Religious Books - Page 6

The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Terry Eagleton

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer.
Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is only in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life.
Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind.

Jesus-Shock

Peter Kreeft

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True Spirituality

Francis Schaeffer

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

What Christians are meant to be 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

In our falleness, even as Christians, there is a great tendency to fall into putting emphasis of the Christian life on either extremes of adhering to doctrinal purity or loving people; one or the other, instead of both. The danger of the former, where Calvinists and Fundamentalists have much to learn, is to give an impression of Christianity of being dead, cold, indifferent, impersonal and compassionless, with our smarter-than-thou and holier-than-thou attitudes for which I am responsible and have to admit that it is a stench to the world; while the danger of the latter, being the banner of liberal theology, where the emergent church has much to learn, is to love people at the expense of truth by presenting Christianity falsely in complete opposition of what the Bible teaches, by denying the deity and resurrection of Christ, for example. Embracing one and not the other is the source of much ugliness in the church. These are the subjects of this text where Dr. Schaeffer teaches both orthodoxy and compassionate Christianity; the former mainly on Gal 2:20, under the appropriately titled heading of "Freedom from the bonds of sin" where he hammers on the need for Christians to die to self, and to live a new life in Christ; as well as the danger of mechanical and antinomian Christianity; and the later on personal relationship both to the infinite and personal God and to our fellow human beings and treating them as such, as the demonstration to the world of who the God of the Bible is, under the heading of "Freedom from the results of the bonds of sin". What Dr. Schaeffer covers here is an important reminder for Christians; new and mature, and the preaching of the gospel for non-Christians.

Editorial Review:

Tyndale celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of this twentieth-century spiritual classic with a special commemorative edition featuring new foreword by Chuck Colson and introduction by Dr. Jerram Barrs, director of the Schaeffer Institute.

True Spirituality is a treasure trove of wisdom for Christians trying to discover what true spirituality looks like in everyday life.

The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life

Jean-Francois Revel, Matthieu Ricard, John Canti, Jack Miles

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Jean Francois-Revel, a pillar of French intellectual life in our time, became world famous for his challenges to both Communism and Christianity. Twenty-seven years ago, his son, Matthieu Ricard, gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism -- not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters.

Meeting in an inn overlooking Katmandu, these two profoundly thoughtful men explored the questions that have occupied humankind throughout its history. Does life have meaning? What is consciousness? Is man free? What is the value of scientific and material progress? Why is there suffering, war, and hatred? Their conversation is not merely abstract: they ask each other questions about ethics, rights, and responsibilities, about knowledge and belief, and they discuss frankly the differences in the way each has tried to make sense of his life.

Utterly absorbing, inspiring, and accessible, this remarkable dialogue engages East with West, ideas with life, and science with the humanities, providing wisdom on how to enrich the way we live our lives.

Fallen Angels, the Watchers, and the Origins of Evil

Joseph B. Lumpkin

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A look into the Spirit world 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I thourghly enjoyed reading the book "Fallen Angels Watchers,and the Origins of Evil". It was one of those books when you start reading it,it is hard to put down.I feel he has touched on a subject that would be very relavent today due to the fact of the hight that Evil had grown to today.I feel that this book is a very good read and worth the time one takes out of one's busy life to expand their knowledge of the Spirit World.I feel this would be very profitable.

Editorial Review:

Deeds of Fallen angels, watchers, nephilim, and the evil of mankind flash before the reader. By seeking out several ancient texts and combining all they have to say about these creatures of heavenly evil, we see a panorama of evil is formed.

Texts of Enoch, Jasher, Jubilees, The War Scrolls, the Holy Bible, and other books were used to form a chronicle of the creation and deeds of the fallen ones. From birth to defeat, this book is one of the greatest stories of evil ever told. Texts are taken directly from the ancient writs and sown into a history that reads like a novel.

ORTHODOXY

Gilbert, K. Chesterson

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. While everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same. It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence. -- G. K. Chesterton

The Essential Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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This is the most comprehensive anthology of Søren Kierkegaard's works ever assembled in English. Drawn from the volumes of Princeton's authoritative Kierkegaard's Writings series by editors Howard and Edna Hong, the selections represent every major aspect of Kierkegaard's extraordinary career. They reveal the powerful mix of philosophy, psychology, theology, and literary criticism that made Kierkegaard one of the most compelling writers of the nineteenth century and a shaping force in the twentieth. With an introduction to Kierkegaard's writings as a whole and explanatory notes for each selection, this is the essential one-volume guide to a thinker who changed the course of modern intellectual history.

