A simple and practical tool for personal transformation. Using a set of 30 colorfully designed Divine Demons cards, this book guides users through a step-by-step process for surfacing and releasing fears, doubts, and limiting beliefs that have served as life-long obstacles to happiness and fulfillment. Original.
A noted author and activist brings his critical acumen and rhetorical skills to bear in this polemic against the dark side of religion. Unlike some popular works by stridently outspoken atheists, this is not a blanket condemnation of all believers. Rather the author's focus is the heartless exploitation of faithful followers by those in power, as well as sectarian intolerance, the violence against heretics and nonbelievers, and the reactionary political and economic collusion that has often prevailed between the upper echelons of church and state. Parenti notes the deleterious effects of past theocracies and the threat to our freedoms posed by present-day fundamentalists and theocratic reactionaries. He discusses how socially conscious and egalitarian minded liberal religionists have often been isolated and marginalized by their more conservative (and better financed) coreligionists. Finally, he documents the growing strength of secular freethinkers who are doing battle against the intolerant theocratic usurpers in public life. Historically anchored yet sharply focused on the contemporary scene, this eloquent indictment of religion’s dangers will be welcomed by committed secular laypersons and progressive religionists alike.
You're already in a war. It's time to fight. This book will equip you with tools to protect the five fronts of spiritual battle: your relationship with God, your identity, your family and friends, your church, and the world. Win Your War is a practical marriage, parenting, and relationship book that is grounded in the Word of God and focused on recognizing Satan's role in your life. Mark and Grace Driscoll help you understand the power Jesus gives you to overcome the enemy's attacks. Mark and Grace Driscoll look at the nature of spiritual warfare in response to Adam and Eve. God has a kingdom where His people are governed by the Spirit. Satan has the world, where his people are governed by the flesh. Spiritual warfare is the battle between these two realities in everything, including our identity, temptation, gender, marriage, and emotional well-being. Some years ago Mark Driscoll preached on the Book of Genesis and discovered an unexpected theme about spiritual warfare that works itself out in all of human history: the storyline of the Bible is that there is first a wedding and then a war. Satan did not show up until a man and woman were married and had a ministry call on their lives. The first thing he did was attack marriage and separate men and women. After reading this book, you will uncover the five fronts of spiritual battle: your relationship with God, your identity, your family and friends, your church, and the world. Also Available in Spanish ISBN-13: 978-1-62999-259-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-1-62999-260-0 OTHER TITLE BY MARK DRISCOLL Spirit-Filled Jesus (2018) ISBN: 978-1629995229
"A variety of Chinese writings-medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes-from the Song period (960-1279) depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused to marry, were considered unmarriageable, or were married but denied their husbands sexual access, thereby removing themselves from social constructs of female sexuality defined in relation to men. As elite male authors attempted to make sense of these incomprehensible women whose sexual bodies were unavailable to them, they were forced to contemplate the purpose of women's bodies and lives apart from wifehood and motherhood. This raised troubling new questions about normalcy, desire, sexuality, and identity. In Divine, Demonic, and Disordered Hsiao-wen Cheng considers accounts of "manless women," many of which depict women who suffered from "enchantment disorder" or who engaged in "intercourse with ghosts"-conditions with specific symptoms and behavioral patterns. Through her questioning of conventional binary gender analyses and heteronormative assumptions, she shifts attention away from women's reproductive bodies and familial roles and offers historians of China and readers interested in women, gender, sexuality, medicine, and religion a fresh look at the unstable meanings attached to women's behaviors and lives even in a time of codified patriarchy"--
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.
The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (DDD) is the single major reference work on the gods, angels, demons, spirits, and semidivine heroes whose names occur in the biblical books. Book jacket.
