Do things bring happiness? Do you believe only what you see? What is truth? What can you reliably know? Is death nothingness? Does God exist? This book examines such questions, from which two distinct world views arise and are surveyed. The book examines reality, how our choices determine our character and final destination, knowledge, and limitations of science; surveys relativity, quantum physics, life, evolution, and mans uniqueness; and looks at realitys material and immaterial aspects. Genesis is reviewed and shown to have scientific meaning. The book ends by proposing two very different paths that one can choose to follow.
Have you ever wondered why society is getting cruder and ruder, with stress, depression and mental illness rising and little joy felt? Why children behave badly and schools are failing? Why trust has vanished with your identity? And why sex is oozing out of every aspect of the culture? We live in a skeptical age with the country splintering into special interest groups claiming to be victims and requiring special treatment, and a Congress thats deadlocked in partisan bickering. There is anger and tension and really intolerable things being tolerated, placing women and children in danger. If you have such questions, this is your book, an inquiry into the spirit of the age. Examined are root causes for the darkened culture, immoral behavior, and rejection of traditions. The age glorifies science and technical progress, and yet is unhappy and sickly. Individualism surmounts community concerns creating narcissistic people tending toward nihilism, where the self is the center of the universe. The postmodern culture throws away things, relationships, and lives, like it disposes of outdated items. Logic is replaced with how I feel, and reliance on personal experience for making decisions. Relativism is accepted in ethics and for determining truth, so that it is my truth and your truth, and objectivity and common sense are lost. Science is erecting the abstract man, who, in the process, has lost heart and a sense of reality, living in a delusional world. The result is a profusion of confusion.
Presents a critique of the deceptive and ultimately self-subverting character of the modern notion of freedom, retrieving an alternative view through a new interpretation of the ancient tradition.
A leading interpreter of modernity argues that our culture of limitless self-fulfillment is making millions mentally ill. Training her analytic eye on manic depression and schizophrenia, Liah Greenfeld, in the culminating volume of her trilogy on nationalism, traces these dysfunctions to society’s overburdening demands for self-realization.
Challenging recent rejections of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s groundbreaking study of Karl Barth’s theology, Stephen Long argues that these interpreters are myopically impatient with the nuances of Balthasar’s reading of Barth and fail to appreciate the longstanding theological friendship that perdured. Even more, current readings threaten to repristinate the embattled divide hallmarking Protestant-Catholic relations prior to Vatican II. Long contends against these contemporary trajectories in a substantial defense of Balthasar’s theological preoccupation with Barth’s thought. This book offers one of the first full contextualizations of the friendship that developed between Balthasar and Barth, which lasted from the 1930s until Balthasar’s death in the 1980s. Re-evaluating Balthasar’s theological work on Barth, the present volume provides a critical new reading of not only Balthasar’s original volume but a wider account of the systematic engagement Balthasar carried on throughout his career. Within this, a paradigm for fruitful, generous ecumenical dialogue emerges.
An understanding of culture and identity is essential for new sociologists. This student-focused text explains the themes and theories behind these core ideas. With up-to-date discussion of 'chavs', masculinity and social networking, skills-based activities and practice exam questions, this is invaluable reading for anyone new to this topic.
"This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Kobayashi sought in criticism a vehicle through which to rhetorically restore to the artistic work an aura of concreteness that precluded interpretation and instead inspired awe, to somehow recover a literary experience unmediated by intellectual machinations. In adhering firmly to this worldview for the duration of World War II, Kobayashi came to assume a complex stance toward the wartime regime. Although his interweaving of aesthetics and ideology exhibited elements of both resistance and complicity, his critical ethos served ultimately to undergird his wartime fascist stance by encouraging acquiescence to authority, championing patriotism, and calling for more vigorous thought control. Treating Kobayashi’s influential works and the historical context in which they are rooted, James Dorsey traces the emergence of a modern critical consciousness in conversation with such concerns as the nature of materiality in capitalist culture, the relationship of narrative to subjectivity, and the nostalgia for beauty in a time of war."
This study offers a theological analysis of, and response to, the modern world, and is at once a theology of culture and of creation. In the first half of the book, Gunton expounds some of the distinctive and often contradictory features of modern culture. It emerges that modern culture, far from being unique in its difficulties, reflects similar inadequacies in ancient thought. The distinctive pathos of modernity is to be found in one unique feature, namely the displacement of God that is a mark of all realms of life. The roots of the problem are sought beyond the Enlightenment, where they are often located, in the combination of platonism and Christian theology which dominated medieval Christian thought. At the heart of the matter is a deficient - because of an inadequately trinitarian - understanding of creation and creation's God. The second half of the book develops a powerful theology of creation where due weight can be given to both universal and particular, both society and the individual.
Building a Better Bridge is a record of the fourth "Building Bridges" seminar held in Sarajevo in 2005 as part of an annual symposium on Muslim-Christian relations cosponsored by Georgetown University and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This volume presents the texts of the public lectures with regional presentations on issues of citizenship, religious believing and belonging, and the relationship between government and religion—both from the immediate situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and from three contexts further afield: Britain, Malaysia, and West Africa. Both Christian and Muslim scholars propose key questions to be faced in addressing the issue of the common good. How do we approach the civic sphere as believers in particular faiths and as citizens of mixed societies? What makes us who we are, and how do our religious and secular allegiances relate to one another? How do we accommodate our commitment to religious values with acknowledgment of human disagreement, and how can this be expressed in models of governance and justice? How are we, mandated by scriptures to be caretakers, to respond to the current ecological and economic disorder of our world? Michael Ipgrave and his contributors do not claim to provide definitive answers to these questions, but rather they further a necessary dialogue and show that, while Christian and Islamic understandings of God may differ sharply and perhaps irreducibly, the acknowledgment of one another as people of faith is the surest ground on which to build trust, friendship, and cooperation.
