Evolving God

Evolving God

Author: Barbara J. King

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-04-21

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 022636092X

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The author of How Animals Grieve “contends that religion . . . is a consequence of primate evolution” in this “brilliant book” (Booklist, starred review). Religion has been a central part of human experience since at least the dawn of recorded history. The gods change, as do the rituals, but the underlying desire remains—a desire to belong to something larger, greater, most lasting than our mortal, finite selves. But where did that desire come from? Can we explain its emergence through evolution? Yes, says biological anthropologist Barbara J. King—and doing so not only helps us to understand the religious imagination, but also reveals fascinating links to the lives and minds of our primate cousins. Evolving God draws on King’s own fieldwork among primates in Africa and paleoanthropology of our extinct ancestors to offer a new way of thinking about the origins of religion, one that situates it in a deep need for emotional connection with others, a need we share with apes and monkeys. Though her thesis is provocative, and she’s not above thoughtful speculation, King’s argument is strongly rooted in close observation and analysis. She traces an evolutionary path that connects us to other primates, who, like us, display empathy, make meanings through interaction, create social rules, and display imagination—the basic building blocks of the religious imagination. With fresh insights, she responds to recent suggestions that chimpanzees are spiritual—or even religious—beings, and that our ancient humanlike cousins carefully disposed of their dead well before the time of Neandertals. “Her interpretations result in a provocative hypothesis about the evolution of spirituality.” —The Dallas Morning News


Evolving God-Images

Evolving God-Images

Author: Edited by Patrick J. Mahaffey, PhD

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2014-05

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 149173244X

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More than a century ago, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God as a defining characteristic of the modern world. Even so, religion continues to have a pervasive influence in the postmodern world of the twenty-first century. Since the 1970s, there has been a dramatic resurgence of religion and spirituality. This collection of reflective essays explores spirituality and its changing relationship to culture, individual identity, and society in our increasingly globalized, postmodern world. Born out of a doctoral seminar at Pacifica Graduate Institute entitled The God Complex, the essays provide a personal understanding of diverse and conflicting worldviews and attitudes about religion, secularity, nature, and the purpose of human existence. With a rich range of perspectives, each offering provides a powerful testament to the interdisciplinary study of myth, religion, and depth psychology as a means for revisioning one's understanding of the divine. Praise for Evolving God-Images A deeply moving example of what can happen in the classroom when, almost magically, the professor's wisdom and enthusiasm, the archetypal power of the subject matter itself, and the openness of the students converge. Dr. Christine Downing, author of The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine and Gods in Our Midst: Mythological Images of the Masculine A marvelous and unique collection of essays devoted to re-visioning conceptions of divinity. Dr. Evans Lansing Smith, author of Sacred Mysteries: Myths About Couples in Quest


The Image of the Unseen God

The Image of the Unseen God

Author: Thomas E. Hosinski

Publisher: Catholicity in an Evolving Uni

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781626982598

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The Image of the Unseen God develops a novel understanding of God and God's action compatible with the teachings of Jesus, the Christian tradition, and contemporary science.


God

God

Author: Reza Aslan

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0553394738

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of Zealot explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle


Prayers to an Evolutionary God

Prayers to an Evolutionary God

Author: William Cleary

Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

Published: 2012-04-14

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1594734208

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Provides the requisite knowledge and practical guidelines for some of the most common counseling situations. Today's rabbis, in addition to being spiritual leaders of their congregations, are also expected to be competent counselors to members of their community. Yet rabbis often feel inadequately prepared for the difficult challenges of their counseling role. To many, rabbinic counseling appears deceptively simple, requiring no more than good intuition, fair judgment and sincere empathy. Good counseling, in reality, is a complex process requiring a combination of knowledge, skill, self-awareness and an understanding of human dynamics. This groundbreaking book—written specifically for community rabbis and religious counselors—reflects the wisdom of seasoned professionals, who provide clear guidelines and sensible strategies for effective rabbinic counseling.


The Evolving God

The Evolving God

Author: J. David Pleins

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-06-06

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1623562473

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Offers a new appreciation of Darwin as a religion thinker and a better understanding of his positive contributions to the study of religion.


God and the Evolving Universe

God and the Evolving Universe

Author: James Redfield

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2003-01-06

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1101144076

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In a world racked by violence and conflict, James Redfield and Michael Murphy—leading cocreators of today's spiritual boom—present a message of hope and a vision for the future. It is no accident, they argue, that the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed a revolution in new human capacities. Daily we hear and read about supernormal athletic feats; clairvoyant perception; lives transformed by meditative practices; healing through prayer-and we ourselves experience these things. The authors contend that thousands of years of human striving have delivered us to this very moment, in which each act of self-development is creating a new stage in planetary evolution—and the emergence of a human species possessed of vastly expanded potential.


Thank God for Evolution

Thank God for Evolution

Author: Michael Dowd

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780670020454

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Presents a philosophy that unifies evolution and religion, discussing evolution as a divine process, how to use insights derived from evolution to improve spiritual life, and how to work for systemic change within this framework.


The New God-image

The New God-image

Author: Edward F. Edinger

Publisher: Chiron Publications

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0933029985

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C.G. Jung saw in the cultural history of Western man a progressive evolution of its God-image. During the last ten years of his life, he wrote a series of remarkable letters about the new God-image which is now emerging through the discoveries of depth psychology. Edinger discusses fourteen of these letters with respect to the epistemological premises--modern man's new awareness of subjectivity; the paradoxical Godthe nature of the new God--image as a union of opposites; and the continuing incarnation--how the new God-image is born in individual men and women.


Evolution, Games, and God

Evolution, Games, and God

Author: Martin A. Nowak

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0674075536

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According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism’s reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics. Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms “cooperation” and “altruism.” Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning. The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.