Anthropology Religion

The church is sadly still confused about what it means to be a man or a woman. While secular society talks about sexuality in terms of liberation, many in the church define manhood and womanhood in terms of reductive roles that rob us of the dignity of personhood, created in the image of God. In her poetic, theologically contemplative style, Aimee Byrd invites you to enter the rich treasure trove of the Song of Songs as its lyrics reveal how our very bodies are visible signs that tell us something about our God.

A series of discourses concerning Man. I shall have to make this first one more or less abstract and theoretical, dealing with first principles, with what on the one hand may strike you as commonplace and unimportant; on the other hand, with those things that may seem to you so theoretical and far away as to be, if not difficult of comprehension, still hardly able to thrill you with any feeling of interest. And yet work like this always has to be done. Before a train of cars, lighted, decorated, fragrant with flowers, full of a happy company, with laughter and song, can rush in its speed ...

Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim-displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the 'hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S., as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities.

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.

But, really, who are you? Are you ready to let that question shake you to your core - as you peel away layers of false identity built on shifting and ephemeral factors and learn to embrace your true self found in Jesus Christ alone? No job, no family relationship, no personality type, nationality, or accomplishment can offer you what Christ does: an abiding identity of righteousness in him.

The gospel message transcends cultures, but human communication does not. In Transforming Communication missionary and professor Vee J. D-Davidson provides principles for the intercultural communication of Christ. Using her twenty-five-plus years of experience teaching as a Westerner in Asia as a starting point, Davidson provides transferable principles that encourage awareness of context-specific issues and that see opportunities for intercultural communication as wholly unique opportunities, regardless of any perceived communication barriers.

Anthropologists have invariably engaged in their discipline as a form of redemption, whether to escape from social restriction, nourish their souls, reform their home polities, or vindicate "the natives". Redeeming Anthropology explores how in pursuit of a secular science sired by the Enlightenment, adherents to a "faith in mankind" have vacillated between rejecting and embracing theology, albeit in concealed and contradictory ways.

What can zombies teach us about the gospel? The hit show The Walking Dead is set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by mindless zombies. The characters have one goal: survive at all costs. At first glance there doesn't seem to be much the show can teach us about God or ourselves. Or is there? Author and speaker Danielle Strickland didn't expect to be drawn to a show about zombies, but she was surprised by the spiritual themes the show considers.

私たちはどこにいるのか。そして、どう生きるべきか――。

Does your body really matter? You are flesh and blood. It’s easy to forget this, living as if your mind and soul were all that mattered. But ignoring your body leads to an incomplete, ineffective life. God created us from the dust, and being physical beings in a physical world affects everything from our use of technology to our sexuality and our worship. In this provocative audio book, Matthew Lee Anderson explores how our bodies interact with our faith.

C S Lewis's philosophical defence of Natural Law (absolute morality) - without which human beings are reduced to less than fully human, and are, thus ‘abolished'. CS Lewis argues that objective value actually exists and that to believe otherwise is to create nonsense. Human beings appreciate values such as beauty and goodness because such things are part of reality - but if absolute morality is denied there will not be any progress for mankind as the things that matter most will be explained away.

In this powerful classic, the eminent Swiss philosopher Max Picard argues that though the “flight from God” is not a phenomenon unique to this age, man has nevertheless put himself and society in an extremely dangerous situation with the progressive secularization of Western culture. In the age of faith, Picard says, a man had to make a conscious decision to separate himself from the world of faith. Today, the world, not just the individual, is in flight, and men must extricate themselves from modernity and make a deliberate decision to find and affirm faith.

What is consciousness? Is the mind a machine? What makes us persons? How can we find the path to human maturity? These are among the fundamental questions that Rowan Williams helps us to think about in this deeply engaging exploration of what it means to be human.

THE current creed of Christendom is a chaos of contradictions. Truths and lies, facts and fancies, intuitions and superstitions, essentials and excrescences are bound in one bundle of tradition which the honest believer finds hard to swallow whole, and which the earnest doubter is equally reluctant in toto to reject. It is high time to attack this chaos, to resolve it into its elements, and to reorganize our faith into a form which shall at the same time command the assent of honest and the devotion of earnest men. This work cannot be done roughly with the broad-axe. The problem is not ...

While millions of believers around the world are finding their understanding of Christianity to be outdated and untenable, Matthew Distefano has managed to paint the gospel in such a way that even an atheist could appreciate its beauty. Rather than a message of rapture, or rewards and reprisals, Distefano presents the good news of what God has done in history to stem the tide of our own violence and evil - inviting us into a whole new way of living and being in this world.

Based on two years of fieldwork and interviews with 71 Midwestern Americans, the Waskuls' book is a reflexive ethnography that examines how people experience ghosts and hauntings in everyday life. The authors explore how uncanny happenings become ghosts and the reasons people struggle with or against a will to believe. They present the variety and character of hauntings and ghostly encounters, outcomes of people telling haunted legends, and the nested consequences of ghostly experiences.

Prof. Dr. Josef Pieper (1904-1997), katholischer Philosoph und Professor für philosophische Anthropologie, berichtet in der SWR-Reihe "Gedanken zur Lebensführung" über seine Kindheit, Jugend und Studienzeit, seine Heimat sowie seine Arbeiten, die Christenfibel, Begegnungen und schließlich über seine Familie. Pieper gehört zu den international meist gelesenen Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Schwerpunkt seines Denkens ist die Überwindung kultureller Formen des säkularen Totalitarismus und seiner philosophischen Grundlagen durch eine erfahrungs- und handlungsbezogene Rehabilitierung des christlichen Menschenbildes.

There are some persons who suppose that the freedom of the will is denied whenever God’s grace is maintained, and who on their side defend their liberty of will so peremptorily as to deny the grace of God. This grace, as they assert, is bestowed according to our own merits. It is in consequence of their opinions that I wrote the book entitled On Grace and Free Will. This work I addressed to the monks of Adrumetum, in whose monastery first arose the controversy on that subject, and that in such a manner that some of them were obliged to consult me thereon.

Ritual is perhaps the oldest, and certainly the most enigmatic, thread in human culture. Seemingly pointless ceremonies pervade every known society: from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades, birthdays to graduations. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery until now. Today, a fearless new generation of anthropologists is venturing into this shadowy realm.

Mercy might seem insignificant - until the moment you’re the one in need of it. Although it’s a small word, it yields big impact. Yet, too often, it is misunderstood. Author Linda Oberbrunner learned the power of mercy firsthand. Born in the Midwest back in the 1950s, she found herself caught up in economic, racial, social, and political tension.