Download or read book Imagination and the Playfulness of God written by Robin Stockitt and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human imagination is a reflection of and a participation in the divine imagination; so mused the romantic poet, philosopher and theologian Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His thinking was intuitive, dense, obscure, brilliant, and deeply influenced by German philosophy. This book explores the development of his philosophical theology with particular reference to the imagination, examining the diverse streams that contributed to the originality of his thought. The second section of this book extrapolates his thinking into areas into which Coleridge did not venture. If God is intrinsically imaginative, then how is this manifested? Can we articulate a theology of the ontology of God that is framed in imaginative and creative terms? Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Huizinga on 'play,' this study seeks to develop a theological understanding of God's playfulness.
Download or read book The God Who Plays written by Brian Edgar and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-12-20 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people would be surprised to hear that a playful attitude towards God and the world lies at the heart of Christian faith. Traditionally Christians have focused on the serious responsibilities of service, sacrifice, and commitment. But the prophets say that the future kingdom is full of people laughing and playing, which has implications for Christians who are called to live out the future kingdom in the present. Play is not trivial or secondary to work and service—only a playful way of living does justice to the seriousness of life! Play is the essential and ultimate form of relationship with God, which is why Jesus told people to learn from children. Indeed, a playful attitude is an important part of all significant relationships. This book explores grace, faith, love, worship, redemption, and the kingdom from the perspective of a playful attitude. It describes how to create a “play ethic” to match the “work ethic” and discusses play as a virtue, Aquinas’s warning against the sin of not playing enough, and Bonhoeffer’s claim that in a world of pain it is only the Christian who can truly play.
Download or read book The Gift of Wonder written by Christine Aroney-Sine and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can you imagine a God who dances with shouts of joy, laughs when you laugh, loves to play, and invites us to join the fun? In this book Christine Sine invites us to pay attention to childlike characteristics that have the power to reshape us, with fresh spiritual practices that engage all our senses and help us embrace the wonder and joy that God intends for us.
Download or read book Theology of Play written by Jürgen Moltmann and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1972 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How to Begin When Your World Is Ending written by Molly Phinney Baskette and published by Broadleaf Books . This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving, witty, and probing, Molly Baskette's practical and spiritual perspective will appeal to readers of Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Kate Bowler's Everything Happens for a Reason. As a progressive parish minister, Molly Baskette has been a companion during the most vulnerable, traumatized, and unsettled periods of many people's lives. She has also had a front row seat to remarkable human transformation, as many of the ruptures her people lived through turned out to be the way that God got in. But when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer at age thirty-nine, with two small children, her theology of and relationship to God was tested more profoundly than ever. Instead of becoming despondent, though, she engaged with her faith more deeply--seizing the opportunity to test the seaworthiness of the faith she had been practicing and preaching. In How to Begin When Your World is Ending, Baskette shares the questions that confronted her along the way like: Is it true that prayer changes things? Does God care whether we live or die--and is there a damn thing God can do about it anyway? How can vulnerability, counterintuitively, be a strength? And the million-dollar question: is there life after death, and just what might it be like? Weaving together her own story and the stories of those she encountered in her life of faith, Baskette mines joy from all the hardest parts of being human. In doing so she reminds us that whatever you are going through, someone has been there before you, and found meaning in the madness.
Download or read book The Old Philosopher written by Vi Khi Nao and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry
Download or read book Sense of the Possible written by L. Callid Keefe-Perry and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sense of the Possible is for those interested in learning about the intersection of Christian theology and imagination. Written from the assumption that imagination is deeply connected to the Christian work for liberation and human flourishing, this book is an energizing introduction to the ways in which theologians have thought about the powerful human capacity to envision a future that has not yet come. Containing perspectives from scripture, theology, philosophy, and congregational studies, this text is an excellent way to explore how it is that imagination can be part of a faithful Christian life. Each chapter comes with recommended readings and discussion questions that can be used in churches or classrooms.
Download or read book Creativity as Sacrifice written by James M. Watkins and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theological interest in art is at a premium. However, theological engagement with art is often enacted without a clear sense of method. This text argues for a theological methodology in engaging the arts, and, specifically, the author puts forward a theological model for understanding human creativity in the light of Jesus’ sacrificial redemption. In dialogue with theology, philosophy, psychology, and art theory, the author establishes the relevance and applicability of an incarnational and sacrificial model of human creativity. Theological models also do more than provide a conceptual framework for theological inquiries. They engage the imagination. A theological model for human creativity is like an invitation to join in the creative vision God has for the world, and to embody this vision in one’s own creative work. Therefore, Creativity as Sacrifice does not merely articulate a conceptual framework for human creativity; it also casts a vision for human life as a creative response to the gracious gifts of a creative God.
