Словари
Различные книги в жанре СловариLife After Suffering
Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, once said that to be human is to suffer. Suffering is an unavoidable part of life, but how do we engage our suffering in a culture that teaches us to avoid suffering at all costs? Through the telling of two stories, the horrific death of his parents and the exiled Judeans of the sixth century BCE, Chris Williams offers a way of engaging suffering that questions the dominant voices of popular culture. Perhaps hope is not found in avoiding suffering at all costs, but by inviting others into our darkest moments.
Heaven, Science, and the Last Things
How long will this planet go on? How long will the universe last? Scientists give projected answers based on knowledge of universal physical laws. They talk of billions of years. When Christians take part in worship they express belief in what are called the Last Things–Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell, concepts based on the Scriptures. Can these beliefs be held on to? Concerning future events the Bible presents diverse and even incredible ideas that are held by Christians. This book is an attempt to interpret the Bible in a credible way and to encourage faith in God's purposes.
Leaving Dirt Place
Accosted by hatred and living out a dismal existence in Dirt Place, we humans have tried and failed to find the source of love. Many philosophies of love have proved powerless in satisfying our need for this pure and true thing. One after another, the world's religions fail to illuminate its reality and beauty. All the while, the overwhelming presence of evil has forced love into the shadows of elusiveness. But through the barrage of attempts to explain love's source, it is the Christian God alone who has brought meaning, value, and eternal significance to this oft-misunderstood virtue. It is the Christian God alone whose divine and perfect love was revealed in all its splendor in the cross of Jesus Christ. In Leaving Dirt Place, Jonah Haddad explores a multitude of philosophies and religions whose flawed accounts of love must ultimately yield to the truth of Christianity. This thoughtful and challenging apologetic presents a clear case for the true God of love.
The Great Tradition—A Great Labor
At a recent conference entitled Ancient Wisdom–Anglican Futures, theologians from across the denominational spectrum considered the question, «What does it mean to inhabit the 'Great Tradition' authentically?» As an expression of what C. S. Lewis called «Deep Church,» Anglicanism offers a test case of Tradition with a capital "T" in late modernity. Of particular interest is the highly dynamic transmission that has preserved a recognizable «Anglican Way» over the centuries. The process has been enlivened through constant negotiation and exchange with surprising convergences that have brought new life and direction. The contributors to this volume show how «profitable and commodious» (as Richard Hooker has said) the Great Tradition can be in nurturing the worship, communal life, and mission of the Church. But it often demonstrates how hard it is to uphold the varied integrities of historic faith in the contemporary marketplace of religion and, especially, among evangelicals who continue to follow the Canterbury Trail.
Contributors: Simon Chan, Tony Clark, Dominic Erdozain, Edith Humphrey, D. Stephen Long, George Sumner, and D. H. Williams.
Your Neighbor's Hymnal
Your Neighbor's Hymnal provides a winsome and thoughtful exploration of popular music, from rock to hip-hop to metal to soul, as a vital source contemporary culture continues to go to learn about faith, hope, and love. Where some Christians have kept their focus only on a hymnal found in their church or formed by the genre of Contemporary Christian Music, Keuss argues that your neighbor's hymnal is filled with great music that God is using and deserves a deeper listen. Offering forty songs spanning time and genres, each section includes a number of representative reflections on the history and artist that created the song, reflections on its lyrical content, and theological and biblical connections that will hopefully show some ways in which the song illustrates how your neighbor is hearing, seeking, and finding faith, hope, and love through popular music.
This book can be approached in a number of ways. As an introduction to this stream of popular culture, the overviews and short introductions to each song provide a glossary useful in courses needing texts in theology and popular culture. For use with church groups, whether adult bible studies or youth groups, Your Neighbor's Hymnal provides points of reference for connecting key aspects of the Christian faith with illustrations readily available for discussion. For interested music listeners, the book will provide a means of giving voice to their own musings on faith.
