After Christianity

After Christianity PDF Author: Gianni Vattimo
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231506503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
What has been the fate of Christianity since Nietzsche's famous announcement of the "death of God"? What is the possibility of religion, specifically Christianity, thriving in our postmodern era? In this provocative new book, Gianni Vattimo, leading Italian philosopher, politician, and framer of the European constitution, addresses these critical questions. When Vattimo was asked by a former teacher if he still believed in God, his reply was, "Well, I believe that I believe." This paradoxical declaration of faith serves as the foundation for a brilliant exposition on Christianity in the new millennium—an age characterized by a deep uncertainty of opinion—and a personal account of how Vattimo himself recovered his faith through Nietzsche and Heidegger. He first argues that secularization is in fact the fulfillment of the central Christian message, and prepares us for a new mode of Christianity. He then explains that Nietzsche's thesis concerns only the "moral god" and leaves room for the emergence of "new gods." Third, Vattimo claims that the postmodern condition of fragmentation, anti-Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism can be usefully understood in light of Joachim of Fiore's thesis concerning the "Spiritual Age" of history. Finally, Vattimo argues for the idea of "weak thought." Because philosophy in the postmetaphysical age can only acknowledge that "all is interpretation," that the "real" is always relative and not the hard and fast "truth" we once thought it to be, contemporary thought must recognize itself and its claims as "weak" as opposed to "strong" foundationalist claims of the metaphysical past. Vattimo concludes that these factors make it possible for religion and God to become a serious topic for philosophy again, and that philosophy should now formally engage religion.

After Christianity

After Christianity PDF Author: Gianni Vattimo
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231506503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
What has been the fate of Christianity since Nietzsche's famous announcement of the "death of God"? What is the possibility of religion, specifically Christianity, thriving in our postmodern era? In this provocative new book, Gianni Vattimo, leading Italian philosopher, politician, and framer of the European constitution, addresses these critical questions. When Vattimo was asked by a former teacher if he still believed in God, his reply was, "Well, I believe that I believe." This paradoxical declaration of faith serves as the foundation for a brilliant exposition on Christianity in the new millennium—an age characterized by a deep uncertainty of opinion—and a personal account of how Vattimo himself recovered his faith through Nietzsche and Heidegger. He first argues that secularization is in fact the fulfillment of the central Christian message, and prepares us for a new mode of Christianity. He then explains that Nietzsche's thesis concerns only the "moral god" and leaves room for the emergence of "new gods." Third, Vattimo claims that the postmodern condition of fragmentation, anti-Eurocentrism, and postcolonialism can be usefully understood in light of Joachim of Fiore's thesis concerning the "Spiritual Age" of history. Finally, Vattimo argues for the idea of "weak thought." Because philosophy in the postmetaphysical age can only acknowledge that "all is interpretation," that the "real" is always relative and not the hard and fast "truth" we once thought it to be, contemporary thought must recognize itself and its claims as "weak" as opposed to "strong" foundationalist claims of the metaphysical past. Vattimo concludes that these factors make it possible for religion and God to become a serious topic for philosophy again, and that philosophy should now formally engage religion.

Thinking Faith after Christianity

Thinking Faith after Christianity PDF Author: Martin Koci
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438478941
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Winner of the 2020 Emerging Scholar’s Theological Book Prize presented by the European Society for Catholic Theology This book examines the work of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka from the largely neglected perspective of religion. Patočka is known primarily for his work in phenomenology and ancient Greek philosophy, and also as a civil rights activist and critic of modernity. In this book, Martin Koci shows Patočka also maintained a persistent and increasing interest in Christianity. Thinking Faith after Christianity examines the theological motifs in Patočka's work and brings his thought into discussion with recent developments in phenomenology, making a case for Patočka as a forerunner to what has become known as the theological turn in continental philosophy. Koci systematically examines his thoughts on the relationship between theology and philosophy, and his perennial struggle with the idea of crisis. For Patočka, modernity, metaphysics, and Christianity were all in different kinds of crises, and Koci demonstrates how his work responded to those crises creatively, providing new insights on theology understood as the task of thinking and living transcendence in a problematic world. It perceives the un-thought element of Christianity—what Patočka identified as its greatest resource and potential—not as a weakness, but as a credible way to ponder Christian faith and the Christian mode of existence after the proclaimed death of God and the end of metaphysics.

Civilization Before and After Christianity

Civilization Before and After Christianity PDF Author: R. W. Church
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3382195860
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 77

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Book Description
Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Christianity after Christendom

Christianity after Christendom PDF Author: Martin Koci
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350322652
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
What comes after the end of Christendom? Christianity has ceased to function as the dominant force in society and yet the Christian faith continues. How are we to understand Christianity in this 'after'? Bringing into conversation seven unorthodox or 'heretical' continental philosophers, including Jan Patocka, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo and John D. Caputo, Martin Koci re-centres the debates around philosophy's so-called return to religion to address the current 'not-Christian, but not yet non-Christian' culture. In the modern context of increasing secularization and pluralization, Christianity after Christendom boldly proposes that Christians must embrace the demise of Christianity as a meta-narrative and see their faith as an existential mode of being-in-the-world. Whilst not denying the religion's history, this 'after' of Christianity emancipates the discourse from the socio-historical focus on Christendom and introduces new perspectives on Christianity as an embodied religious tradition, as a way of being, even as a faithfulness to the world. In dialogue with a broad range of philosophical movements, including deconstruction, phenomenology, hermeneutics and postmodern critiques of religion, this is a timely examination of the present and future of post-Christendom Christianity.

