Sociology Religion

Freshly translated from the original German into todays English, this book contains a treasury of devotionals taken from Luthers writings and sermons (1513 to 1546), conveniently divided into daily readings to point readers to the Bible and a deeper understanding of faith.

For thousands of years, religion has woven its way through societies and people as if it were part and parcel to that society or person. In large measure it was left unexplained and unchallenged, it simply existed. Those who attempted to challenge and expose religion were often persecuted, excommunicated, shunned, or even executed. It could be fatal to explain that which the church, priest, or imam said was unexplainable. Before the germ, viral, and parasite theory of disease, physicians had no tools to understand disease and its propagation.

In his most ambitious work yet, Shermer sets out to discover what drives humans' belief in life after death, focusing on recent scientific attempts to achieve immortality by radical life extentionists, extropians, transhumanists, cryonicists, and mind uploaders, along with utopians who have attempted to create heaven on earth.

In this groundbreaking book, New York Times best-selling author and Hollywood producer DeVon Franklin dishes the real truth about men by making the compelling case that men aren’t dogs, but all men share the same struggle. He uses the metaphor of a dog that needs training as a way to explore why behavior persists in men that can lead them to act against their vows, their integrity, and even their character.

What exactly are the weird and the eerie? In this new essay, Mark Fisher argues that some of the most haunting and anomalous fiction of the 20th century belongs to these two modes. The weird and the eerie are closely related but distinct modes, each possessing its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with horror, yet this emphasis overlooks the aching fascination that such texts can exercise. The weird and the eerie both fundamentally concern the outside and the unknown, which are not intrinsically horrifying, even if they are always unsettling.

A survey of the various ways--often unrecognized and overlooked--whereby Christianity has impacted the world, making the world a better place and enriching our everyday living.

In his reflections on God, Jesus, suffering, and liberation, James H. Cone relates the gospel message to the experience of the Black community. But a wider theme of the book is the role that social and historical context plays in framing the questions we address to God as well as the mode of the answers provided.

Stanley Grenz charts the postmodern landscape. He shows the threads that link art and architecture, philosophy and fiction, literary theory, and television. He shows how the postmodern phenomenon has actually been in the making for a century and then introduces readers to the gurus of the postmodern mind-set. What he offers here is truly an indispensable guide for understanding today's culture.

Do you want the greatest political and societal challenges of the day to be addressed with thoughtful, reality-based solutions rather than with cherry-picked quotations from scripture? Do you want to shrink religion - especially fundamentalist religion - to the point that it plays no noticeable role in public life? Do you want right-wing religious leaders to be so unpopular that politicians avoid them rather than pander to them for endorsements? This book illustrates specific, actionable steps for facilitating fundamentalist religion's decline.

The idea that religion has undergone a radical change since the Christian Reformation—from totalitarian and socially repressive to private and relatively benign—is a familiar part of the story of secularization. It is often invoked to explain and justify the liberal politics and world view of modernity. And it leads to the view that "politicized religions" threaten both reason and liberty. Asad's essays explore and question all these assumptions.

Thomas G. Long, one of America's most trusted and thoughtful pulpit voices, provides a much needed theological and cultural critique of today's Christian funeral. Long begins by describing how the Christian funeral developed historically, theologically, and liturgically and then discusses recent cultural trends in funeral practices, including the rise in number of cremations and memorial services.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.

Over 90 percent of couples experience some level of tension around money. In fact, money issues are the number one stressor in relationships. So many books try to fix the surface problems, such as how to budget and what to prioritize when it comes to finances, but the issues go much deeper than just a simple spreadsheet. How do men and women view money differently? What do most couples fight about? How can they get on the same page?

In 2012, 38-year-old Ian Thorson's search for spiritual transcendence ended in tragedy on a remote Arizona mountaintop. His wife, a woman anointed as a goddess by an eccentric Buddhist community, held him in her arms as he slowly died from dehydration and dysentery. For Scott Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, Thorson's death was just the most recent iteration of an unspoken epidemic that connected intensive meditation and mental instability.

In this accessible and engaging book, Ralph Wood shows us that J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece is a deeply Christian work because it does not blink back the horrors of our terrible times but confronts them with startling honesty.

In this book, Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the 19th century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile.

In this groundbreaking new book, acclaimed researcher and author George Barna identifies, describes, and analyzes seven major "faith tribes" in America - documenting who they are, what they believe, how they vote, and what they are passionate about. Barna provides helpful insight into how these groups influence our economy, politics, and values - and what their potential is to change America.

Past and present civilizations failed and fail for many reasons, but the number-one predictor of a civilization’s survival is its sense of religion—or lack thereof. So argues David Goldman in How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too). The strength of a civilization’s religion affects its purpose, its fertility rate, and ultimately, its fate, says Goldman—who then argues that, contrary to popular belief, Islamic countries are in the last throes of death while Christian America is in a position to flourish.

In March 1997, 39 people in Rancho Santa Fe, California, ritually terminated their lives. To outsiders, it was a mass suicide. To insiders, it was a graduation. Benjamin Zeller not only explores the question of why the members of Heaven's Gate committed ritual suicides, but interrogates the origin and evolution of the religion, its appeal, and its practices. By tracking the development of the history, social structure, and worldview of Heaven's Gate, Zeller shows that the movement was both a reflection and a microcosm of larger American culture.

While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches, where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be. #ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing.