showed that these three branches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition correspond to three forms of the American way of life; while Kruse's One Nation Under God showed how Christian America was shaped by corporate America. Willem H. Vanderburg's Secular Nations under New Gods proceeds based on a dialogue between Jacques Ellul's interpretation of the task of Christians in the world and Ellul's interpretation of the roles of technique and the nation-state in individual and collective human life. He then adds new insight into our being a symbolic species dealing with our finitude by living through the myths of our society and building new secular forms of moralities and religions. If everything is political and if everything is amenable to discipline-based scientific and technical approaches, we are perhaps treating these human creations the way earlier societies did their gods, as being omnipotent, without limits. Vanderburg argues that until organized Christianity becomes critically aware of sharing these commitments with their societies, it will remain entrapped in the service of false gods and thereby will continue to turn a message of freedom and love into one of morality and religion.
Download or read book Breaking Gods written by Viola Grace and published by Devine Destinies. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abandoned at the doors of an abbey, Lieta began life with knowledge of how to use any talent she was in contact with. As she grew, so did her collection of accessible power. When the Citadel came to the abbey to ask for her assistance, she was astonished to learn she was not only not the only one of her kind, but she was one of the only sane ones. Her species enjoys being worshipped and that is rarely a good result for their people. Lieta has to stop them, nullify them and make sure that they won�t hurt others. Running into one of her previous arrests and finding out that she is expected to let him be her shadow is a shock. Muraz once fancied himself a god, but after being shown that he was not alone, he has decided that working with the only being more powerful than himself might be educational.
Download or read book Breaking Free written by Beth Moore and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2007-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you want to know God and really believe Him? Do you want to find satisfaction in God, experience His peace, and enjoy His presence? Do you want to make the freedom Christ promised a reality in your daily life?
Download or read book The Gods Are Broken written by Jeffrey K. Salkin and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Abraham smashing his father's idols might be the most important Jewish story ever told and the key to how Jews define themselves. In a work at once deeply erudite and wonderfully accessible, Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin conducts readers through the life and legacy of this powerful story and explains how it has shaped Jewish consciousness. Offering a radical view of Jewish existence, The Gods Are Broken! views the story of the young Abraham as the "primal trauma" of Jewish history, one critical to the development of a certain Jewish comfort with rebelliousness and one that, happening in every generation, has helped Jews develop a unique identity. Salkin shows how the story continues to reverberate through the ages, even in its connection to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Salkin's work--combining biblical texts, archaeology, rabbinic insights, Hasidic texts (some never before translated), philosophy, history, poetry, contemporary Jewish thought, sociology, and popular culture--is nothing less than a journey through two thousand years of Jewish life and intellectual endeavor.
Download or read book Ragnarok written by A.S. Byatt and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Booker Prize–winning author of Possession breathes life into the Ragnorak myth through the novel of a young British girl during World War II. Ragnarok retells the finale of Norse mythology: a story of the destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. What more relevant myth could any modern writer choose? As the bombs of the Blitz rain down on Britain, one young girl is evacuated to the countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life. Then she is given a copy of Asgard and the Gods—a book of ancient Norse myths—and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. War, natural disaster, reckless gods, and the recognition of impermanence in the world are just some of the threads that A.S. Byatt weaves into this most timely of books. Linguistically stunning and imaginatively abundant, this is a landmark. A Globe and Mail (Toronto) Best Book “A gorgeous, brilliant, and significant performance.” —Booklist, starred review “Byatt’s prose is majestic, the lush descriptive passages—jewelled one minute, gory the next—a pleasure to get lost in.” —The Telegraph
Download or read book American Gods written by Neil Gaiman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2002-04-30 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident. Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible. He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever he the same...
