Musings of a Persecuted Soul is a story about spiritual catharsis, a search for answers to questions often avoided by Christians and rarely discussed from church pulpits. The author presents his lifelong quest to find spiritual equilibrium between his Christian beliefs and his secular education and personal observations in the natural world. Grounded in the Berean example of Acts 17:11, "to search the scriptures for truth," the author will take you on a thought-provoking journey, investigating topics guaranteed to provoke spiritual debate. Whether you are a strict traditionalist or a scriptural freethinker, Musings of a Persecuted Soul will challenge your established beliefs and breathe new spiritual life into your soul.
S¿ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) stood apart from the other philosophers of his day. He was less concerned with debates over abstract concepts of philosophy than with the working out of how one should live one's daily life. He believed that living Christianly should not be a matter of whether one holds the correct beliefs or dogma; Christianity is an experience, something which we must choose to live each day. Kierkegaard's thoughts and ideas apply directly to our fractured society today, explains Michael Stark. As the modern world has become smaller, it has become more divisive and argumentative. It seems that the more information we have access to, the more fearful we--Christian communities included--are becoming. Through an examination of topics such as truth, faith, selfhood, and love, Stark introduces us to the teaching of Kierkegaard and demonstrates how this prophetic voice from the past can help us navigate the hostile and combative climate of today.
This book addresses provides a series of in-depth portraits of men and women who have been labelled ‘terrorists’, from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Bridging historical methodologies and theoretical approaches to terrorism studies, it seeks to contribute to the developing historicising of terrorism studies. This is achieved principally through a prosopographical approach. In the preponderance of detailed statistical and quantitative data on the practice of terrorism and political violence, the individuals who participate in terrorist acts are often obscured. While ideologies and organisations have attracted much scholarly interest, less is known of the personal trajectories into political violence, particularly from a historical perspective. The focus on a relatively narrow cast of high-profile terrorist ‘villains’, to a large part driven by popular and media attention, results in a somewhat skewed picture; of equal value, arguably, is a more sustained reflection on the lives of lesser-known individuals. The book sits at the juncture between terrorism studies, historical biography and ethnography. It comprises case studies of ten individuals who have engaged in political violence in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in a number of locations and with a variety of ideological motivations, from Russian-inflected anarchism to Islamist extremism. Through detailed empirical research, crucial themes in the study of terrorism and political violence are explored: the diverse individual radicalisation pathways, the question of disengagement and re-engagement, various counter-terrorist and counter-insurgency strategies adopted by governments and security forces, and the changing nature and perception of terrorism over time. Although not explicitly comparative, a number of themes resonate between the case studies, which will be drawn together in the conclusion to this book. These include the role of migration in radicalisation, the influence of radical family heritages, the experience of imprisonment and the narratives which individuals construct to tell their own terrorist life-stories. It also provides an historically grounded answer to one of the most contentious and heated debates in recent literature on terrorism studies: ‘what leads a person to turn to political violence?’ In examining the life-narratives of a diverse range of men and women who at some point embraced violence, this book seeks to contribute to a growing understanding of the entire arc of a terrorist lifespan, from radicalisation to mobilisation, to disengagement and beyond. This book will be of much interest to students of political violence, terrorism studies, security studies and politics in general.
Internet readers of the Daily Reflections with Fr. Don Talafous have long urged the author to publish selections in book form. Here is such a collection offering hope and encouragement in the face of the sadness and suffering of our world. While they come from the mind, heart, and PC of a Catholic Benedictine, the topics of these reflections appeal to church-going Christians, readers of a skeptical bent, and even those of no or minimal relation to any organized religion.
The anthology is a collection of articles written by renowned mathematicians of the twentieth century. The articles span roughly a century in time and a wide range in subject. They are by mathematicians acknowledged by their peers as outstanding creators whose work has added richly to the discipline.
Unlike other humanistic disciplines, the academic study of religion must contend with a phenomenon that touches every dimension of human experience. For scholars so engaged, the study of religion often becomes a cross-cultural as well as a necessarily interdisciplinary endeavor. In this collection of original essays, Jon R. Stone has brought together the intellectual autobiographies of fourteen senior scholars - all with national or international reputations in their respective fields - each of whom reflects upon his or her own theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches to the study of religion. Taken together, these essays represent the variety of research methods and interpretive rigor mature scholars bring to the task of examining religious phenomena, religious actions, religious movements, and religious ideas.