As with faith, good music is meant to be shared, and Your Neighbor's Hymnal offers a wonderful opportunity to do both.
Neither Necessary nor Inevitable
Historic determinism is a convenient way to tie up the uncomfortable loose ends in the tragic lives of millions and to explain, at the same time, the exceptional opportunities of many of the rest of us. A belief in an inevitable chain of events or the will of God, or destiny, or historic necessity suggests a formula to justify each situation as inevitable. Here history is seen like a single track, on which people ride in different cultural coaches in the same direction. Every stop, every departure is part of a natural schedule. It readily leads to resignation for many and arrogance for the lucky. Neither Necessary nor Inevitable argues and illustrates that such attention to the sirens of retrospective determinism gives a false sense of security and a freedom from responsibility. When history swallows the importance of people's choices, inalienable rights become inalienable conditions. In Neither Necessary nor Inevitable, Udo Middelmann argues that while written history may tell a story of choices and consequences in a tight mesh, living history is the result of genuine choices that render the record too chaotic to support the belief in a controlling master plan of material or divine intention. Instead we each lay down our cultural tracks with personally significant choices. Turns and stops are not inevitable, and each choice affects the course of history for generations. Responsibility is not reduced by the belief in a necessary history or a willful God.
Against the Tide, Towards the Kingdom
Against the Tide, Towards the Kingdom is the story of the Urban Vision community in New Zealand. This book recounts the story of a group of young Christian adults who over the last fifteen years have relocated to the colorful ends of their city to share life with those who are struggling, homeless, sick, poor, neglected, or otherwise marginalized. The community has grown over time to seven neighborhoods where on any given day you may find «Urban Visionites» growing vegetables amidst the concrete, teaching English to refugees, offering alternative education programs to out of school teenagers, fostering children, doing church with the homeless, offering friendship to the mentally ill, roasting fair trade coffee, running kids clubs, moms groups, tenant meetings or just sharing yet another cup of tea with their neighbors. In fact sharing is a good summary of the whole shape of this exciting movement. They share homes, food, money, vehicles, jobs, prayers, dreams, conversations, fun, tears, pain, hope, healing, transformation . . . they share the whole of life with each other and with their neighbors. They live the gospel, this good news of Jesus.
A Psalm-Shaped Life
Ever felt glad, sad, or mad and didn't quite know how to talk to God about it? How long since you have used something other than a «happy» psalm in corporate worship? A Psalm-Shaped Life explores how these ancient prayer-songs give us a vision of God and voice to respond to God in all of life, in its joys and sorrows. Psalms of all kinds have shaped the life of God's people for three thousand years. They can and should do so today, also. Reading and praying the Psalms individually and together puts us in a long line of men and women who have poured out their hearts to God using these ancient texts and have been shaped in doing so. A Psalm Shaped Life is a plea for regular and informed immersion in the Psalms, both individually and as a community.
Heaven
"Heaven is one of those great mysteries that somehow symbolize what we don't know about ourselves and the world around us. At the same time it lifts our vision from the mundane realities of our everyday lives and reminds us that beyond the daily grind of our existence there is another, unseen reality. A reality that is as real–if not more so–than our everyday lives. Heaven suggests an answer to the familiar human feeling that there must be more than this, and prompts us to wonder whether there is indeed more in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in all our philosophies." –Paula Gooder, from the Introduction
Contemplative Prayer
The current popularity of contemplative prayer is not accidental. A twenty-first-century understanding of the human condition has made us suspicious of words and the understanding we craft out of words. Theology generally offers us words that purport to give us a more precise and certain understanding of God, but the mystic has always known that our relationship to God transcends words and the kind of understanding that words produce. The theology of the mystic has always been about understanding our communion with the mystery that is God in order to fall evermore deeply in love with the Divine. That is the ultimate purpose of contemplative prayer, and the purpose of this book is to offer a philosophy and theology of contemplative prayer in the twenty-first century.