Living Paradox Dying


Book Description




Understanding Death as Life’s Paradox


Book Description

This book focuses on death as life’s paradox in order to test, to put on trial, what it means for us human beings to exist. No one of us chooses to be born. Yet, having been born, we must choose to have been born, to live, to exist. To exist is to choose to exist. To choose to exist is to live with our choices. This text argues that death is the limit of life, that we can live freely and lovingly, at once justly and compassionately, solely within the limit of death. It shows that we can develop a comprehensive conception of life, and also of death, solely insofar as we learn to overcome the dualistic opposition between philosophy and theology that continues today to falsify our understanding of not only the secular, but also the sacred.




Dying to Live


Book Description

Many Christians acknowledge that they love Jesus but are disillusioned about their spiritual condition. They come to Christ to drink from the well of his new life, yet find that their thirst remains. Why has the Christian life not met their expectations for spiritual growth and how can they satisfy this craving for their Christian walk to have a deeper impact? Do you desperately yearn for a deeper relationship with God? Clive Calver —pastor, preacher and longtime church statesman —can relate. As a young preacher and fairly new Christian, he felt deeply frustrated in his efforts to experience spiritual transformation. Then it dawned on him that Jesus ' death on the cross achieved two things: how to die and how to live. Crucified love was God 's gift to us; resurrected life with Christ was his purpose for us. For far too long we have been presented with a version of the Christian faith that majors on what we get rather than on what we give. The cross has been portrayed as the place where Jesus died for us and where we receive from him but rarely as the location of our joint crucifixion with him. The uncomfortable truth is that Jesus calls us to share his cross. "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). Fortunately, we don 't have to be some kind of a "Super Christian" to allow God 's power to work through us. Calver shows how a number of ordinary believers have discovered the paradoxical fulfillment of the crucified life as they die to self and serve God and other people. By "dying to live," you too can know the joy of resurrection.




The Paradoxes of Mourning


Book Description

When it comes to healing after the death of someone loved, our culture has it all wrong. We're told to be strong when what we really need is to be vulnerable. We're told to think positive when what we really need is to wallow in the pain. And we're told to seek closure when what we really need is to welcome our natural and necessary grief. Dr. Wolfelt's new book seeks to dispel these misconceptions that we hold on to so tightly and help people everywhere mourn well so they can live fuller lives. The Paradoxes of Mourning discusses three truths that grieving people used to know and respect but in the last century, seem to have forgotten: 1. You must make friends with the darkness before you can enter the light. 2. You must go backward before you can go forward. 3. You must say hello before you can say goodbye. In the tradition of the Four Agreements and the Seven Habits, this compassionate and inspiring guidebook by North America's most beloved grief counselor gives you the three keys that unlock the door to hope and healing.




Dying to Live


Book Description

Clayton King has spoken to two-million-plus people in 30 countries, including hundreds of thousands in the teen-to-thirties age group. Inspiring, humorous, energetic, he presents Christianity’s unchanging core message with new vividness and passion. In Dying to Live, he challenges Christians to throw aside the “bigger, richer, more successful” paradigm and risk following Christ unreservedly. Readers will freshly see the joy of laying their lives down for the gospel as Clayton... tells stories—his own and others’—that give poignant, attractive pictures of radical discipleship considers why people are drawn to those willing to sacrifice themselves for others examines Jesus’ paradox: that giving away your life is the only way to find it Believers hungering for a life that’s worth dying for will be electrified by this passionate call to the bold virtues of living all-out for God, risking death, knowing their life is significant and their future is secure.