Christianity After Auschwitz

Christianity After Auschwitz PDF Author: Paul R. Carlson, EdD
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1453582622
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
There is an old Jewish adage that pretty much sums up Israel’s experience among the nations for the last 2,000 years. “Scratch a gentile,” the saying goes, “and you’re sure to find an anti-Semite.” That notion is given credence by the fact that the first two millennia of the Jewish-Christian encounter culminated in the systematic slaughter of six-million Jews in the heart of Christendom. But Dr. Paul R. Carlson, author of Christianity After Auschwitz, is cautiously optimistic that the dawn of this new millennium may lead to Jewish-Christian amity as the Church faces up to its past sins and seeks to work with the Synagogue against those demonic forces which threaten civilization itself. However, as Carlson illustrates, the genocidal germ that gave birth to Hitler’s criminal regime still flourishes among countless Christians, many of whom would passionately deny they harbor any anti-Semitic notions or sentiments. While the book is addressed primarily to Carlson’s fellow evangelicals, both Jews and Christians will discover that it provides the general reader with an overview of those critical issues which scholars alone have in the past wrestled with in the post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian encounter. At the outset, Carlson is quick to concede that the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, a scion of the great Chechnowa Rebbe, was certainly correct when he insisted that “Christians have never tried to penetrate the soul of the Jews. “They have read the Bible but neglected the oral tradition by which we interpret it,” he noted. “This makes a different Bible altogether. For example, says Rav Soloveitchik: “To equate Judaism with legalism the way Christian theologians are prone to do is like equating mathematics with a compilation of mathematical equations.” By the same token, old stereotypes die hard. “The Jew has been pictured as the arch-capitalist and the arch-Bolshevik and chastised for being both, whipsawed by contending forces,” says Nathan C. Belth. “The Soviet authorities [saw] Jews as a threat to the state, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who castigate[d] Soviet terror, sees Jews as libertarians who brought on socialism, after, of course, rejecting Christ.” Since time-immemorial, anti-Semites have also portrayed the Jew as the greedy, shady businessman or banker. But they conveniently forget stories such as that of Haym Salomon [1740-1785], the Jewish broker whose financial aid staved off starvation and desertion among American troops during our War for Independence. At one critical point, Robert Morris, the American financier and statesman, sent a messenger to alert Haym Salomon of the plight of the cash-strapped Colonial forces. The man brought the news to Salomon while he was attending Yom Kippur services at Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia. The congregation was shocked at the intrusion on the holiest day of the Jewish year; but Haym Salomon quietly informed the messenger: “Tell Mr. Morris our country’s appeal will not be in vain.” But that old canard about Jews and their money remains grist for the anti-Semite’s mill. By the same token, Jews have not been entirely blameless when it comes to their own stereotypes of Christians, particularly evangelicals. Nathan Perlmutter confessed as much during his tenure as national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith. “Our image of the fundamentalist and the evangelical is a kind of collage assembled out of bits and pieces from Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Erskine Caldwell . . . ,” he admitted. “Even after all this time memories of the great swarm of sex-ridden, Bible-thumping caricatures continue to exert a pervasive power.” But evangelicals would be among the first to admit that Jews have come a long way since the days of the infamous Toledot Yeshu, or Life of Jesus, which depicted the Galilean in scandalous terms. Indeed, the Israeli author Shalom Ben-Chorin is representative of those Jewish intellectuals who now believe that “it is time for Jesus to come home again.” Meanwhile, few Christians realize just how vulnerable many Jews feel in what they perceive to be “Christian America.” That perception is heightened by the 1992 American Jewish Year Book finding that “roughly 12 percent of Americans of Jewish heritage are now Christians.” “There is another way of looking at what I have called a disaster in the making,” says former US Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, author of Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America “Of the 6.8 million people who are Jews or of Jewish descent, 1.1 million say they have no religion and 1.3 million have joined another religion, adding up to 2.4 million,” Abrams observes. “This means that one-third of the people in America of Jewish ethnic origin no longer report Judaism as their current religion (Abrams italics). Such statistics illustrate why Jewish leaders unanimously condemn those Christian missionary agencies which specifically target Jews for conversion. They have been particularly incensed by one recent evangelical effort, known as Peace 2000, which aimed to convert every Jew in Israel to Christianity by the dawn of the new millennium. “Centuries of martyrdom are the price which the Jewish people has paid for survival,” says Brandeis scholar Marshall Sklare. “And the apostate, at one stroke, makes a mockery of Jewish history. “But if the convert is contemptible in Jewish eyes,” Sklare adds, “the missionary — all the more, the missionary of Jewish descent -- is seen as pernicious, for he forces the Jew to relive the history of his martyrdom, all the while pressing the claim that in approaching the Jew he does so out of love. “What kind of love is it, Jews wonder, that would deprive a man of his heritage,” Sklare asks. “Furthermore, given the history of Christian treatment of the Jews, would it not seem time at last to recognize that the Jew has paid his dues and earned the right to be protected from obliteration by Christian love as well as destruction by Christian hate?” The distinguished Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was even more pointed about the matter. “I had rather enter Auschwitz,” he once remarked, “than be an object of conversion.” All of this leads to the opening chapter of Christianity After Auschwitz, which introduces Christians to Emil Fackenheim’s “Eleventh Commandment” — or 614th Mitzvoth — which decrees that Jews are not permitted to grant Hitler any posthumous victories through intermarriage, assimilation, or conversion to a faith not their own. In a word, they are commanded to remain Jews. By the same token, Jewish scholars are quick to recognize that any “open and honest” dialogue will at some point involve a frank discussion of the similarities and differences between the Jewish and Christian perception[s] of the Messianic hope. With that understanding, the second chapter deals with the remarkable career of the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh and last Grand Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidim. Many of his talmidim, or disciples, believe he will ultimately be revealed as King-Messiah. His life and work are considered within the context of that of Jesus of Nazareth, as well as those of several pseudo-messiahs who have troubled Israel down through the centuries The author then makes it clear that Jesus himsel

