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The Construction of Belief

Author : Aziz Esmail

Publisher : Saqi

Page : 207 pages

File Size : 33,15 MB

Release : 2013-02-01

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0863567665

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Book Description

Mohammed Arkoun was one of the most prominent and influential Arab intellectuals of his day. During a career spanning more than thirty years, he was revered as an outstanding research scholar, a bold critic of the theoretical tensions embedded within Islamic Studies and an outspoken public figure, upholding political, social and cultural modernism. This Festschrift honours Arkoun's scholarship, bringing together the contributions of eleven distinguished scholars of history, religious studies and philosophy. It offers a comprehensive selection of critical engagements with Arkoun's work, reflecting on his considerable influence on contemporary thinking about Islam and its ideological, philosophical and theological dimensions. The authoritative reference study on the work of Mohammed Arkoun, The Construction of Belief is essential reading for students and scholars of Islam, Muslim societies and cultures, modernity, religious studies, philosophy and semanti.



Building Belief

Author : Chad V. Meister

Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers

Page : 231 pages

File Size : 46,40 MB

Release : 2009-06-01

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1606087991

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Book Description

Take a journey from doubt to belief It can be hard to share your faith with others, especially when people can't agree on whether there is even any actual truth. With that in mind, Chad Meister has developed a simple, logical way for you to help others move past relativism to a place where Christian belief makes sense: the Apologetics Pyramid. In Building Belief, Meister leads you up each step of the pyramid, beginning where many find themselves today--doubting if anything is really true. From there, he powerfully builds a case for absolute truth, the existence of God, universal morals and values, the reliability and divine inspiration of the Bible, the resurrection of Christ, and ultimately, the good news that Jesus is the Son of God who offers salvation to the world. "Join Chad Meister in this concise, clear, and compelling book as he builds a persuasive case for the truth of Christianity."--Lee Strobel, author, The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith "An excellent book to lead earnest enquirers from doubt to conviction about the basic truths of the Christian faith."--Norman L. Geisler, dean, Southern Evangelical Seminary and Bible College "Chad Meister is a force to be reckoned with, and this delightful little book is a timely resource to be studied by Christians and given to non-Christians."--J. P. Moreland, distinguished professor of philosophy, Talbot School of Theology; author, Love Your God with All Your Mind "Building Belief is thoughtful, fresh, and full of personal and practical illustrations. Meister strikes just the right balance, providing a model for how apologetics ought to be done."--Paul Copan, Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics, Palm Beach AtlanticUniversity "Meister offers both the tools and the method for making discussions with skeptics more fruitful."--Jay W. Richards, research fellow, Acton Institute; coauthor, The Privileged Planet



From Belonging to Belief

Author : Julie McBrien

Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press

Page : 347 pages

File Size : 18,46 MB

Release : 2017-06-08

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0822983052

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Book Description

From Belonging to Belief presents a nuanced ethnographic study of Islam and secularism in post-Soviet Central Asia, as seen from the small town of Bazaar-Korgon in southern Kyrgyzstan. Opening with the juxtaposition of a statue of Lenin and a mosque in the town square, Julie McBrien proceeds to peel away the multiple layers that have shaped the return of public Islam in the region. She explores belief and nonbelief, varying practices of Islam, discourses of extremism, and the role of the state, to elucidate the everyday experiences of Bazaar-Korgonians. McBrien shows how Islam is explored, lived, and debated in both conventional and novel sites: a Soviet-era cleric who continues to hold great influence; popular television programs; religious instruction at wedding parties; clothing; celebrations; and others. Through ethnographic research, McBrien reveals how moving toward Islam is not a simple step but rather a deliberate and personal journey of experimentation, testing, and knowledge acquisition. Moreover she argues that religion is not always a matter of belief—sometimes it is essentially about belonging. From Belonging to Belief offers an important corrective to studies that focus only on the pious turns among Muslims in Central Asia, and instead shows the complex process of evolving religion in a region that has experienced both Soviet atheism and post-Soviet secularism, each of which has profoundly formed the way Muslims interpret and live Islam.



