Search Results for: papers/490937
Disjunction (or)
Faith and Doubt
What if the most important word is the one in the middle? We often think of doubt as the opposite of faith, but could it actually strengthen our relationship with God? According to John Ortberg, best-selling author and pastor, the very nature of faith requires the presence of uncertainty. In this refreshingly candid look at a life of faith, he traces the line between belief and unbelief: less a dividing line between hostile camps than a razor’s edge that runs through every soul. His findings point us toward the relief of being totally honest. Questions can expand our understanding, uncertainty can lead to trust, and honest faith can produce outrageous hope. Written from Ortberg’s own struggle with faith and doubt, this book will challenge, comfort, and inspire you with the truth that God wants all of us — including our doubts.
ID Arts
Brian Miller on Family
Today, with hectic, work-centered lives, busy social calendars, and precious little free time, people feel obligated yet resentful while gathering with kin during the holidays. Granted, a nice seder or Christmas dinner isn’t in itself so unpleasant. If one could just arrive, shovel down the food as quickly as possible, then bolt for the door, such occasions would be tolerable. The problem is that for all denominations these feasts have been institutionalized in American culture; they’re compulsory, a sign of good citizenship and family values. This enforced proximity with blood relations naturally builds to a breaking point. There’s only so much you can hear about your batty aunt’s goiter. There are only so many times you can coo over the new baby or suffer small children poking action figures into your eyes. And don’t let’s start with your mother about when you’re finally going to get married! As breakfast drags on to brunch drags on to dinner, surrounded by family members, there’s this mounting revulsion that you share their same receding hairlines, their same tendency toward cellulite, their same horsy, nasal laughs, their very same DNA. That’s usually the trigger that sets you fleeing in fear and disgust.
Martha Gelhorn on Making a Difference
All my reporting life I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don’t need to worry about that. My responsibility was the effort. I belong to a global fellowship, men and women, concerned with the welfare of the planet, and its least protected inhabitants. I plan to spend the rest of my years applauding that fellowship and cheering from the sidelines. Good for you. … Never give up.
Christiane Amanpour on Bearing Witness to Horror
I have spent the past decade in just about every conceivable war zone. I have made my living bearing witness to the most horrific events of the end of the 20th century. Because CNN is seen all over the world, I’ve become globally identified as a harbinger of war and disaster. Wherever I go, people say jokingly — or maybe not so jokingly — that they shudder when they see me: “Oh, my God. Amanpour is coming. Is something bad going to happen to us?” U.S. soldiers, with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance, joke that they track my movements to predict where they will be deployed. And I have calculated that I have spent more time at the front than most normal military units. … And then there’s the nightmare of what we see: in Rwanda, piles of bodies being lifted by bulldozers after a genocide and dumped into mass graves — and the toughest of soldiers, supervising this, in tears. In Bosnia, little children being shot in the head. In Somalia and Ethiopia, the walking skeletons heralding those terrible famines. I remember once doing a live shot from a so-called famine camp in Somalia, in which I showed a man, told his story, and explained how ill he was. I suddenly realized that he was dying at that very moment. And I didn’t know what to do — I didn’t know how to move the camera away, how not to sully what was happening in real life. These images and these sounds will never leave me.
Time And The Metaphysics Of Relativity
The larger project of which this volume forms part is an attempt to craft a coherent doctrine of divine eternity and God’s relationship to time. Central to this project is the integration of the concerns of theology with the concept of time in relativity theory. Unfortunately, theologians and philosophers of religion do not in general understand Einstein’s theories, whereas physicists and philosophers of science, under the influence of verificationism, have largely focused philosophical reflection on spatiotemporal concepts given by physics. There is thus a paucity of integrative literature dealing with God and relativity theory. The collapse of positivism and the rejuvenation of metaphysics have led to a renewed scrutiny of the metaphysical foundations of relativity theory and the concept(s) time found therein. This volume provides an accessible and philosophically informed examination of the concept of time in relativity, the ultimate aim being the achievement of a tenable theological synthesis. ~ Product Description
Richard John Neuhaus on Multiculturalism and Ecumaniacs
Admittedly, it is not so attractive when the apparent modesty disguises a self-denigration that is almost tantamount to self-hatred, as is sometimes evident in current forms of “multiculturalism.” Among Christians committed to ecumenism there is a type that is aptly described as an ecumaniac. An ecumaniac is defined as someone who loves every church but his own. So it is that multiculturalists are forever discovering superiorities in other cultures, oblivious to the fact that, in the larger human story, Western culture is singular in its eagerness to praise and learn from other cultures. One is never more distinctively Western than when criticizing what is distinctively Western. The same holds for being American. In our multiculturalism we display our superiority by demonstrating our ability to see through what others — mistakenly, we say — admire in our culture. So maybe this new and self-denigrating way of telling the American story is not so modest after all.
Hume’s Abject Failure
This vital study offers a new interpretation of Hume’s famous “Of Miracles,” which notoriously argues against the possibility of miracles. By situating Hume’s popular argument in the context of the eighteenth-century debate on miracles, Earman shows Hume’s argument to be largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original. Yet Earman constructively conceives how progress can be made on the issues that Hume’s essay so provocatively posed about the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of marvelous and miraculous events.