Doubt After Doubt: Doubting the Christian Faith (Paperback)

Doubt After Doubt: Doubting the Christian Faith (Paperback) PDF Author: Rob Jacik
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1435719638
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Visit http: //www.doubtafterdoubt.com for more information! FOR CHRISTIANS: "Doubt after Doubt" is required reading for anyone who puts their faith into the Bible and Jesus Christ. The journey is from the perspective of a former Christian. It will take you deep into the Bible for answers to Christianity's biggest challenges, while considering views from popular Christian authors and modern scholars. FOR PAGANS: As a Pagan you will find "Doubt after Doubt" a fantastic resource for helping parents, loved ones, friends or others understand why you rejected Christian doctrine and why Paganism aligns most closely to your values and beliefs.

Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality

Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality PDF Author: Sunera Thobani
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350148113
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The current political standoffs of the 'War on Terror' illustrate that the interaction within and between the so-called Western and Middle Eastern civilizations is constantly in flux. A recurring theme however is how Islam and Muslims signify the 'Enemy' in the Western socio-cultural imagination and have become the 'Other' against which the West identifies itself. In a unique and insightful blend of critical race, feminist and post-colonial theory, Sunera Thobani examines how Islam is foundational to the formation of Western identity at critical points in its history, including the Crusades, the Reconquista and the colonial period. More specifically, she explores how masculinity and femininity are formed at such pivotal junctures and what role feminism has played in the wars against 'radical' Islam. Exposing these symbiotic relationships, Thobani explores how the return of 'religion' is reworking the racial, gender and sexual politics by which Western society defines itself, and more specifically, defines itself against Islam. Contesting Islam, Constructing Race and Sexuality unpacks conventional as well as unconventional orthodoxies to open up new spaces in how we think about sexual and racial identity in the West and the crucial role that Islam has had and continues to have in its development.

Christian Theology After the Shoah

Christian Theology After the Shoah PDF Author: James F. Moore
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761828518
Category : Holocaust (Christian theology)
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book takes up the challenge of providing a way to do Christian theology that is both sensitive to the questions arising in the Shoah and incorporates the advances of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Moore's approach also offers new thinking on the difficult texts of the Christian passion narratives as an example of the post-Shoah Christian theology. He expresses a hopeful outlook, that we are on the threshold of a new stage in theology and dialogue; a new generation of thinkers, both Jewish and Christian, are asking how we can move forward and apply the lessons learned from the events of the Shoah.

Being Christian after Christendom

Being Christian after Christendom PDF Author: David Rietveld
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666763004
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
The social landscape has radically changed over the past fifty years. Christians were once respected, sought out, and trusted. Now we are blamed, marginalized, and viewed with suspicion. In this book, David Rietveld explains what, how, and why this has happened, in a way that the average person can understand. He begins with Christendom, where both Christians and non-Christian held shared beliefs and values. He explains the church's role, and how evangelism and discipleship worked in that era. He then tracks the changes that have occurred and clarifies what and why things are now different. Insightful, broad explanations are illustrated by real-life examples, and woven together so that readers can see the patterns in the new twenty-first-century Western landscape. If you are seeking a thoughtful overview of what is going on in our world and how this relates to being a Christian in a local church, this book is a great introduction.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean World After 1492

Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean World After 1492 PDF Author: Alisa Meyuhas Ginio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135299749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The expulsion of the Jews, and later the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula marked the beginning of a new era in the life of the Mediterranean world. The articles in this volume discuss the aftermath of the crucial historical events that took place in the Mediterranean world in 1492, focusing on the social, economic and cultural consequences of these occurrences.