The anthology begins with Kierkegaard's early journal entries and traces the development of his work chronologically to the final The Changelessness of God. The book presents generous selections from all of Kierkegaard's landmark works, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death, and draws new attention to a host of such lesser-known writings as Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions and The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The selections are carefully chosen to reflect the unique character of Kierkegaard's work, with its shifting pseudonyms, its complex dialogues, and its potent combination of irony, satire, sermon, polemic, humor, and fiction. We see the esthetic, ethical, and ethical-religious ways of life initially presented as dialogue in two parallel series of pseudonymous and signed works and later in the "second authorship" as direct address. And we see the themes that bind the whole together, in particular Kierkegaard's overarching concern with, in his own words, "What it means to exist; . . . what it means to be a human being."

Together, the selections provide the best available introduction to Kierkegaard's writings and show more completely than any other book why his work, in all its creativity, variety, and power, continues to speak so directly today to so many readers around the world.

The Thirteen Petalled Rose: A Discourse On The Essence Of Jewish Existence And Belief

Adin Steinsaltz

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From Madonna's music videos to the glossy pages of celebrity magazines and back to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Jewish mysticism has stepped into the modern consciousness like never before. In this classic work, world-renowned scholar Adin Steinsaltz answers the major questions asked by modern Jews about the nature of existence in God's universe. The title The Thirteen Petalled Rose is taken from the opening of the classic Jewish text on mysticism, the Zohar, and refers to the "collective souls of the Jewish people," which scholars have likened to the fullness of a rose and its thirteen petals. Along with a new preface by the author, this edition contains a new chapter on prayer that provides the most up-to-date account of the Kabbalistic view of devotion. Another new chapter recounts and interprets the prophet Elijah's Introduction to the Zohar. "Steinsaltz possesses a mind of the quality that occurs perhaps once or twice in a generation, or several generations.... In [The Thirteen Petalled Rose] one can encounter the classical Jewish mystical view of reality, delineated lucidly, concisely, profoundly and, what is so rare, believingly. It is an utterly authentic expression of Judaism yet so unknown even among the well-informed and therefore so necessary, so welcome." (Herbert Weiner, Oxford University)

Experiencing the World's Religions

Michael Molloy

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Experiencing the World's Religions provides a clear and compelling account of religion as a diverse, lived experience by peoples around the world. Global in its coverage, the text conveys the vitality and richness of the world's religions as a living cultural wellspring that not only concerns systems of belief but how those beliefs are expressed in ceremonies, food, clothing, art, architecture, pilgrimage, scripture, and music. The text demonstrates why an understanding of the world's religions enriches our lives. In an engaging narrative emphasizing the experience of religion, the text takes students on a personal voyage through doctrines, history, the religiously inspired arts, ceremonies, and everyday expressions of belief and combines these with powerful photographs from around the globe. The text goes beyond traditional approaches to personally connect students with the vitality of the great religions and how they reach into the lives of individuals and the culture at large. This fourth edition has been thoroughly updated in both content and illustration, to address recent world events and political changes, and provide additional insight into current theory and practice. .

Warranted Christian Belief

Alvin Plantinga

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Maximally Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

In WCB, Plantinga repeatedly refers to Alston's PERCEIVING GOD as "magisterial." Alston's book is indeed that. But Plantinga's own work in this volume is that and more.

WCB is a philosophically sophisticated defense of even the simplest (and least sophisticated) faith. He challenges a very common objection to Christian belief: "I am not in a position to say whether Christian theism is true or false (who could know a thing like that?), but one thing I do know is that it is not warranted." Plantinga argues, successfully, I think, that this position itself is without warrant. Why? For the simple fact that *if* Christian theism is true, then believers probably *are* warranted even in simple faith. A serious challenge to warrant must therefore include a serious challenge to the truth of the belief.

Warrant is whatever, when added to true belief, yields knowledge. And Plantinga carries into the WCB discussion the results of the prior two volumes. A belief is warranted when it is the product of a belief-producing mechanism that is (a)functioning properly (b) truth-aimed, and (c) functioning in the epistemic environment for which it was designed to acquire truth.

This account seems to do the best job of making sense of those sorts of basic beliefs that all of us hold without having inferred them from other beliefs. I remember that it rained yesterday. What is my evidence that this memory is reliable? From what more basic and certainly known belief may I infer this? Nothing, really. Indeed, it is logically possible that I was brought into existence by a malevolent cartesian deceiver only five seconds ago, equipped with merely *apparent* memories of yesterday's rain, a particularly happy childhood, and even of having actually typed the beginning of this review (this, too, came into existence partially finished and entrusted to me to complete it). Of course, if I am the victim of such a ploy, then my memory belief is *not* the result of a properly functioning, belief-producing mechanism, and I am not warranted.

