We live in a multicultural society, but many Christians hesitate to engage those of other faiths about Christianity. Exploring evangelism from the perspective of four major worldviews, Jay Moon and Bud Simon unpack the intercultural dynamics at hand when sharing the gospel across cultures, offering contextual evangelism approaches that are relevant, biblical, and practical.
An ambitious new history of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, published for the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting version of their story. In it, the Pilgrims are religious zealots who persecuted dissenters and decimated the Native peoples through warfare and by stealing their land. The Pilgrims’ definition of liberty was, in practice, very narrow. Drawing on original research using underutilized sources, John G. Turner moves beyond these familiar narratives in his sweeping and authoritative new history of Plymouth Colony. Instead of depicting the Pilgrims as otherworldly saints or extraordinary sinners, he tells how a variety of English settlers and Native peoples engaged in a contest for the meaning of American liberty.
The Complete American Pilgrim is a traveler's guide to 250 of the most sacred and historic religious sites in the United States. It is based on the travels and research of the author, who over the last few decades has visited countless religious sites around the world. The Complete American Pilgrim invites casual travelers and die-hard pilgrims alike to explore some of the most sacred destinations to be found in the United States. These places, chosen for their religious, historic and architectural importance encompass centuries of the American religious experience. From the historic colonial churches of New England to the magnificent missions of California, discover what hidden treasures of faith may be found in your own neighborhood.
The study of supernatural powers is fraught with vexing hermeneutical challenges, which aggravate further in the African context. While on the one hand Western anthropology tends to discount the idea of supernatural powers by attempting to 'explain them away', on the other Western biblical scholarship has mainly worked from the premise of 'demythologizing' them. But none of these approaches make tangible sense to African scholars for whom supernatural powers constitute an integral component of their spiritual psyche. This book, based on an examination of over a thousand documentary sources (both classic and modern), attempts to address the issue of interpreting supernatural powers from an African worldview. The author analyzes, identifies, and critiques major hermeneutical errors and offers a 'bridging hermeneutic' using the method of reader-response criticism.
A New York Times bestseller people can believe in—by "a pioneer of the new urban Christians" (Christianity Today) and the "C.S. Lewis for the 21st century" (Newsweek). Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, addresses the frequent doubts that skeptics, and even ardent believers, have about religion. Using literature, philosophy, real-life conversations, and potent reasoning, Keller explains how the belief in a Christian God is, in fact, a sound and rational one. To true believers he offers a solid platform on which to stand their ground against the backlash to religion created by the Age of Skepticism. And to skeptics, atheists, and agnostics, he provides a challenging argument for pursuing the reason for God.
Fr. Roy shows how The Three Dynamisms of Faith are lived in today's culture and how they are systematically related; sometimes in alliance and sometimes in apparent opposition. Having led the reader to a plausible answer to the human condition in Catholicism, in his final chapter he discusses some classic issues that result: possible tensions between meaning and truth, between feelings and insight, and about the role of religious experience in becoming attuned to Christian revelation.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As seen on The Joe Rogan Experience! A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations. The most influential religious historian of the 20th century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the Ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same, secret tradition? A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist – the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data, whatever happened at the Last Supper remains an article of faith for today’s 2.5 billion Christians. In an unprecedented search for answers, The Immortality Key examines the archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet. Religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity’s founding event. And after centuries of debate, to solve history’s greatest puzzle. Before the birth of Jesus, the Ancient Greeks found salvation in their own sacraments. Sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called Ancient Mysteries – elaborate rites that led initiates to the brink of death. The best and brightest from Athens and Rome flocked to the spiritual capital of Eleusis, where a holy beer unleashed heavenly visions for two thousand years. Others drank the holy wine of Dionysus to become one with the god. In the 1970s, renegade scholars claimed this beer and wine – the original sacraments of Western civilization – were spiked with mind-altering drugs. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have hinted at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. But the smoking gun remains elusive. If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Ancient Greeks, did they also survive into the age of Jesus? Was the Eucharist of the earliest Christians, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist? With an unquenchable thirst for evidence, Muraresku takes the reader on his twelve-year global hunt for proof. He tours the ruins of Greece with its government archaeologists. He gains access to the hidden collections of the Louvre to show the continuity from pagan to Christian wine. He unravels the Ancient Greek of the New Testament with the world’s most controversial priest. He spelunks into the catacombs under the streets of Rome to decipher the lost symbols of Christianity’s oldest monuments. He breaches the secret archives of the Vatican to unearth manuscripts never before translated into English. And with leads from the archaeological chemists at UPenn and MIT, he unveils the first scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelic drugs in classical antiquity. The Immortality Key reconstructs the suppressed history of women consecrating a forbidden, drugged Eucharist that was later banned by the Church Fathers. Women who were then targeted as witches during the Inquisition, when Europe’s sacred pharmacology largely disappeared. If the scientists of today have resurrected this technology, then Christianity is in crisis. Unless it returns to its roots. Featuring a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the NYT bestselling author of America Before.