Bruce Lincoln is one of the most prominent advocates within religious studies for an uncompromisingly critical approach to the phenomenon of religion—historians of religions, he believes, should resist the preferred narratives and self-understanding of religions themselves, especially when their stories are endowed with sacred origins and authority. In Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars, Lincoln assembles a collection of essays that both illustrates and reveals the benefits of his methodology, making a case for a critical religious studies that starts with skepticism but is neither cynical nor crude. The book begins with Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” and ends with “The (Un)discipline of Religious Studies,” in which he unsparingly considers the failings of uncritical and nonhistorical approaches to the study of religions. In between, Lincoln presents new examinations of problems in ancient religions and relates these cases to larger comparative themes. While bringing to light important features of the formation of pantheons and the constructions of demons, chaos, and the dead, Lincoln demonstrates that historians of religions should take religious things—inspired scriptures, sacred centers, salvific rites, communities graced by divine favor—as the theories of interested humans that shape perception, community, and experiences. As he shows, it is for their terrestrial influence, and not their sacred origins, that religious phenomena merit consideration by the historian. Tackling many questions central to religious study, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars will be a touchstone for the history of religions in the twenty-first century.
God's Demon is a "fascinating"* dark fantasy novel of a fallen warrior seeking atonement from award-winning author and renowned artist Wayne Barlowe. Lucifer's War, which damned legions of angels to Hell, is an ancient and bitter memory shrouded in the smoke and ash of the Inferno. The Fallen, those banished demons who escaped the full wrath of Heaven, have established a limitless and oppressive kingdom within the fiery confines of Hell. Lucifer has not been seen since the Fall and the mantle of rulership has been passed to the horrific Prince Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. The Demons Major, Heaven's former warriors, have become the ruling class. They are the equivalent to landed lords, each owing allegiance to the de facto ruler of Hell. They reign over their fiefdoms, tormenting the damned souls and adding to their wealth. One Demon Major, however, has not forgotten his former life in Heaven. The powerful Lord Sargatanas is restless. For millennia Sargatanas has ruled dutifully but unenthusiastically, building his city, Adamantinarx, into the model of an Infernal metropolis. But he has never forgotten what he lost in the Fall—proximity to God. He is sickened by what he has become. Now, with a small event—a confrontation with one of the damned souls—he makes a decision that will reverberate through every being in Hell. Sargatanas decides to attempt the impossible, to rebel, to endeavor to go Home and bring with him anyone who chooses to follow . . . be they demon or soul. He will stake everything on this chance for redemption. *Guillermo del Toro, Academy Award-Winning Director of The Shape of Water At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The truth about demons is far stranger—and even more fascinating—than what's commonly believed. Are demons real? Are they red creatures with goatees holding pitchforks and sitting on people's shoulders while whispering bad things? Did a third of the angels really rebel with Satan? Are demons and "principalities and powers" just terms for the same entities, or are they different members of the kingdom of darkness? Is the world a chaotic mess because of what happened in Eden, or is there more to the story of evil? What people believed about evil spiritual forces in ancient biblical times is often very different than what people have been led to believe about them today. And this ancient worldview is missing from most attempts to treat the topic. In Demons, Michael Heiser debunks popular presuppositions about the very real powers of darkness. Rather than traditions, stories, speculations, or myths, Demons is grounded in what ancient people of both the Old and New Testament eras believed about evil spiritual forces and in what the Bible actually says. You'll come away with a sound, biblical understanding of demons, supernatural rebellion, evil spirits, and spiritual warfare.
No book has ever attempted to deal with the subject of divinity in its entirety. Here at long last is a comprehensive book dealing with divine beings in its complexity. It provides the reader with accurate and insightful knowledge concerning the concept of divinity. The author gives a clear explanation of the Triune nature of God. God is one being, manifest and existing in three distinct identities or persons, which is further discussed as being comparable with the makeup of a human being. God shares his divine nature with spiritual beings in the heavens with angels and on earth with humankind. The divine nature of God resides in all spirits. Therefore, men have Gods nature in their spirits; they can communicate with and receive the things of the spiritual realm. Through sin, humanity has lost the nature of God; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The purpose of the Bible is to spiritualize humankind, because we have fallen short of the glory of God. The broad focus of this book is to bring as many believers to a stage of maturity in the knowledge of Christ.