Download or read book The Direction of Desire written by Mark Gerard Murphy and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-10-27 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Lacanian psychoanalysis and Christian mystical theology demonstrating the former’s potential for reinvigorating spiritual direction. The author outlines how current methods of spiritual direction become saturated with self-help psycho-pop methodologies, and that desire has therefore been foreclosed in these practices. He suggests that the root of this is a focus on ‘positive affective experientialism’, which means spiritual direction must focus on emotional wholeness, healing and positivity. Finally, he argues that a new dialogue between John of the Cross (a mystic whose writings on spiritual direction formulate part of the core of the Catholic spiritual tradition) and Jacques Lacan can open the way for a spiritual direction beyond the confines of experientialism. The book concludes that we can only escape the experiential commodification of spiritual direction by critiquing the drive to experience in and of itself. This novel work will appeal in particular to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, religion, philosophy and critical theory.
Download or read book Eros of the Human Spirit The written by Elizabeth J. Snedden and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Eros of the Human Spirit examines how we might better recognize, understand, affirm, and appropriate the Godgiven desire to know and love God operative within all human consciousness.
Download or read book Sex on Earth as It Is in Heaven written by Patricia Beattie Jung and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-12-28 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is part of a growing chorus of theological voices raised in support of erotic desire. Although most theologians have concluded that there will be no experience of sexual desire and delight in the world to come, Patricia Beattie Jung critically examines the historical traditions and biblical rationales for this teaching. She defends an alternative claim that there will be a healed and glorified experience of sex in heaven based on a compelling account of the Christian hope for bodily resurrection. The first half of the work focuses on Christian foundations for the notion of sex in heaven, while the second goes on to discuss some of the implications of those convictions for sex on earth. Jung concludes with discussions of how best to nurture sexual delight on earth and how and why internet pornography fails in that regard.
Download or read book Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality written by Lisa Isherwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-23 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality provides a much-needed overview of the state of scholarship on Christian theological reflection on sexuality and sexual theology. Critically, it also intervenes in the cultural debate over sexuality by privileging feminist, queer, and other counter-normative perspectives. Comprising twenty-three chapters by a team of international contributors this volume is divided into four parts: • Normativity and transgression • Bodies • Economies and violence • Divinity. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including consideration of the complexities of Christian theology in regard to contemporary sexuality debates. Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality is essential reading for students and researchers in the field of religion, sexuality, and Christianity.
Download or read book Holy Eros written by James D. Whitehead and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eros is the passionate energy that makes us one with the beautiful other, with a leper, with the world of nature waiting to be embraced and cared for, with our neighbor, the stranger, with God. The Whiteheads explore this vital energy of love as the gift of a Creator madly in love with his creation a God who would bring us to life in abundance if we only say "Yes." They discuss Eros in the movements of our sexuality, as well as in our arousals of compassion and care. They examine the Eros of pleasure and of generosity. They honor the Eros of hope, of anger, of suffering. They reveal that Eros has a Source far deeper than lust, and is a pathway to a passionate God. Holy Eros recovers this fundamental energy of love as a powerful resource in the revitalization of Christian spirituality. Unlike most books on the topic it eschews easy clichs. Its reader benefit is to understand and appreciate an energy that can heal as well as hinder and to tap into its positive force.
Download or read book ThirdWay written by and published by . This book was released on 2007-03 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monthly current affairs magazine from a Christian perspective with a focus on politics, society, economics and culture.
Download or read book The God Who Lives written by Adam Pryor and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian theology has affirmed throughout its history that God is a "living" God. But what does it mean that God lives? Why does it matter? Does God live like us? If God does not live like us what is the difference between our living and God's living? These are the questions Adam Pryor addresses in The God Who Lives. The book considers "life" as a conceptual problem, examining how new studies about the emergence of life have critical implications for interpreting the religious symbol "God is living." In particular, Pryor suggests how absence and desire, what is termed "abstential desire," are critical principles of life for scientific and philosophical thinking today. He goes on to develop a constructive theological proposal in which the theological meaning of the symbol "God is living" is interpreted in terms of the insights garnered from the principle of abstential desire, concluding that God can be understood as akin to the role played by absence in living things. Life is an absent but effective whole in relation to the material parts of which it is comprised. God as living is a similarly effective absence in relation to the world.
Download or read book Divine Communion written by Jay Emerson Johnson and published by Church Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food, sex, and God– these intertwine at the heart of Christian faith and practice. This book invites Christian communities to reflect theologically and spiritually on the desire for God and the desire for sexual intimacy as the same fundamental desire for communion. This is likewise God’s own desire to be in communion with us, which Christians celebrate whenever we share a simple meal of bread and wine at the Eucharistic table. The longing for intimacy and its disruptions echo throughout our political contestations, economic systems, racial and ethnic conflicts, and ecological crises. In no small measure, the vitality of Christian witness to the Gospel in the twenty-first century depends on exploring the depths of desire itself in the ancient hope for Divine Communion made new.