Immortality


Book Description

If you could live forever, would you want to? Both a fascinating look at the history of our strive for immortality and an investigation into whether living forever is really all it’s cracked up to be. A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to. He also makes a powerful argument that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization. Central to this book is the metaphor of a mountaintop where one can find the Immortals. Since the dawn of humanity, everyone – whether they know it or not—has been trying to climb that mountain. But there are only four paths up its treacherous slope, and there have only ever been four paths. Throughout history, people have wagered everything on their choice of the correct path, and fought wars against those who’ve chosen differently. In drawing back the curtain on what compels humans to “keep on keeping on,” Cave engages the reader in a number of mind-bending thought experiments. He teases out the implications of each immortality gambit, asking, for example, how long a person would live if they did manage to acquire a perfectly disease-free body. Or what would happen if a super-being tried to round up the atomic constituents of all who’ve died in order to resurrect them. Or what our loved ones would really be doing in heaven if it does exist. We’re confronted with a series of brain-rattling questions: What would happen if tomorrow humanity discovered that there is no life but this one? Would people continue to please their boss, vie for the title of Year’s Best Salesman? Would three-hundred-year projects still get started? If the four paths up the Mount of the Immortals lead nowhere—if there is no getting up to the summit—is there still reason to live? And can civilization survive? Immortality is a deeply satisfying book, as optimistic about the human condition as it is insightful about the true arc of history.




Death


Book Description

The fact that we will die, and that our death can come at any time, pervades the entirety of our living. There are many ways to think about and deal with death. Among those ways, however, a good number of them are attempts to escape its grip. In this book, Todd May seeks to confront death in its power. He considers the possibility that our mortal deaths are the end of us, and asks what this might mean for our living. What lessons can we draw from our mortality? And how might we live as creatures who die, and who know we are going to die? In answering these questions, May brings together two divergent perspectives on death. The first holds that death is not an evil, or at least that immortality would be far worse than dying. The second holds that death is indeed an evil, and that there is no escaping that fact. May shows that if we are to live with death, we need to hold these two perspectives together. Their convergence yields both a beauty and a tragedy to our living that are inextricably entwined.Drawing on the thoughts of many philosophers and writers - ancient and modern - as well as his own experience, May puts forward a particular view of how we might think about and, more importantly, live our lives in view of the inescapability of our dying. In the end, he argues, it is precisely the contingency of our lives that must be grasped and which must be folded into the hours or years that remain to each of us, so that we can live each moment as though it were at once a link to an uncertain future and yet perhaps the only link we have left.







Death and Nonexistence


Book Description

The dead are gone. They count for nothing. Yet, if we count the dead, their number is staggering. And they account for most of what is great about civilization. Compared to the greatness of the dead, the accomplishments of the living are paltry. Which is it then: are the dead still there to be counted or not? And if they are still there, where exactly is "there"? We are confronted with the ancient paradox of nonexistence bequeathed us by Parmenides. The mystery of death is the mystery of nonexistence. A successful attempt to provide a metaphysics of death, then, must resolve the paradox of nonexistence. That is the aim of this study. At the same time, the metaphysics of death, of ceasing to exist, must serve as an account of birth, of coming to exist; the primary thesis of this book is that this demands going beyond existence and nonexistence to include what underlies both, which one can call, following tradition, "being." The dead and the unborn are therefore objects that lack existence but not being. Nonexistent objects - not corpses, or skeletons, or memories, all of which are existent objects - are what are "there" to be counted when we count the dead.




The Living Paradox


Book Description

"“You have set an example for the world. You have brought humankind closer to their deities. It’s not just their authorities and responsibilities that make a God revered, it is their actions and deeds. Your actions made you the closest to Him.” Year 2020, The Republic of Jannah emerged in the midst of a cold war among the five great nations. The same year I, Clarion “Larry” Sharma was born. At age 12, I lost two of my most important things - My mother and my memories. At age 17, I left home in search for clues. During my quest, my mother’s death became my sole motivation. I even died chasing every version of truth. In the Afterlife, I was furious at the Supreme God who I felt was manipulating me. He offered me three wishes in order to compensate. These three wishes solved the mystery of her death but changed how I looked at life. It changed me. My actions indeed made me the closest to Him. What you would have done in my place? How did my choices affect my life? Why don’t you find it yourself? This is not just another cliche. It is my tale how I emerged as the youngest demigod, how I ended up being 'The Living Paradox'."