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Dazzling....She writes with Milton open at her elbow but with the real dirt of a real Utah under her fingertips.--The Yale Review No poet writing today confronts the perplexities of the divine with more pizzazz than Kimberly Johnson. In A Metaphorical God, Johnson showcases her gifts for mining language for its hidden gems and its gospel (my tongue is a fovent choir, / a cloven fire), using what she unearths to delve deep into mysteries both epistemological and holy.
A collection of 26 thought-provoking meditations on the name of God.
In this groundbreaking work, John Hick refutes the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. According to Hick, Jesus did not teach what was to become the orthodox understanding of him: that he was God incarnate who became human to die for the sins of the world. Further, the traditional dogma of Jesus' two natures--human and divine--cannot be explained satisfactorily, and worse, it has been used to justify great human evils. Thus, the divine incarnation, he explains, is best understood metaphorically. Nevertheless, he concludes that Christians can still understand Jesus as Lord and the one who has made God real to us. This second edition includes new chapters on the Christologies of Anglican theologian John Macquarrie and Catholic theologian Roger Haight, SJ.
The world is full of people who are very certain--in politics, in religion, in all manner of things. In addition, political, religious, and social organizations are marketing certainty as a cure all to all life's problems. But is such certainty possible? Or even good? The Certainty of Uncertainty explores the question of certainty by looking at the reasons human beings crave certainty and the religious responses we frequently fashion to help meet that need. The book takes an in-depth view of religion, language, our senses, our science, and our world to explore the inescapable uncertainties they reveal. We find that the certainty we crave does not exist. As we reflect on the unavoidable uncertainties in our world, we come to understand that letting go of certainty is not only necessary, it's beneficial. For, in embracing doubt and uncertainty, we find a more meaningful and courageous religious faith, a deeper encounter with mystery, and a way to build strong relationships across religious and philosophical lines. In The Certainty of Uncertainty, we see that embracing our belief systems with humility and uncertainty can be transformative for ourselves and for our world.
In this wide-ranging book that moves from Greek drama to modern poetry, David Brown explores the ways in which the poetry and drama of the past were rooted in religious questions. He posits that their creative potential needs to be rediscovered to bring present-day worship and experience of God alive.
". . . a liberating book about a liberating theological approach."--Christianity and Crisis"Metaphorical Theology is a brilliant piece of writing which will make an important contribution both to new thinking on he nature of religious language and also to the dialogue between Christianity and Feminist Theology."--Rosemary Radford RuetherGarrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary"The great virtue of Professor McFague's book is that it tackles [some] crucial problems in an extremely perceptive and creative way . . . .All in all it is a most timely book both for the theological and for the church at large."--Maurice WilesRegius Professor of DivinityChrist Church, Oxford University
Challenge our common images of God by blowing the lid off conventional God-descriptors. “We do not have to let go of one sense of God to take up another. Neither do we need to go about challenging old metaphors. What is crucial is to find a metaphor—or two, or six—that creatively point toward what we believe.” —from Chapter 1 Let Carolyn Jane Bohler inspire you to consider a wide range of images of God in order to refine how you imagine God to have and use power, and how God wills and makes divine will happen—or not. By tapping into your God-given ability to re-imagine God, you will have a better understanding of your own beliefs and how you, God, and the world relate to each other. Wonderfully fresh and down to earth, Bohler uses playful images, moving stories, and solid scholarship to empower you to break free of old habits and assumptions, whatever your faith tradition. She encourages you to explore new names for God that are not only more consistent with what you believe, but will also deepen and expand your experience of God. Think about... God the Choreographer of Chaos God the Nursing Mother God the Jazz Band Leader God the Divine Blacksmith God the Divine Physical Therapist God the Team Transformer ... and more
A strikingly original exploration of what it might mean to be authentically human in the age of artificial intelligence, from the author of the critically-acclaimed Interior States. • "At times personal, at times philosophical, with a bracing mixture of openness and skepticism, it speaks thoughtfully and articulately to the most crucial issues awaiting our future." —Phillip Lopate “[A] truly fantastic book.”—Ezra Klein For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking. Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.
Biblical stories are metaphorical. They may have been accepted as factual hundreds of years ago, but today they cannot be taken literally. Some students in religious schools even recoil from the "fairy tales" of religion, believing them to be mockeries of their intelligence. David Tacey argues that biblical language should not be read as history, and it was never intended as literal description. At best it is metaphorical, but he does not deny these stories have spiritual meaning. Religion as Metaphor argues that despite what tradition tells us, if we "believe" religious language, we miss religion's spiritual meaning. Tacey argues that religious language was not designed to be historical reporting, but rather to resonate in the soul and direct us toward transcendent realities. Its impact was intended to be closer to poetry than theology. The book uses specific examples to make its case: Jesus, the Virgin Birth, the Kingdom of God, the Apocalypse, Satan, and the Resurrection. Tacey shows that, with the aid of contemporary thought and depth psychology, we can re-read religious stories as metaphors of the spirit and the interior life. Moving beyond literal thinking will save religion from itself.
Throughout the Bible, divine interaction with humanity is portrayed in almost embarrassingly human terms. God sees, hears, thinks, feels, runs, rides chariots, laughs, wields weapons, gives birth, and even repents. Many of these descriptions, taken at face value, seem to run afoul of classical thought about God's qualities of divine simplicity, transcendence, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and, especially, immutability. Traditionally, such representations have been seen as accommodations to human intellectual and moral limitations. They allowed God to be more comprehensible but did not actually describe any real part of His character, being, or interaction with humanity. References to God seeing or hearing, for example, are not deemed to represent real acts, as God is all-knowing. This view is largely based on the Aristotelian conception of metaphors: they are rhetorical devices and should not be taken literally. Since the 1970s, our understanding of the ways in which metaphors convey meaning has become much more sophisticated. We are better able to unlock the function of human acts of God within the Bible. This book aims to explore the biblical metaphor of divine sight in Genesis and how current conceptions of metaphorical function can enrich our reading of the text and its theology.