Download or read book Ren Girard and Secular Modernity written by Scott Cowdell and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, Scott Cowdell provides the first systematic interpretation of René Girard’s controversial approach to secular modernity. Cowdell identifies the scope, development, and implications of Girard’s thought, the centrality of Christ in Girard's thinking, and, in particular, Girard's distinctive take on the uniqueness and finality of Christ in terms of his impact on Western culture. In Girard’s singular vision, according to Cowdell, secular modernity has emerged thanks to the Bible’s exposure of the cathartic violence that is at the root of religious prohibitions, myths, and rituals. In the literature, the psychology, and most recently the military history of modernity, Girard discerns a consistent slide into an apocalypse that challenges modern ideas of romanticism, individualism, and progressivism. In the first three chapters, Cowdell examines the three elements of Girard’s basic intellectual vision (mimesis, sacrifice, biblical hermeneutics) and brings this vision to a constructive interpretation of “secularization” and “modernity,” as these terms are understood in the broadest sense today. Chapter 4 focuses on modern institutions, chiefly the nation state and the market, that function to restrain the outbreak of violence. And finally, Cowdell discusses the apocalyptic dimension of Girard's theory in relation to modern warfare and terrorism. Here, Cowdell engages with the most recent writings of Girard (particularly his Battling to the End) and applies them to further conversations in cultural theology, political science, and philosophy. Cowdell takes up and extends Girard’s own warning concerning an alternative to a future apocalypse: “What sort of conversion must humans undergo, before it is too late?”
Download or read book The Conversion and Therapy of Desire written by Mark J Boone and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first fruits of the literary career of St Augustine, the great theologian and Christian philosopher par excellence, are the dialogues he wrote at Cassiciacum in Italy following his famous conversion in Milan in AD 386. These four little books, largely neglected by scholars, take up the ancient philosophical project of identifying the principles and practices that heal human desires in order to attain happiness, renewing this philosophical endeavour with insights from Christian theology. Augustine's later books, such as the Confessions, would continue this project of healing desire, as would the writings of others including Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas. Mark J. Boone's The Conversion and Therapy of Desire investigates the roots of thisproject at Cassiciacum, where Augustine is developing a Christian theology of desire, informed by Neoplatonism but transformed by Christian teaching and practices.
Download or read book Passionate Deification written by Henry L. Novello and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past the passions were regarded as sicknesses of the soul due to Adam’s sin. As the Redeemer, Christ shares in our humanity and experiences the passions, but given his divine status he quickly overcomes the passions by his superior reason as the Word. In effect, Christ is displayed as a Stoic sage who is unperturbed by the passions. The book is critical of this traditional perspective for its inability to think of the Incarnation as the Word’s real participation in our humanity. Christ is not a Stoic sage who displays an uninvolved holiness, but the Word become flesh who displays an astonishing breadth and intensity of emotional life, which reveals what it means for the fullness of divinity to dwell bodily in him. Reformed theology moved beyond the traditional perspective in affirming the strong emotions of Christ as proof of his humanity, but Christ’s divinity was given insufficient attention. The book proposes a complex view of Christ’s emotions, which are regarded not merely as proof of his humanity, but reveal the personal attributes of divinity communicated to his humanity. To observe Christ’s emotions is to witness the mutual interaction of humanity and divinity in his person, which accomplishes our salvation (deification). To imitate Christ, then, means that Christ’s emotions become the emotions of his followers, so that by seeing as God sees and feeling as God feels, they go forth in obedience to Christ’s commandment to love one another as he has loved us, which is to live the way of the cross for the sake of the ongoing embodiment of God in the world.
Download or read book The Transformation of Desire written by Diarmuid Ó Murchú and published by Darton Longman & Todd. This book was released on 2007-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, passionate, and unflinchingly honest reflection on the nature of desire, its present-day frustration, the possibilities for rehabilitation, and the dseperate need for transformation. This study combines O'Murchu's gifts both as a social psychologist with a wealth of research into the pressing issues of our time and as one of the most readable and informed contributors to the interface of science and contemporary spirituality. An excellent read, a must for all seriously committed to saving this planet and healing community.
