In this remarkable New York Times bestseller, Joel Osteen offers unique insights and encouragement that will help readers overcome every obstacle in their lives.
The best-selling author of In a Pit with a Lion explores the foundational elements of Christianity--compassion, wonder, curiosity and power--to help believers rediscover the significance of their faith.
Our generation needs a reformation. But a single person won’t lead it. A single event won’t define it. Our reformation will be a movement of reformers living creatively, compassionately, courageously for the cause of Christ. This reformation will not be born of a new discovery. It will be the rediscovery of something old, something ancient. Something primal. —Mark Batterson, Primal What would your Christianity look like if it was stripped down to the simplest, rawest, purest faith possible? You would have more, not less. You would have the beginning of a new reformation—in your generation, your church, your own soul. You would have primal Christianity. This book is an invitation to become part of a reformation movement. It is an invitation to rediscover the compassion, wonder, curiosity, and energy that turned the world upside down two thousand years ago. It is an invitation to be astonished again.
This insightful book offers a careful, intelligent look at doubt--at some of its common sources, the challenges it presents, and the opportunities it may open up in a person's quest for faith.
The Quest for God is a study of the explosion of interest in newer approaches to spirituality that took place in the west among Christians, Jew, and Muslims in the twelfth century. The book explores the historic internal and external forces that influenced members of the three major faith groups who were looking for new ways to approach their personal relationship with God. It contains a detailed explanation of the new attitudes and religious practices that emerged among the three groups during that century. This includes special emphasis placed on the mysticism of Christian monks and nuns, the Kabbalah of the Jews, and the tenets of Sufism in Islam. It also paints a clear picture of the role played by the leading figures, both male and female, who pioneered this effort. A unique feature of the book is the linkage of similar imagery, biblical references, mystical attitudes, and actual religious practices utilized by all three faith systems to achieve a newer more mystical approach to spirituality. The fundamental development of spiritual approaches initiated by these three faiths laid the foundation for many of the spiritual practices we have today. Each of the three faiths is covered in a separate section. Preceding the discussion of the spiritual elements of each is a chapter dealing with the historical setting in which that faith operated. A final chapter summarizes the entire work and shows the common characteristics that each group had and links them together.
Jerome Murphy-O'Connor's reputation as a recognized expert on the Corinthian correspondence has been built on the original solutions he has offered to perennial problems. Brought together for the first time in one volume, each of the sixteen articles anthologised here deals with one or more verses in 1 Corinthians that have baffled scholars for generations. Throughout the collection the author dialogues with the opinions of colleagues, responding to and building on their accurate observations, and explaining in detail why certain solutions are viable whilst others are implausible. A newly written 'reception history' has been appended to each article to bring the collection completely up to date. Although not a commentary on 1 Corinthians, this volume deals thoroughly with all the major problems of the most interesting of the Pauline letters.
In a reexamination of the allegorical dimensions of PARADISE LOST, Catherine Martin presents Milton's poem as a prophecy foretelling the end of one culture and its replacement by another. Maintaining a dialogue with a critical tradition that extends from Johnson and Coleridge to the best contemporary Milton scholarship, Martin sets PARADISE LOST in both the early modern and the postmodern worlds.
This fourth in a series continues this non-academic author's ground-breaking word by word analysis of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This volume covers all of chapters 1.7, 1.8 and 2.1 with the intent to explore them as art objects. In chapters 1.7 and 1.8 Aesthetics meets Theosophy meets Metaphysics. Together they share a common subject-how one part or whole treats another part. These two chapters move from shun to share, hurt to help, male to female. In aesthetics, from bad art to good art. In theosophy, from TZTZ god to ES god. In metaphysics a la Arthur Schopenhauer, from male to female aspects of Will. Featuring an all male cast, chapter 1.7 is a stinging criticism of Shem by Shaun-brother against brother. Chapter 1.7 is intentionally bad art. In aesthetic terms, the whole of the chapter is at odds with the parts and the parts at odds with other parts. With an all female cast, chapter 1.8 features a young washerwoman and old washerwoman washing clothes and talking together across a river. The main point is that they are working together, and Old shares knowledge of the eternal feminine with Young. Sharing replaces shunning. Part helps part. Chapter 1.8 is intentionally divine art. Chapter 2.1 starts Part II that features the Earwicker children, the human expression of the death defying new. As children, they come with the potential for new possibilities. Initially, however, their realization is limited by youth, when they are more under instinct-based and parental control than under self-control. Chapter 2.1 features a children's game fueled by immature sexual intoxication and loss of self-control. Joyce presents this come-on game in the rhythms and rhymes of children's stories, poems and songs, that is in children's art limited by the purpose to please a young mind. Chapter 2.1 takes the form of a play. The action in the play is the children's game. It is a play about play. With drama in the structure, Joyce weaves Macbeth into the chapter and like Shakespeare's bearded witches, boils the pot with male and female. Hermetic magic supplies the metaphors and concepts for chapter 2.1. Hermetic magic is the art of accessing the celestial force field known as the Astral Light. In order to have strong magic the magus must be in equilibrium and must know him or herself. Magus Joyce notes that these same requirements are necessary for the highest art.
In the eighteenth century the Alps became the subject of a new view of nature, which crystallized in the sublime. Oscillating between fear and fascination, this sensual experience triggered a thrilling borderline experience: travelers ventured to the mountain world full of longing and projected a variety of different dreams onto the "wild nature" that had yet to be explored. To what extent has the sublime influenced architecture in the Alps, from the early days of tourism to the present? Prompted by this question, the author analyzes Alpine architecture in its historical context and offers a critical assessment of contemporary tourism. This is a book that inspires us to reflect on the future of building in the Alps and on our relationship with nature.
Liberal education aspires to excellence through the cultivation of free human beings who excel in thought, word, and deed. But what exactly is excellence, and why do we admire it? How do we conceive of what is excellent? What constitutes excellence—either for human beings, or in the realms of philosophy, literature, science, and politics? Why is excellence an aim of liberal education? What kinds of texts, courses, and inquiries contribute to achieving this end? Such questions animate the studies herein. The essays in this volume reflect on the idea of excellence embedded within core texts, as well as how such texts influence and ennoble higher education. In its chapters, we consider rival forms of excellence from ancient Greece and Rome, through modern Europe and America, and beyond. The world of antiquity and its accounts of excellence, as represented in the works of Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, and Cicero, are here brought into dialogue with diverse modern perspectives on excellence, as articulated by Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Austen, Darwin, Lincoln, Tennyson, and Nietzsche, as well as (more recently) by John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Cardinal Newman, and Eboo Patel. Our desire to seek and understand excellence transcends borders, and the purpose of this volume is to help perpetuate in contemporary higher education the study of core texts essential to the cultivation of excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.