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International news accounts describe mind-blowing horrors of child prostitution, state-sponsored religious persecution, racial violence, torture and genocide. What can we possibly do in response? Can ordinary Christians make a difference? And where is the God of justice? The good news about injustice is that God is against it. Gary Haugen explains that God is in the business of using the unlikely to accomplish justice and mercy. This book offers stories of courageous Christians who have stood up for justice and also calls the body of Christ to action. Haugen provides concrete guidance on how Christians can rise up to seek justice throughout the world.
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In its own words: Because it’s time we untangle the narrative of faith from the fundamentalists, pious self-helpers and religio-profiteers. And let’s do it with holy mischief rather than ideological firepower. We’ll explore the point at which word, action and image intersect, and then ignite. So let’s blaspheme the gods of super-powerdom, instigate spiritual action campaigns and revamp that old Picture Bible. We’ve set up camp in the outback of the spiritual commons. A bustling spot for the over-churched, out-churched, un-churched and maybe even the un-churchable. A location just beyond boring bitterness. A place for wannabe contemplatives, front-line world-changers and restless cranks. A place where the moon shines quiet, instinct runs mythic and belief rides a bike (or at least sits on the couch entertaining the possibility).
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In its own words:
"While run-on sentences, comma splices, split infinitives, and other
such grammatical minutiae may rarely make appearances in the best of
our nation’s dailies and weeklies, and a small but growing class of
press watchdogs help to correct errors of fact (pointing out bias,
factual omissions, and distortions), a more perilous corruption lurks
under the clean surface of the printed page: specious reasoning." ... "Our contemporary political discourse is, to put it
bluntly, a mess. As a population we simply are not trained in the basic
logical, rhetorical, and analytic tools necessary to navigate the swamp
of contemporary politics." ... "Logical analysis should be a first line of defense
against the hijacking of our political discourse by cynical
manipulators. Even without knowing the truth of the premises of an
argument, one can determine whether or not the conclusion is justified
by these premises. Sadly, as we will have ample opportunity to show in
detail, many editorialists cannot even pass such a basic and
fundamental test. This transforms their editorials from opinions that
are worth taking seriously into mere nonsense and empty assertions. As we say, we are speaking 'validity to power' — not truth as the phrase usually runs, but validity."
Man's Unconquerable Mind (Columbia University Press: 1954).
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There are many naïve people all over the world – some of them scientists – who believe that all problems, sooner or later, will be solved by Science. The word Science itself has become a vague reassuring noise, with a very ill defined meaning and a powerful emotional charge: It is now applied to all sorts of unsuitable subjects and used as a cover for careless and incomplete thinking in dozens of fields. But even taking Science at the most sensible of its definitions, we must acknowledge that it is as unperfect as all other activities of the human mind.
The Existence of God, 2nd Edition (Clarendon Press: 2004), p. 134.
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From time to time various writers have told us that we cannot reach any conclusions about the origin or development of the universe, since it is (whether by logic or just in fact) a unique object, the only one of its kind, and rational inquiry can only reach the conclusions about objects which belong to kinds, e.g. it can reach a conclusion about what will happen to this bit of iron, because there are other bits of iron, the behaviour of which can be studied. This objection of course has the surprising, and to most of these writers unwelcome, consequence, that physical cosmology cannot reach justified conclusions about such matters as the size, age, rate of expansion, and density of the universe as a whole (because it is a unique object); and also that physical anthropology cannot reach conclusions about the origin and development of the human race (because, as far as our knowledge goes, it is the only one of its kind). The implausibility of these consequences leads us to doubt the original objection, which is indeed misguided.
R. Scott Smith (Ashgate Publishing, Limited: March 2003), 230 pages.
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We live in a time of moral confusion: many believe there are no overarching moral norms and that we have lost an accepted body of moral knowledge. Alasdair MacIntyre addresses this problem in his restatement of Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics; Stanley Hauerwas does so through his highly influential work in Christian ethics. Both recast virtue ethics in light of their interpretations of the later Wittgenstein's views of language. This book systematically assesses the underlying presuppositions of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, finding that their attempts to secure moral knowledge and restate virtue ethics, both philosophical and theological, fail. Scott Smith proposes alternative indications as to how we can secure moral knowledge, and how we should proceed in virtue ethics. ~ Product Description
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If God is a person, it follows that our relations with God are personal relations. ... God is not a Thing. Nor is he an Idea. If we were Platonists, we might believe that there was some technique whereby we could emancipate ourselves from the shackles of our earthly existence and put ourselves on a level with the Forms. But God, being a living spirit, has a different sort of existence from the dead timelessness of the Forms. Knowledge of him is not like knowledge of mathematical truths, which any man can set himself to come to know, but like knowledge of persons, and is essentially an interchange between two parties, requiring not only our wish to know, but his willingness to be known.