"Who can lay exclusive claim to Jesus? This remarkable book issues a challenge to all three monotheistic religions. Christians owe it to themselves to take a good look at their past and the atrocities carried out "in the name of Christ". It is only in this way that they can gain a new vision of ecumenical unity. Jews and Muslims, too, are called upon to remember what they have in common with the figure of Christ. All three religions must find a way of overcoming their centuries-old mistrust of one another. This book offers a way to start." [Back cover]
This is a collection of stories based around the poem 'The Three Faces of Christ'. Each of the stories explores an aspect of Christ, and Dennis explores Christ's vulnerability, suffering, the comfort he draws from our love and his delight in us.
Highlights the key elements of the Catholic moral tradition and lays the foundations for Christian ethics through experiential reflections of right action toward persons, communities and personal choices.
Jesus is one of the most commonly portrayed figures of all time in the artistic community. But what can all of his varying faces—coming from so many different ages and diverse countries around the world—tell us about him as a person? In this beautiful book, images of Jesus are used to explore his life and legacy, including Jesus as shepherd, Jesus as victor, Jesus as broken, and many more. With illuminating text and arresting images, this book is visually stunning and textually inspiring—the perfect gift for anyone with an interest in fine art, spirituality, or both.
On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another’s company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”
This is a biblical, theological, and mystical exploration of God that reveals the bigger, closer, and more human God hidden behind the traditional Trinity than many commonly understand and experience. Drawing upon scholars, scientists, mystics, and his own experiences, the author presents a new framework for knowing God.
"In The Many Faces of Christ religious historian Philip Jenkins refutes our most basic assumptions about the Lost Gospels and the history of Christianity. He reveals that hundreds of alternative gospels were never lost, but survived and in many cases remained influential texts, both outside and within the official Church. We are taught that these alternative scriptures--such as the Gospels of Thomas, Mary, or Judas--represented intoxicating, daring and often bizarre ideas that were wholly suppressed by the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. In bringing order to the tumult, the Church canonized only four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The rest, according to this standard account, were lost, destroyed, or hidden. But more than a thousand years after Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made his Roman Empire do the same, the Christian world retained a much broader range of scriptures than would be imaginable today"--
This small volume comprises primarily papers presented in 2001 at the 32nd Annual Margaret S. Mahler Symposium on Child Development in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mourning and the importance of the capacity to bear some helplessness, while still finding pleasure in life, are central to this tightly organized volume. The multi-faceted processes involved in mourning and adaptation are addressed. Expectably, Mahler's conceptual contributions are liberally referenced throughout the volume - separation individuation, libidinal object constancy, the unavoidable losses of developmental changes, and mourning of the loss of one-ness. In keeping with the design of the symposium, the book is organized around four primary chapters (presentations), each followed by a discussion chapter. The unifying theme is mourning of the loss of a primary object, either early in life or in adulthood.
New York Times bestselling author and Bible expert Bart Ehrman reveals how Jesus’s divinity became dogma in the first few centuries of the early church. The claim at the heart of the Christian faith is that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. But this is not what the original disciples believed during Jesus’s lifetime—and it is not what Jesus claimed about himself. How Jesus Became God tells the story of an idea that shaped Christianity, and of the evolution of a belief that looked very different in the fourth century than it did in the first. A master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, Ehrman reveals how an apocalyptic prophet from the backwaters of rural Galilee crucified for crimes against the state came to be thought of as equal with the one God Almighty, Creator of all things. But how did he move from being a Jewish prophet to being God? In a book that took eight years to research and write, Ehrman sketches Jesus’s transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his death—alive again—did anyone come to think that he, the prophet from Galilee, had become God. And what they meant by that was not at all what people mean today. Written for secular historians of religion and believers alike, How Jesus Became God will engage anyone interested in the historical developments that led to the affirmation at the heart of Christianity: Jesus was, and is, God.