Download or read book Transformations of Love written by Frances Harris and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-01-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most controversial episode in the life of the seventeenth-century virtuoso and diarist John Evelyn has always been his passionate, complex friendship with the Restoration maid of honour Margaret Blagge, afterwards Mrs Godolphin. His 'Life of Mrs Godolphin', written after her early death in childbirth, exalted the friendship and represented her as effectively a saint. They saw their intense friendship as platonic spiritual mentoring. Yet it is sometimes argued that what took place between them was actually a kind of seduction on Evelyn's part; that far from trying to overcome her religious scruples about marriage to a young man she deeply loved, as he afterwards claimed, he secretly encouraged them in order to keep her in his power, and even falsified some documents to conceal this from her husband, whose patronage he sought. Was Evelyn in his way as much a sexual predator as the Restoration rakes he professed to despise, or does the episode provide a window on an unexplored aspect of early modern spirituality? Undoubtedly there was more to the friendship than Evelyn publicly admitted, but it remains a puzzle still to be interpreted. This new study is based on Evelyn's papers, now fully accessible for the first time, and on important and hitherto unknown correspondence between Margaret Blagge and her future husband. It situates the episode fully within the pre- and post-Reformation debates concerning marriage and friendship (the latter seen by some as 'more a sacrament' than marriage) and the long traditions of platonic love and intense friendships between men and women in religious contexts. Its diverse and vividly realized settings include the glamorous, disreputable public household of the Restoration court and the great gardens of the day, at once 'little worlds' in microcosm and recreations of paradise on earth.
Download or read book Convergent Knowing written by Simon Appolloni and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global environmental destruction, growing inequality, and the persistent poverty afflicting the majority of humans on the planet challenge Christian theorists, theologians, and ethicists in their pursuit of an ethical vision that is both environmentally sustainable and just for all of creation. Too often their visions – which start with traditional understandings of the Christian faith, prevalent approaches to science, or current ethical models – are inadequate. In Convergent Knowing Simon Appolloni proposes a new framework for ethical deliberation in which the epistemological lines between religion and science are somewhat blurred. This framework opens up avenues to explore new paradigms for Christianity, science, and liberation while addressing interrelated questions not always manifest within the religion, science, and ethics debates: what kind of ethics, what kind of science, and what kind of Christianity do we need today and tomorrow when the liberation of countless subjects of creation is at stake? Exploring and analyzing the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Leonardo Boff, Diarmuid O'Murchu, and Thomas Berry, four Christian ethical thinkers who have borrowed from the natural sciences to unite a liberationist agenda with an environmental ethic, Convergent Knowing assists Christian thinkers struggling to integrate science, environment, liberation, and their faith.
Download or read book The Sacrament of Desire written by Alex D. Suderman and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-09-26 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the political-theological implications of sacramental desire in Fyodor Dostoevsky`s The Brothers Karamazov with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in critical dialogue with Henri de Lubac. Suderman demonstrates how the work of de Lubac, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche address a transcendent desire for a higher social and political unity in late-modern Western cultures and the imperialistic and coercive tendencies latent within it, concretely expressed in the Western church and the modern state. Specifically, this book investigates how Dostoevsky and Nietzsche envision new forms of political embodiment that are neither escapist nor imperialist. Through a detailed examination of Zarathustra’s dramatic discovery of the eternal return and Alyosha’s mystical experience of the resurrection, Suderman demonstrates the metaphysical significance of their respective political ethics. While the intent of de Lubac is to recover the social implications of the sacraments of Roman Catholicism, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky espouse alternative articulations of community and the sacramental desire necessary for such embodiment, a desire rooted in their respective perceptions of God.
Download or read book The Prophets and Apostles Doctrine written by Woodrow Alexander and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here are 8 bible study topics presented in plan and simple language without any need to have a degree in theology to understand. Plenty of scriptures are included within the text of the study so that all you need is this handy book to study God's word anytime, anywhere. TOPICS COVERED IN THIS BOOK 1. Scattered And Divided - An explanation of how the world got populated and where the different races originated? 2. God's Plan Is Eternal - God's sovereignty over all of His creation. Plus an explanation of God's salvation plan. 3. Spiritual Seed/Kingdom - God's places more emphasis on the spiritual more than the physical. 4. The Ram That Became The Lamb - An examination of the nature and character of God. 5. Baptized In The Lord - Baptism explained, the physical and spiritual applications. 6. Our Blessed Hope - Death and resurrection explained. 7. Secret Rapture - The Second Coming of the Lord and surrounding events. 8. To Be Like Him - An examination of Christian life in comparison to the life and teachings of Jesus. This book covers only a few of the doctrines presented by the Prophets and Apostles to the early Christian Church. Church leaders today have neglected to teach some of these doctrines and untruths have crept into others. When you throw out those unsubstantiated truths you end up with what the prophets and apostles taught.
Download or read book Flesh as Transformation Symbol in the Theology of Anselm of Canterbury written by James Gollnick and published by Lewiston, N.Y. ; Queenston, Ont. : E. Mellen Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking as its organizational principle Herbert Richardson's threefold levels of meaning, this study examines the nine cases in which Anselm uses the word flesh, places the concept flesh in the context of Anselm's theological system, and displays flesh as a motif or transformation symbol governing Anselm's entire life and thought.
