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Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life," but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief? On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art. This book will enable you to walk into a museum and talk about the spirituality that is or is not visible in the art you see.
A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age. Fifty-five years have passed since the cover of Time magazine proclaimed the death of God and while participation in mainstream religion has indeed plummeted, Americans have never been more spiritually busy. While rejecting traditional worship in unprecedented numbers, today's Americans are embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures -- from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right.As the Internet makes it ever-easier to find new "tribes," and consumer capitalism forever threatens to turn spirituality into a lifestyle brand, remarkably modern American religious culture is undergoing a revival comparable with the Great Awakenings of centuries past. Faith is experiencing not a decline but a Renaissance. Disillusioned with organized religion and political establishments alike, more and more Americans are seeking out spiritual paths driven by intuition, not institutions. In Strange Rites, religious scholar and commentator Tara Isabella Burton visits with the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; Satanists and polyamorous communities, witches from Bushwick, wellness junkies and social justice activists and devotees of Jordan Peterson, proving Americans are not abandoning religion but remixing it. In search of the deep and the real, they are finding meaning, purpose, ritual, and communities in ever-newer, ever-stranger ways.
"A fresh and rigorously researched take on Christianity's founding."--Publishers Weekly The first Christians were weird. Just how weird is often lost on today's believers. Within Roman society, the earliest Christians stood out for the oddness of their beliefs and practices. They believed unusual things, worshiped God in strange ways, and lived a unique lifestyle. They practiced a whole new way of thinking about and doing religion that would have been seen as bizarre and dangerous when compared to Roman religion and most other religions of the ancient world. Award-winning author, blogger, speaker, and New Testament teacher Nijay Gupta traces the emerging Christian faith in its Roman context in this accessible and engaging book. Christianity would have been seen as radical in the Roman world, but some found this new religion attractive and compelling. The first Christians dared to be different, pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable, transformed how people thought about religion, and started a movement that grew like wildfire. Brought to life with numerous images, this book shows how the example of the earliest Christians can offer today's believers encouragement and hope.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Relationship Goals . . . Will you be remembered as a person who claimed to follow God but liked to play it safe? Or as a person who lived your life out on the limb and trusted God enough to live in crazy faith? Noah looked crazy when he started building the ark . . . until it started raining. It was crazy for Moses to lead a nation of people into the desert away from Egypt . . . until the Red Sea parted. It was crazy to believe that a fourteen-year-old virgin would give birth to the Son of God . . . until Mary held Jesus in her arms. There are many things that seem normal or average today that at one point in time seemed absolutely crazy. Smartphones, Wi-Fi, and even the electric light bulb were all groundbreaking, history-making inventions that started out as crazy ideas. Our see-it-to-believe-it generation tends to have a hard time exercising true faith—one that steps out, takes action, and sees mountain-moving results. Many of us would rather play it safe and stand on the sidelines, but it’s crazy faith that helps us see God move and reveals His promises. In Crazy Faith, Pastor Michael Todd shows us how to step out in faith and dive into the purposeful life of trusting God for the impossible. Even if you have to start with baby faith or maybe faith, you can become empowered to let go of your lazy faith, trust God through your hazy faith, and learn to live a lifestyle of crazy faith. With powerful stories of modern-day faith warriors who take their cues from biblical heroes, Michael Todd equips you to • believe for the impossible • choose hope over fear • be alert to the voice of God • cope with loss and doubt • develop a deeper level of trust in God • speak faith-filled declarations • inspire crazy faith in others God’s not looking for somebody to give Him all the reasons why His plans can’t happen. He’s looking for somebody to believe they will happen. In fact, He has so much He wants to do through you. The question is, Are you crazy enough to believe it?
In the summer of 2002, Timothy K. Beal loaded his family into a twenty-nine-foot-long motor home and hit the rural highways of America in search of roadside religious attractions-sites like the World's Largest Ten Commandments and Precious Moments Chapel. Roadside Religion tells of his attempts to understand the meaning of these places as expressions of religious imagination and experience, and to encounter faith in all its awesome absurdity.
William Miller was the founder of the modern American millennial tradition. Using various dates found in scripture, he sought to calculate the chronology of Christ's return to earth. Although his prediction that Christ would visibly return in 1843 failed spectacularly, followers reinterpreted his message and laid the basis for the modern Seventh-day Adventist Church. In this book, David L. Rowe utilizes the vast collection of Miller primary materials to reconstruct Miller's life. He relies on information found in correspondence. Rowe gives special attention to the Miller family connections and to Miller's personal identity struggles, documenting a deep tension between proclivities for both obedience and rebellion.
How to talk about Jesus in a way that connects with modern culture. As followers of Jesus, we know that the good news is deeply attractive. But we often fear that to those on the outside, it comes across as irrelevant or even repellent. Sometimes the Christian worldview feels so out of step with everything else going on that we don't know how to share our faith. However, author Daniel Strange wants to show you that the connections are there—in fact, the longings that our culture cannot help but express are the very ones that Jesus fulfils. Building on the work of theologian J.H. Bavinck, Dan reveals five recurring themes that our culture can’t stop talking about, or, as he puts it, the "five permanent ‘itches’ that in our work, rest, and play, we have to vigorously scratch." From TV to books to social media, these are the questions we can't stop asking and the tensions we can't stop wrestling with—and Jesus speaks powerfully into each one. This book will help you to spot these connections in our culture, excite you about how Jesus makes sense of humankind’s deepest questions and longings, apply them to your own life first and then equip you to speak of him to others in a way that is truly magnetic. "Dan Strange has written another terrific, down-to-earth book to help believers engage in fruitful conversations with friends about faith." Dr. Timothy Keller, who has also written the foreword to this book.
In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush and Mike Pence—Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.
The archbishop of Philadelphia presents a hopeful treatise for Catholics on how to live the faith with confidence in today's post-Christian culture while evaluating the reasons behind declining Catholic numbers.
God Bless America lifts the veil on strange and unusual religious beliefs and practices in the modern-day United States. Do Satanists really sacrifice babies? Do exorcisms involve swearing and spinning heads? Are the Amish allowed to drive cars and use computers? Taking a close look at snake handling, new age spirituality, Santeria spells, and satanic rituals, this book offers more than mere armchair research, taking you to an exorcism and a polygamist compound—and allowing you to sit among the beards and bonnets in a Mennonite church and to hear L. Ron Hubbard's stories told as sermons during a Scientology service. From the Amish to Voodoo, the beliefs and practices explored in this book may be unorthodox—and often dangerous—but they are always fascinating. While some of them are dying out, and others are gaining popularity with a modern audience, all offer insight into the future of religion in the United States—and remind that fact is often stranger than fiction.