Silencing the Demon’s Advocate


Book Description

The author argues that many problems of interpretation including notorious problems of circularity, arise from a failure to recognise that Descartes' strategy for the attainment of certainty is not to add support for his beliefs, but to subtract grounds for doubt.




Descartes' Meditations


Book Description

This book provides new insights into understanding Descartes' philosophy of mind, especially the role and significance of the senses and emotions.




Silencing Satan


Book Description

Silencing Satan: A Handbook of Biblical Demonology is about the nature and strategies of Satan and the demons, and their defeat through the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The book is for Christians in ministry, whether seminarians, pastors, Bible teachers, Christian counselors, or lay leaders. It is for all who desire an informed faith relevant to supernatural evil and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Each chapter reflects extensive research and is succinctly written to enable believers to quickly grasp biblical truths that expose the lies and half-truths propagated by popular culture, within and outside the church. The authors teach that when face to face with supernatural evil in its various guises--apparitions, voices, sensations, false doctrine, and immoral temptations--believers resist the devil and reflexively turn to Jesus and Scripture. They fight by living a radical life of faith, expressed through love and obedience to Christ. As they do, God himself redeems the evil that Satan intends for his vainglory. God is building his church, and the gates of hades will not prevail against her (Matt 16:18)!




Silence in Middle Eastern and Western Thought


Book Description

Presenting an engaging reflection on the work of prominent modern Iranian literary artists in exchange with contemporary Continental literary criticism and philosophy, this book tracks the idea of silence – through the prism of poetics, dreaming, movement, and the body – across the textual imaginations of both Western and Middle Eastern authors. Through this comparative nexus, it explores the overriding relevance of silence in modern thought, relating the single concept of "the radical unspoken" to the multiple registers of critical theory and postcolonial writing. In this book, the theoretical works of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Gaston Bachelard, Antonin Artaud, and Gilles Deleuze are placed into a charged global dialogue with the literary-poetic writings of Sadeq Hedayat, Ahmad Shamlu, Nima Yushij, Esmail Kho’i, and Forugh Farrokhzad. It also examines a vast spectrum of thematic dimensions including disaster, exhaustion, eternity, wandering, insurrection, counter-history, abandonment, forgetting, masking, innocence, exile, vulnerability, desire, excess, secrecy, formlessness, ecstasy, delirium, and apocalypse. Providing comparative criticism that traces some of the most compelling intersections and divergences between Western and Middle Eastern thought, this book is of interest to academics of modern Persian literature, postcolonial studies, Continental philosophy, and Middle Eastern studies.




Silencing Satan: 13 Studies for Individuals and Groups


Book Description

The 13 lessons of this study guide help Christians develop an informed faith about supernatural evil and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Each lesson refers the reader to significant teachings in Silencing Satan: Handbook of Biblical Demonology. In the book, the authors teach about the nature and strategies of Satan and the demons, and their defeat through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. They advocate resisting the devil in his various guises--apparitions, voices, sensations, false doctrine, and immoral temptations--by reflexively turning to Jesus Christ and Scripture. The authors expose the half-truths and lies propagated by popular culture. They caution not to fill in gaps of understanding with extra-biblical sources. Does the study of Satan and the demons increase fear or give him too much attention? In fact, when presented from a biblical perspective, such knowledge can increase faith in Jesus Christ and enable Christians to effectively serve God and his church. Believers are challenged to live a radical life of faith, expressed through love and obedience to Christ. Seminarians, pastors, Bible teachers, Christian counselors, and lay leaders will find this study useful in individual and small group situations. A leaders' guide is available in the appendix.




Silenced!


Book Description

This book is about people whose beliefs and affiliations have opposed powerful interests in the present-day United States. This eclectic group of people and controversial issues, from climate-change scientists who have been censored by the Bush administration to Muslims accused of terrorism, have one thing in common. All of them straddle the limits of what Noam Chomsky has called permissible debate as defined by dominant political and economic institutions and individuals. The central thesis is that restriction of free inquiry is harmful to our culture because it inhibits the search for knowledge. Johansen presents case studies in the borderlands of free speech in a Jeffersonian cast—an intellectual framework assuming that open debate—even of unpopular ideas—is essential to accurate perception of reality. This book is about people whose ideological circumstances have found them opposing established beliefs in our times—scholars advocating the Palestinian cause in a very hostile intellectual environment, for example, as well as climate scientists defending themselves against the de-funding of their laboratories by defenders of fossil-fuel interests; opponents of creation science under assault for teaching what once was regarded as household-variety biology (a.k.a. Darwinism); Marxists in a political system dominated by neoconservatives. The central thesis that unites this diverse array of controversies is that shutting down free inquiry—most notably for points of view deemed unpopular—dumbs us all down by restraining the search for knowledge, which demands open inquiry. We have been told when going to war, as in Iraq, that freedom isn't free, the unstated assumption being that our armed forces are fighting and dying to safeguard our civil rights at home and abroad. During recent years, however, freedom to inquire and debate without retribution has been under assault in the United States. This assault has been carried out under a distinctly Orwellian cast, under Newspeak titles such as the Patriot Act, parts of which might as well be described more honestly as the Restriction of Freedom of Inquiry Act. The information gathered here will interest (and probably anger) anyone who is concerned with protecting robust, free inquiry in a nation that takes seriously its freedom to speak out, and to define truth through open debate.