This book explores the dynamic interaction between religion and tourism in the modern world. It considers questions such as: do travellers leave their religion at home when they are touring – and what happens if not? what are the relationships between tourism and pilgrimage? what happens to religious performances, places and festivals that function as tourism attractions? Other chapters examine religious theme parks, wellness and spa tourism, the roles played by tourist guides, guidebooks and religious souvenirs, and the role of tourism as a major arena of religious encounters in the contemporary world. Surveying the growing body of work in the field, Michael Stausberg argues that tourism should be a major focus of research within religious studies.
Awarded third place in pilgrimages/Catholic travel by the Catholic Media Association. Historian Kevin Schmiesing takes you to more than two-dozen sites and events that symbolize and embody America’s rich and sometimes tumultuous Catholic past, including the Santa Fe Trail, Gettysburg, and the Bourbon Trail. You’ll also meet both famous and infamous Catholics—including Augustus Tolton, Dr. Samuel Mudd, and Frances Cabrini—who impacted our nation’s history. The idea for A Catholic Pilgrimage through American History came from Schmiesing’s mother, he says. She turned every childhood vacation into a pilgrimage, purposely inserting religious sites into the family’s journey to places such as Niagara Falls, Washington, DC, or Myrtle Beach. Catholics have been part of the American experiment since the beginning—in founding the colonies and expanding the west, building education and health care systems, abolishing slavery, fighting on the front lines, and advancing science, technology, and space exploration. Each of the twenty-seven sites on Schmiesing’s virtual itinerary—including, the Washington Monument, Wounded Knee Creek, the University of Notre Dame, and Mission San Diego de Alcalá—transports you to a significant time in US history and connects the dots to our Catholic heritage. You will meet notable Catholics such as John F. Kennedy, Black Elk, and Katharine Drexel, and learn more about their contributions to history. You will explore the various and sometimes conflicting roles Catholics have played in key periods and events through the stories of shrines, memorials, and other historic places including: the Catholic Plymouth Rock—St. Mary’s City, Maryland; the Bourbon Trail—Church of St. Thomas, Bardstown, Kentucky; the Pope’s Stone—the Washington Monument in the District of Columbia; a Catholic mission and a Native American tragedy: Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota; and the home of the first Black priest—the churches of Quincy, Illinois.
The debate about when the middle ages ended and the modern era began, has long been a staple of the historical literature. In order to further this debate, and illuminate the implications of a longue durée approach to the history of the Reformation, this collection offers a selection of essays that address the medieval-modern divide. Covering a broad range of topics - encompassing legal, social, cultural, theological and political history - the volume asks fundamental questions about how we regard history, and what historians can learn from colleagues working in other fields that may not at first glance appear to offer any obvious links. By focussing on the concept of the medieval-modern divide - in particular the relation between the Middle Ages and the Reformation - each essay examines how a medievalist deals with a specific topic or issue that is also attracting the attention of Reformation scholars. In so doing it underlines the fact that both medievalists and modernists are often involved in bridging the medieval-modern divide, but are inclined to construct parallel bridges that end between the two starting points but do not necessarily meet. As a result, the volume challenges assumptions about the strict periodization of history, and suggest that a more flexible approach will yield interesting historical insights.
