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"An illuminating and powerful reading of three of the most important contemporary professedly antireligious thinkers... stinging critiques of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche."-C. Stephen Evans, Society of Christian Philosophers
Postmodern Apologetics provides an introduction to contemporary French thinkers who argue for the coherence and viability of Christian faith and religious experience with phenomenological and hermeneutical tools. It treats both French philosophers and appropriations of their thought in the North American context.
This book revisits Paul Ricoeur's classification of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the “masters of suspicion”, and provides a thought-provoking critique for critical religious studies scholars, as well as anyone working in critical theory more broadly. Whereas Ricoeur saw suspicion as a mode of interpretation, Andrew Dole argues that the method common to his “masters” is better understood as a mode of explanation. Dole replaces Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion with suspicious explanation, which claims the existence of hidden phenomena that are bad in some recognizable way. Each of the masters, Dole argues, offered a distinct kind of suspicious explanation. Reconstructing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in this way brings their work into conversation with conspiracy theories, which are themselves a type of suspicious explanation. Dole argues that conspiracy theories and other types of suspicious explanation are “cognitively ensnaring”, to borrow a term from Pascal Boyer. If they are true they are importantly true, but their truth or falsity can be very difficult to ascertain.
"This is a book about things that matter. Things like life, death, relationships, sex, suffering, meaning. A book about how the whole picture of your life looks from the perspective of the God who created it." --Back cover.
Will a young mother's disappearance bring a bayou town together, or tear it apart?
The author maintains that suspciion can open up sapces for dialogue in apologetical encounter since both suspicion and biblical faith are concerned (in principle at least) with ruthfulness. She argues that suspicion is a 'scalpel' to faith because it can carry challenge and discomfort as well as insight and healing.
This book is a memoir of my journey in faith. That journey began in the home of my childhood, but the chapters cover experiences extending from some of my earliest memories until just a few years ago. I had already begun reflecting on these experiences, theologically, as the later ones were occurring, but it was not until a friend invited me to speak to his congregation that I connected them. "You're not what most of our people think of when they hear the word Baptist," the priest of a local Episcopal church said. "Come talk to us about how you got where you are from where you started." It was a fascinating challenge. As I sat down to prepare a one-hour Sunday school lesson for Episcopalian adults, I realized I had a story to tell. My suspicion is that this story, regardless of how eloquently I have or have not told it, will resonate with many people. Too frequently I hear people speak of their "bad experiences" with the church, experiences often occurring in the formative years of childhood or adolescence. Sadly, too many of these folks leave organized religion, if not turn their backs altogether on a God they suspect has turned a blind eye or a judgmental whim against them. I have managed to stay within the realm of organized religion. In fact, it is my life. I have not felt the need to abandon or reject God. In fact, God has become more important, more real, more central to my story. I understand those who leave, but because I believe so strongly in the church and the value of faith in one's life, I hope my experience might be an encouragement. One can question, doubt, reject much of what we learned in our childhood, and still remain faithful. There is a "new way home." Maybe my experiences will help some of you find it. Each chapter includes a sermon I have preached over the course of the last eighteen years as co-pastor of the Park Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, with my wife, Amy Jacks Dean. I include these sermons as a testimony to the faith that has been developing and changing. I have enjoyed the privilege of being a "professional proclaimer" of Christianity, and although I did not write the sermons for this book, it should be clear in reading them that the faith which is very real to me continues to be a "work in progress." Each chapter also begins with several "Questions to Consider." Unlike many books that conclude chapters with similar reflection/study questions, I have included these questions as a prelude to each chapter. I hope they will whet your appetite and get your wheels turning in the right direction for the chapter and sermon that follow. To get the most out of these questions, you might reflect on them briefly before you read and then come back to them before starting the next chapter. There is room for you to make notes about your own experience and any deepened insight you may have gained by reading my story and relating it to your own faith experience. Finding a New Way Home is not just a book; it really is the experience of my life. I am glad to have this opportunity to share it with you. Especially if you have strayed from the path and have considered leaving it all behind, I welcome you. It's a journey worth taking, because even if you are surprised where you find yourself along the way today, you can be sure that home is where your heart is-and where God is-and there's just no place like it. Welcome to the journey. Welcome home!
A richly detailed, profoundly engrossing story of how religion has influenced American foreign relations, told through the stories of the men and women—from presidents to preachers—who have plotted the country’s course in the world. Ever since John Winthrop argued that the Puritans’ new home would be “a city upon a hill,” Americans’ role in the world has been shaped by their belief that God has something special in mind for them. But this is a story that historians have mostly ignored. Now, in the first authoritative work on the subject, Andrew Preston explores the major strains of religious fervor—liberal and conservative, pacifist and militant, internationalist and isolationist—that framed American thinking on international issues from the earliest colonial wars to the twenty-first century. He arrives at some startling conclusions, among them: Abraham Lincoln’s use of religion in the Civil War became the model for subsequent wars of humanitarian intervention; nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries made up the first NGO to advance a global human rights agenda; religious liberty was the centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt’s strategy to bring the United States into World War II. From George Washington to George W. Bush, from the Puritans to the present, from the colonial wars to the Cold War, religion has been one of America’s most powerful sources of ideas about the wider world. When, just days after 9/11, George W. Bush described America as “a prayerful nation, a nation that prays to an almighty God for protection and for peace,” or when Barack Obama spoke of balancing the “just war and the imperatives of a just peace” in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, they were echoing four hundred years of religious rhetoric. Preston traces this echo back to its source. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith is an unprecedented achievement: no one has yet attempted such a bold synthesis of American history. It is also a remarkable work of balance and fair-mindedness about one of the most fraught subjects in America.
Emma Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan was born into a nomadic indigenous community of Innu living along the St. Lawrence River in present-day Quebec. At age eleven, he was sent to France by Catholic missionaries to be educated for five years, and then brought back to help Christianize his people. Pastedechouan's youthful encounter with French Catholicism engendered in him a fatal religious ambivalence. Robbed of both his traditional religious identity and critical survival skills, he had difficulty winning the acceptance of his community upon his return. At the same time, his attempts to prove himself to his people led the Jesuits to regard him with increasing suspicion. Suspended between two worlds, Pastedechouan ultimately became estranged--with tragic results--from both his native community and his missionary mentors. An engaging narrative of cultural negotiation and religious coercion, Betrayal of Faith documents the multiple betrayals of identity and culture caused by one young man's experiences with an inflexible French Catholicism. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and non-native peoples.