Download or read book A Stranger in the House of God written by John Koessler and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2009-08-30 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outside wondered about the God they worshipped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. A Stranger in the House of God addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers. Like a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, it traces the author’s journey and explores his experiences with both charismatic and evangelical Christianity. It also describes his transformation from religious outsider to ordained pastor. John Koessler provides a poignant and often humorous window into the interior of the soul as he describes his journey from doubt and struggle with the church to personal faith
Download or read book Poetic Theology written by William A. Dyrness and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the poetics of everyday life ? What can they teach us about God? Art, music, dance, and writing can certainly be poetic, but so can such diverse pastimes as fishing, skiing, or attending sports events. Any and all activities that satisfy our fundamental need for play, for celebration, and for ritual, says William Dyrness, are inherently poetic and in Poetic Theology he demonstrates that all such activities are places where God is active in the world. All of humanity s creative efforts, Dyrness points out, testify to our intrinsic longing for joy and delight and our deep desire to connect with others, with the created order, and especially with the Creator. This desire is rooted in the presence and calling of God in and through the good creation. With extensive reflection on aesthetics in spirituality, worship, and community development, Dyrness s Poetic Theology will be useful for all who seek fresh and powerful new ways to communicate the gospel in contemporary society. William Dyrness s bold invitation to a poetic theology shaped by Scripture, tradition, and imagination one luring us toward a fuller participation in beauty than argument or concept alone allow reminds us that truth itself is beautiful to behold and poetic to the core. . . . If poetry is in its deepest reflex an intensification of life, then Dyrness s call for a poetic theology is one we ignore at our peril, reminding us that faithful living is not only about proper thinking but also and, perhaps, more properly about the texture of our living and the quality of our loving. Mark S. Burrows Andover Newton Theological School Makes a strong case for aesthetics as one of the avenues used by God to draw human beings near to him and his glory. . . . A wonderful journey through Reformed spirituality and a wake-up call for Reformed theology. Cornelius van der Kooi Free University, Amsterdam
Download or read book Preaching and Teaching with Imagination written by Warren W. Wiersbe and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 1997-02-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No more dreary three-point sermon outlines! Wiersbe coaches preachers to creatively proclaim the living Word so hearers experience God's truth changing their lives.
Download or read book How God Becomes Real written by T.M. Luhrmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more. A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.
Download or read book Kicking at the Darkness written by Brian J. Walsh and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Brian Walsh engages with the theologically rich catalog of musician Bruce Cockburn in an effort to ignite a renewed Christian imagination.
Download or read book When I Fly with Papa written by Claudia May and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-movement poem invites readers ages three and up to journey with the Papa of their imagination. It can be read in one sitting or spread out over numerous days. A movement or verse can guide a moment of storytelling and reflection. Readers can even skip a day or more and return to a poem for a fresh experience with Papa as God.
Download or read book Faith Hope and Poetry written by Malcolm Guite and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do Theology'. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.
Download or read book Transgressive Devotion written by Natalie Wigg-Stevenson and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2021-02-28 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic theology is in need of a new genre. In "Transgressive Devotion" Natalie Wigg-Stevenson articulates a theological vision of that genre as performance art. She argues that theology done as performance art stops trying to describe who God is, and starts trying to make God appear. Recognising that the act of studying theology or practicing ministry is always a performance, where the boundaries between what we see, feel, experience and learn are not just blurred but potentially invisible, Wigg-Stevenson brings together ethnographic theological fieldwork, historical and contemporary Christian theological traditions, and performance artworks themselves. A daring vision of theology which will energise anybody feeling ‘boxed in’ by the discipline, Transgressive Devotion blurs borders between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy to reveal how the very act of doing theology makes God and humanity vulnerable to each other. This is theology which is a liturgy of Divine incantation. In other words: this is theology which is also prayer.
Download or read book Toward a Theology of Beauty written by John J. Navone and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catholic theology, philosophy, and spirituality have long taught that the joy of Christian contemplation is to delight in the splendor of the divine love for us in all things. John Navone explains that Happiness Itself - God - is forever knowing its truth and loving its goodness and delighting in its beauty. The gift of the beatific vision is communion with Happiness Itself.
