Anthropology Religion

The headlines are clear: Religion is on the decline in America as many people leave behind traditional religious practices. In this follow-up to her critically acclaimed book Christianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass argues that what appears to be a decline actually signals a major transformation in how people understand God. The distant God of conventional religion has given way to a more intimate sense of the sacred with us in the world.

Rather than sharing better time-management tips to squeeze more hours out of the day, Kelly Kapic takes a different approach in You're Only Human. He offers a better way to make peace with the fact that God didn't create us to do it all.

"Biblical womanhood" is the idea that the Bible teaches God-ordained male leadership and female submission in the home and subordination in the church. Some say this hierarchy of authority is sufficiently evidenced by examples of male leadership (and lack of female leadership) in the Bible: the first human was male, Israel's official priests were male, most authors of Scripture were male, Jesus was male and chose twelve male Apostles. God is addressed as Father. Wives are commanded to submit to their husbands.

"You are your own, and you belong to yourself." This is the fundamental assumption of modern life. And if we are our own, then it's up to us to forge our own identities and to make our lives significant. But while that may sound empowering, it turns out to be a crushing responsibility - one that never actually delivers on its promise of a free and fulfilled life, but instead leaves us burned out, depressed, anxious, and alone. This phenomenon is mapped out onto the very structures of our society, and helps explain our society's underlying disorder.

How can Christian men and women live faithfully in a world confused over sexuality and gender? Surely we must be reminded of what Scripture teaches. Yet as God’s design for sexuality is being suppressed and denied in the modern world, we need to hear it articulated in a fresh and accessible way. God’s Good Design presents the historic, biblical view of sexuality in a manner that is appealing even to those who have been conditioned to believe it is scary or oppressive.

Award-winning journalist Rob Moll chronicles the fascinating ways in which our brains and bodies interact with God and spiritual realities. He reports on neuroscience findings that show how our brains actually change and adapt when engaged in spiritual practices. We live longer, healthier, happier, and more fulfilling lives when we cultivate the biological spiritual capacity that puts us in touch with God. God has created our bodies to fulfill the Great Commandment.

What would happen if you admitted you weren't a good person? It's a seemingly crazy question. From priests to prisoners, nearly everyone thinks they're morally better than average. Why change our minds? In his conversational and delightfully self-effacing style, Brant Hansen shows us why we should fight our drive to be self-righteous: it's breathtakingly freeing. What's more, just admitting that we're profoundly biased toward ourselves and want desperately to preserve our rightness at all costs even helps us improve our relationships with God and others.

If it is true that God is a male, then his divinity or deity is expressed in his masculinity. Yet, I am a woman, and there are parts of my body, such as my breasts, vagina, and womb that are telling a story about God that I have never learned or understood. This is an exploration of the significance of a womb that must shed and bleed before it can create. How will we engage our body which cyclically bleeds most of our life and can build and birth a human soul? How will we honor the living womb that lives and, sometimes, dies within us?

Today we are told to be true to ourselves, look within for answers, and follow our hearts. But when we put our own happiness first, we experience record-breaking levels of aimlessness, loneliness, depression, and anxiety. Self-centeredness always fails to deliver the fulfillment we're seeking.

In Reclaimed, author and cultural critic Andy Steiger explores the trend toward dehumanization that underlies our fraught times. People on both sides of the political aisle and from all walks of life share a deep desire for better understanding, justice, and human dignity. Yet we're uncertain how to achieve these aims. Steiger points to Jesus as the basis for rediscovering our common ground and our shared humanity.

The Cross of Christ has left a crater at the center of history, an inflection of sacrificial love toward which everything before and after this event is ordered and properly understood. That Christ is the Alpha and Omega—the logic, the meaning of creation itself, from whom the drama of salvation emanates and toward whom it moves—is a central but often neglected doctrine of Catholic Christianity.

Tracing the migrations of the Denisovans and their interbreeding with Neanderthals and early human populations in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas, Andrew Collins and Greg Little explore how the new mental capabilities of the Denisovan-Neanderthal and Denisovan-human hybrids greatly accelerated the flowering of human civilization over 40,000 years ago. They show how the Denisovans displayed sophisticated advances, including precision-machined stone tools and jewelry, tailored clothing, celestially-aligned architecture, and horse domestication.

In What God Has to Say about Our Bodies, Sam Allberry explains that all of us are fearfully and wonderfully made, and should regard our physicality as a gift. He offers biblical guidance for living, including understanding gender, sexuality, and identity; dealing with aging, illness, and death; and considering the physical future hope that we have in Christ.

As news reports of the horrific December 2004 tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God’s power or God’s nonexistence, asking over and over, How could a good and loving God - if such exists - allow such suffering? In The Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart speaks at once to those skeptical of Christian faith and to those who use their Christian faith to rationalize senseless human suffering.

600 ricette per filtri, incantesimi, scongiuri e malie. Tutte provengono da documenti originali scritti tra il XIV e il XVIII secolo. Le ricette sono suddivise in due grandi categorie: stregoneria nera (incanti, sortilegi e malefìci) e stregoneria bianca (rimedi, controfatture e prodigi benefici). Per ognuna delle ricette riportate sono indicati gli ingredienti e i metodi per eseguirle. Quando è stato possibile sono stati pure indicati il nome della strega o dello stregone.

Helping listeners walk the line between idolatry and ingratitude, this audiobook emphasizes our responsibility to glorify God by joyfully embracing his good gifts without letting them become worldly distractions that steal our affection.

Hercules, Zeus, Thor, Gilgamesh - these are the figures that leap to mind when we think of myth. But to David Leeming, myths are more than stories of deities and fantastic beings from non-Christian cultures. Myth is at once the most particular and the most universal feature of civilization, representing common concerns that each society voices in its own idiom.

私たちはどこにいるのか。そして、どう生きるべきか――。

Many bemoan the decay of culture. But we all have a responsibility to care for culture, to nurture it in ways that help people thrive. In Culture Care artist Makoto Fujimura issues a call to cultural stewardship, in which we become generative and feed our culture's soul with beauty, creativity, and generosity. We serve others as cultural custodians of the future. This is a book for artists, but artists come in many forms.

By meditating on personal examples from the author's life, as well as reflecting on the inspirational life and writings of Thomas Merton, stories from the Gospels, as well as the lives of other holy men and women (among them, Henri Nouwen, Therese of Lisieux, and Pope John XXIII), the listener will understand how becoming who you are, and becoming the person that God created, is a simple path to happiness, peace of mind and even sanctity.