Mark (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament)


Book Description

In this new addition to the BECNT series, respected New Testament scholar Robert Stein offers a substantive yet highly accessible commentary on the Gospel of Mark. The commentary focuses primarily on the Markan understanding of the Jesus traditions as reflected in this key New Testament book. For each section in Mark, the author analyzes how it fits the immediate and larger context of the Gospel; offers verse-by-verse comments on the words, phrases, sentences, and themes found in the section; and explores what Mark is seeking to teach. As with all BECNT volumes, Mark features the author's detailed interaction with the Greek text. It combines academic sophistication with pastoral sensitivity and accessibility to serve as a useful tool for pastors, church leaders, students, and teachers.




Overcoming the World Missions Crisis


Book Description

A wake-up call to evangelicals to return to the biblical mandate and model for missions before we have no unique message to proclaim. An alarming view of missions in the twenty-first century.




The Wages Of Sin: BOOK ONE: The Devil's Advocates


Book Description

As a lone carriage makes its uncertain way across the breadth of Hell, the creatures of darkness begin to stir to answer their master's call. An enemy that will define the future of all the worlds has been unleashed on Earth which could threaten their very existence unless they unite. They answer the call with evil intent in their hearts to vanquish that which threatens their world, but will they be able to put aside disharmony, war and hatred that thrives between them to fight for their lives or will the challenge of finally meeting their creator be too much to overcome selfish greed. In a world that exists on bargain and wagers it is life on Earth which meets the highest price unless someone can steal it first. The first in a five part story which invites you to finally meet your creator.




Screaming in Silence


Book Description

Description A serious pro-survival, pro-recovery book, written because I have been the survivor of many suicide attempts, not to forget also the person left behind after actual suicides, and the victim of serious self-harm in myself and those I love. I haven't attempted suicide or self-harmed for 8 years and I don't plan to do so again, but I always have my plan to hand. Starting at the age of 11, I have attempted suicide 443 times (sometimes barely surviving, twice dying, only to be revived) and for fifteen years I was a person who self-harmed - cutting and bloodletting, sometimes as self-harm, sometimes as a suicide attempt. The two are definitely linked but not all self-harm is suicidal, not all suicide attempts are meant to kill, and sadly about one million people kill themselves every year, not all of them meaning to. As I have also been the victim left behind when someone I loved took their own life, I really can see the issue from all perspectives. Allow me to fill you in on my personal experience first of all, so you know you are 'talking' to someone who really has been there before herself. Pull up a chair, or sit back in bed, and we will talk. About the Author Katy Sara Culling was born in Liverpool, North England, in January 1975, sharing her birth date rather aptly with Virginia Woolf. Daughter of Sue and Paul Culling, her family moved back to its roots in Derbyshire, where she grew up along with her younger sister Beth, in the village of Castle Donington, on the Derbyshire-Leicestershire border. However, even as young as 5 she exhibited symptoms of bipolar disorder (manic depression) - leading her to be loud and talkative, often in trouble. She also worried a great deal about death to an extent that is very unusual in one as young as she was. Not just her own death either. She attended a private school for girls, Loughborough High School, where she was an extremely high achieving student. Unfortunately, due to bullying and also to numb her rampant mania and depression, she developed anorexia nervosa and began to self-harm. She found that the anorexia and self-harming took over her life and made coping with mood swings easier because she did not feel their full effect anymore. Katy Sara then went to The University of Nottingham, where she studied Biochemistry and Nutrition. She did her (1st class) thesis on alcohol and metabolism, interested in the psychology of alcoholism. All this was done despite considerable illness including over 60 suicide attempts and purging-type anorexia - and yet more bullying. She was bullied for being anorexic by her fellow floor-mates. However her good academic work at Nottingham lead to an offer of a place at The University of Oxford, where she studied for a PhD (DPhil) in Clinical Medicine. Here she was a full time member of Linacre College Oxford and was never bullied. Linacre is a graduate only college. She took part in many cycling events for charity. In her final year she became so ill with anorexia and bipolar depression that she agreed to take time off her PhD (the worst decision of her life) and go into hospital (first as a day patient, then an inpatient on the general ward, and eventually a sectioned inpatient on the general ward). During those two years she attempted suicide over 300 times, dying twice, only to be revived. She also made several trips to the Emergency Room to be treated for either suicide attempts or self-harm. She finally, at the age of 28 got a diagnosis of bipolar I disorder and the correct medication, and had been mostly fine ever since. Her eating disorder spontaneously recovered when her bipolar disorder became more controlled. She later wrote up her PhD thesis and published her results. Katy Sara now works for the Bipolar Foundation - Equilibrium, an independent, international, non-governmental organisation dedicated to improving treatment and understanding of the causes and effects of bipolar disorder ('manic-depression'). Katy Sara