But I take it that I am warranted in remembering yesterday's rain. In fact, I am not at all on thin ice in saying that I *know* that it rained yesterday. Assuming that (a) it really did rain and (b) my recalling it now is due to the fact that I saw it (or was told about it by my truthful wife, or some other reliable way of knowing) then my memory belief is indeed warranted and counts as knowledge.

Suppose that God *does* exist just as believers maintain and that, further, God's presence is experienced in some immediate way. Calvin spoke of a *sensus divinitatus*--a sense of the divine--that was a part of the original cognitive equipment of all humans (and which was damaged when we were collectively dropped on our heads in the Fall). Suppose that faith amounts to a sort of restoration of this faculty. I take in the summer night sky in the South Dakota Badlands and this occasions spontaneous thoughts about God's creative activity. Or I commit some shameful deed and am impressed with the thought that God disapproves of what I am doing. Are such beliefs warranted? According to Plantinga, they are warranted in precisely the way that my memory belief is warranted **IF** they are true.

Beyond the notion of the *sensus divinitatus,* biblical Christians believe that the Holy Spirit bears a kind of internal witness, engendering love for God and bearing witness to the Scriptures that they are true.

A critic may challenge all such beliefs by alleging that (a) they are held in the absence of anything that looks like evidence and (b) they are readily explained away on some social science explanation. The Freudian explanation of religious belief, for instance, is that it is natural but it is the result of a belief-producing mechanism that is not truth-aimed: wish-fulfillment. But the critic is in a position to know this *only* if he already knows either that God does not exist (which would certainly get in the way of his doing things like creating, disapproving, or bearing witness) or, at least, that God is not, in fact, making his presence known in these immediate ways.

In short, the de jure objection that the belief is not warranted cannot be offered apart from the de facto objection that the belief is false. Such criticisms thus beg the question against the believer.

In the film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character, Ray, built a baseball diamond in his cornfield, and ballplayers from the past, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, emerged out of the corn to play. Ray, his wife and their daughter could not only see the players, but carried on conversations with them. Ray's brother-in-law saw nothing and, further, was convinced that Ray and his family had either gone crazy or were pulling some sort of hoax.

Suppose, with the plot, that the ballplayers *really were* there, and Ray believed that they were because he perceived them directly, say, through some additional and extraordinary faculty. Given the story and Plantinga's account, Ray is warranted in believing that he is talking to ballplayers. Indeed, he knows that he is. Can he *prove* to his brother-in-law, on the basis of whatever evidence is available to his brotherf-in-law's ordinary faculties? No. But how does this affect the question of whether his belief is warranted? Can I *prove* my memory belief to be true on the basis of some other faculty, such as perception or reason? Maybe not. But must I be able to do so in order to be warranted? Of course not.

Why, then, should anyone suppose that Christian believers are warranted in their beliefs only if they are able to infer those beliefs from evidence that is available to ordinary faculties?

Plantinga argues along such lines that Christian belief is warranted. Along the way, he takes up discussions of potential challenges to his account. The book opens with a discussion of a view that is prevalent at many divinity schools: that Kant established once and for all that human language cannot refer to God. Gordon Kaufmann offers a rehashed version of this, followed by a rehashed version of his rehashed version. Plantinga's interaction with Kaufmann's work is sheer delight. So is his discussion of John Hick's view of Religious Pluralism, which, as Keith Yandell once quipped, is "in danger of becoming canonical" in religious studies departments.

The book concludes with several potential "defeaters" to Plantinga's model for warranted Christian belief. Some argue that the sheer fact of religious diversity strikes a blow. Others press various arguments from evil. Plantinga's discussion of Paul Draper's version is a gem (as is Draper's version itself, to be honest).

He also takes on a version of the Great Pumpkin Objection, calling it "Son of Great Pumpkin." The basic GPO is what may well have occurred to you as you reflected on Plantinga's model: *anyone* from *any* perspective can claim that her beliefs are warranted. Even Linus could claim that his belief in the Great Pumpkin is properly basic and warranted without appeal to evidence. You'll have to read Plantinga for yourself to decide whether this objection sticks.

This is a rewarding read, very much worth the effort of 500+ pages. It is also highly entertaining, as Plantinga is a sprightly writer--even when in the midst of the most rigorous argument.

I've only recently completed a careful reading of WCB and, as you can probably tell, am still in a sort of "honeymoon period" with the book. Plantinga has persuaded me--a former dyed-in-the-wool evidentialist--that his account of warrant is the correct one. If I think of any telling objections you'll be the first to know.

Editorial Review:

This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, thus, insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true.