In today’s pluralistic world, many cultures feel a shift in the relationship of people with religious traditions. A corresponding movement is a resurgence of interest in human spirituality. This Handbook presents the views of education scholars who engage these concepts every day, in a collection of essays reflecting the international state of the discipline. Out of these rises a vision for the emergence of a just and peaceful world.
I had always believed in the healing power of our Lord, and viewed my life as one of service to Him via the practice of medicine. But, in retrospect, I had a deeper trust in the power of modern medicine and science than I did in Jesus Christ and His fully accomplished work on the Cross. My thinking was flawed, but, as I grew in my walk with the Lord and meditated on Scripture more fully, I began to see the superiority of faith over the limited interventions modern medical science had to offer, and that this interplay between faith and science was not mutually exclusive, but complimentary, for the spiritual aspects of our lives illuminate and empower the carnal aspects of intellect and physical senses. I began jotting notes to myself related to this interplay of faith and healing and science, and just filed them away...for years. IThen, in December of 2017, a baby was born to a first time mother of mine, his little body riddled with the most fulminant form of acute lymphoblasic leukemia, almost always fatal. His absolutely miraculous healing was the impetus to start putting these thoughts into writing, in the form of weekday morning emails entitled “A Christian Doctor’s View of Healing, Faiith, and Science”. It was soon made clear to me that these writings were to take the form of a year long devotional book, comprised of short weekday messages that are intimately linked, such that they can be read through as a book. And that book was to paint a picture, and that picture was to be of a face, and the face was to be that of Jesus, for He is the source of all healing
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is chiefly remembered as the Romantic poet who wrote “The Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”, as Wordsworth’s collaborator on the Lyrical Ballads, as the myriad-minded philosopher who introduced his countrymen to the thought of Kant, as one of the foremost critics of Shakespeare, and as a supremely gifted conversationalist who put a spell on any visitor to his Highgate home. In his own day, however, Coleridge was most notorious for his political “apostasy”. With the Revolution across the Channel, once celebrated as the harbinger of a new age, deteriorating into the terreur and the Pitt ministry desperately trying to contain revolutionary activities on British soil, public intellectuals were compelled to take sides. As it turned out, the choices they made during the 1790s would haunt them well into the 1810s. This first book-length study of Coleridge’s reactions to the French Revolution examines his trajectory from “radical” to “conservative” – and challenges the very notion that these labels can be applied to him. Particular focus is given to the part his friend Robert Southey played in Coleridge’s political coming of age, as well as to William Hazlitt’s role as his relentless prosecutor in later life. As such, the book offers an accessible portrayal of the first-generation Romantics and their political sensibilities.
How does faith impact culture? What influence does culture have on faith? These questions might seem academic, limited to university religion or philosophy classes, until we look at the morning headlines or listen to the evening newscasts. Our lives are invaded daily by stories of extremists with yet another suicide bombing, or protests for of against reproductive rights, or scientific discoveries raising questions about the creation of the universe all based on conflicting faith commitments. Like it or not, these faith/culture questions are part of all of our lives. In this book, six writers explore the juncture of faith and different dimensions of 21st century cultures. The words faith and culture are dynamic, not static. Over time they take on new meanings. In the Christian tradition, for centuries faith meant the total life of a follower of Jesus. But in the last three centuries of the Enlightenment, many have come to see faith as a rational set of beliefs that are often separated from the way a person lives. In the chapters of this book there is an effort to describe faith as a way of life that sometimes supports current dimensions of culture, and sometimes opposes them. Since faith is a personal response to God, there are as many different expressions of faith as there are people. Instead of seeing this as a problem, each of our writers presents the juncture of faith and culture from their own personal experience and we are all enriched by the differences. In this book we see the process of current cultures changing, being shaped in new ways at least in part by faith communities. Being aware of these changes makes it possible for each of us to join our writers to be a part of the change we seek in our world instead of being victims of forces beyond our control.
