Some people hate rules, and they are free to do so. God created humans with free will. But God doesn’t want us to run wild. The Ten Commandments, which are repeated several times in the Bible, give us a roadmap on how to live life. But they are more than a moral code—and they are concerned with more than just appropriate conduct, correct values, and social order. They are a prescription for holiness, a spiritual life, and a life of faith. Looking beyond their prohibitive language reveals something about the will of God. For example, “Honor your father and mother” can imply the notion that we should not dishonor them. “Do not steal” can imply the notion of sharing and giving. By revisiting the Ten Commandments, Tom Kingery runs each law through a sieve that includes four perspectives important to the journey of faith—moral, ethical, social, and spiritual. By doing so, he breathes new life into the ancient laws. Reading this book will shed light on the path we take as we walk with God in obedience and loyalty.
"Our culture is debating about when it's permissible to display the Ten Commandments," said a reviewer of this book. "The Workbook on the Ten Commandments will help them be displayed in the one place that matters: your life." Small groups looking for Bible study that meets real life will welcome this skillfully presented study of the Ten Commandments. Biblical context and contemporary application are woven throughout eight weeks of study. Reflection questions draw the reader deeper into God's purpose for each commandment in our lives today. A clearly outlined group meeting plan caps each week. These sessions include community-building exercises, time for singing hymns and discussion, and time to pray together.
OThe Bible Delusion: 101 OHang on a MinuteO Moments; and GodOs Mysterious WaysO comprises an easy to read summary of 101 examples of absurdity in the King James Version of the Bible, dismantling everything from the Genesis creation myth to the coherency of The Gospels. More aspects are categorised into groups that are anything but OgodlikeO in their nature. The Bible is full of bizarre rules, regulations and instructions D on animal sacrifice, war, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, misogyny, slavery, and much more D straight from God. There are numerous contradictions, anomalies, anachronisms and oddities, many of which are explored and explained in this comprehensive work."
In this book eminent Jewish and Christian scholars come together to illuminate the Ten Commandments. Roger Van Harn has arranged the volume so that writers from both traditions dialogue over each of the Ten Words. A Christian or a Jew writes a penetrating essay about one of the commandments, followed by a shorter response from a member of the other tradition -- all done, remarkably, without sacrificing either Jewish or Christian identity. Unique for its authentic interfaith dialogue on dogmatic matters, The Ten Commandments for Jews, Christians, and Others offers pertinent guidelines for believing Jews and Christians today, with the goal of stimulating deeper conversation between the two groups. As Van Harn says, "Listening to one another may hold pleasant surprises that open us to new possibilities.
The protracted global financial crisis and perceived rise in economic inequality has awakened the long-dormant debate as to whether the international monetary system is in need of fundamental reform. While not surprising given that there is now general agreement that excessive money and credit growth played a key role in the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008, John Butler makes a compelling case in this book that the only way to place the global economy back on the path of sustainable economic growth and to reverse the trend towards inequality is to remonetize gold. Already there are a number of major countries expressing concern about the stability of the existing monetary order. And concern is increasingly giving way to action. As the dollar′s international reserve role gradually declines and more trade is conducted in other currencies, global monetary arrangements are likely to become increasingly multipolar. As there is no single national currency that can realistically replace the dollar as the preeminent global monetary reserve, gold will re-emerge as the preferred international money. As students of economic history will note, it was precisely a multipolar world amid rapidly growing international trade that ushered in the classical gold standard in the 1870s. The world′s 40-year experiment with purely unbacked fiat currencies is thus rapidly approaching its conclusion. This book, however, goes much farther than predict a return to gold. It explores just what the transition might look like, including both orderly and disorderly scenarios and drawing on historical examples where relevant. It considers to what extent the price of gold will likely rise as it becomes remonetized. It surveys and evaluates recent developments in financial technology, including bitcoin, blockchain and digital gold. Most important, it prepares the reader with practical investment advice for a world of gold or gold-backed money, including thoughts on interest rates, exchange rates, credit spreads, equity market valuations, and risk premia for assets in general. Thus John Butler provides not only a compelling vision of the future, but also a detailed road map for navigating what is likely to be the most challenging investment landscape in generations
This bibliography, first published in 1957, provides citations to North American academic literature on Europe, Central Europe, the Balkans, the Baltic States and the former Soviet Union. Organised by discipline, it covers the arts, humanities, social sciences, life sciences and technology.
Each of these new "commandments" is partly true and may sound good until you look closely. For liberal Christianity never goes away, it just gets repackaged. If the church is going to hold fast to "the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), we must, in every era, be able to distinguish the true faith from the false.
This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Egon Börger, contains 14 papers from a Dagstuhl Seminar, that cover a wide range of applied research, spanning from theoretical and methodological foundations to practical applications.
A collection of twenty-nine essays and speeches, originally given in English by Czech Republic prime minister Václav Klaus, on economic reform, ecological policy, the future of Europe, the relationship between art and toleration, and more. Nineteen of the essays and speeches were previously published in the author's Rebirth of a Nation Five Years After (1994)--p.xiv.
Why have the monotheistic religions failed to produce societies that live up to their ethical ideals? A prominent rabbi answers this question by looking at his own faith and offering a way for religion to heal itself. In Putting God Second, Rabbi Donniel Hartman tackles one of modern life’s most urgent and vexing questions: Why are the great monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—chronically unable to fulfill their own self-professed goal of creating individuals infused with moral sensitivity and societies governed by the highest ethical standards? To answer this question, Hartman takes a sober look at the moral peaks and valleys of his own tradition, Judaism, and diagnoses it with clarity, creativity, and erudition. He rejects both the sweeping denouncements of those who view religion as an inherent impediment to moral progress and the apologetics of fundamentalists who proclaim religion’s moral perfection against all evidence to the contrary. Hartman identifies the primary source of religion’s moral failure in what he terms its “autoimmune disease,” or the way religions so often undermine their own deepest values. While God obligates the good and calls us into its service, Hartman argues, God simultaneously and inadvertently makes us morally blind. The nature of this self-defeating condition is that the human religious desire to live in relationship with God often distracts religious believers from their traditions’ core moral truths. The answer Hartman offers is this: put God second. In order to fulfill religion’s true vision for humanity—an uncompromising focus on the ethical treatment of others—religious believers must hold their traditions accountable to the highest independent moral standards. Decency toward one’s neighbor must always take precedence over acts of religious devotion, and ethical piety must trump ritual piety. For as long as devotion to God comes first, responsibility to other people will trail far, far behind. In this book, Judaism serves as a template for how the challenge might be addressed by those of other faiths, whose sacred scriptures similarly evoke both the sublime heights of human aspiration and the depths of narcissistic moral blindness. In Putting God Second, Rabbi Hartman offers a lucid analysis of religion’s flaws, as well as a compelling resource, and vision, for its repair.