The Western Construction of Religion

Author : Daniel Dubuisson

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 268 pages

File Size : 32,11 MB

Release : 2003-06-18

Category : Religion

ISBN : 9780801873201

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Book Description

The Western Construction of Religion not only provides a critical assessment of the whole history of religionas it is understood in the West but offers better ways of constructing the study of this central part of human experience.



The ‘Malleus Maleficarum‘ and the construction of witchcraft

Author : Hans Broedel

Publisher : Manchester University Press

Page : 224 pages

File Size : 36,65 MB

Release : 2013-07-19

Category : History

ISBN : 1847795676

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Book Description

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The Malleus is an important text and is frequently quoted by authors across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Yet it also presents serious difficulties: it is difficult to understand out of context, and is not generally representative of late medieval learned thinking. This, the first book-length study of the original text in English, provides students and scholars with an introduction to this controversial work and to the conceptual word of its authors. Like all witch-theorists, Institoris and Sprenger constructed their witch out of a constellation of pre-existing popular beliefs and learned traditions. Therefore, to understand the Malleus, one must also understand the contemporary and subsequent debates over the reality and nature of witches. This book argues that although the Malleus was a highly idiosyncratic text, its arguments were powerfully compelling and therefore remained influential long after alternatives were forgotten. Consequently, although focused on a single text, this study has important implications for fifteenth-century witchcraft theory. This is a fascinating work on the Malleus Maleficarum and will be essential to students and academics of late medieval and early modern history, religion and witchcraft studies.



Building Belief

Author : Chad V. Meister

Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers

Page : 230 pages

File Size : 29,50 MB

Release : 2009-06-01

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1725226103

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Book Description

It can be hard to share faith with others, especially when people can't agree on whether there is even any actual truth. With that in mind, Chad Meister has developed a simple, logical way for you to help others move past relativism to a place where Christian belief makes sense: the Apologetics Pyramid. In Building Belief, Meister leads you up each step of the pyramid, beginning where many find themselves today--doubting if anything is really true. From there, he powerfully builds a case for absolute truth, the existence of God, universal morals and values, the reliability and divine inspiration of the Bible, the resurrection of Christ, and ultimately, the good news that Jesus is the Son of God who offers salvation to the world.



Born Believers

Author : Justin L. Barrett

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 305 pages

File Size : 30,46 MB

Release : 2012-03-20

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1439196575

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Book Description

Infants have a lot to make sense of in the world: Why does the sun shine and night fall; why do some objects move in response to words, while others won’t budge; who is it that looks over them and cares for them? How the developing brain grapples with these and other questions leads children, across cultures, to naturally develop a belief in a divine power of remarkably consistent traits––a god that is a powerful creator, knowing, immortal, and good—explains noted developmental psychologist and anthropologist Justin L. Barrett in this enlightening and provocative book. In short, we are all born believers. Belief begins in the brain. Under the sway of powerful internal and external influences, children understand their environments by imagining at least one creative and intelligent agent, a grand creator and controller that brings order and purpose to the world. Further, these beliefs in unseen super beings help organize children’s intuitions about morality and surprising life events, making life meaningful. Summarizing scientific experiments conducted with children across the globe, Professor Barrett illustrates the ways human beings have come to develop complex belief systems about God’s omniscience, the afterlife, and the immortality of deities. He shows how the science of childhood religiosity reveals, across humanity, a “natural religion,” the organization of those beliefs that humans gravitate to organically, and how it underlies all of the world’s major religions, uniting them under one common source. For believers and nonbelievers alike, Barrett offers a compelling argument for the human instinct for religion, as he guides all parents in how to effectively encourage children in developing a healthy constellation of beliefs about the world around them.



More Than Belief

Author : Manuel A. Vasquez

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 392 pages

File Size : 38,39 MB

Release : 2020-04-08

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0197541682

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Book Description

This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the centrality of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion.



Understanding the Qur'an Today

Author : Mahmoud Hussein

Publisher : Saqi

Page : 102 pages

File Size : 31,85 MB

Release : 2013-03-11

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0863568548

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Book Description

The prevailing belief among Muslims is that, because the Qur'an is the Word of God and God is eternal, it follows that His Word is also eternal. The belief is based on the postulate that the Word of God must be of the same nature as God Himself. Mahmoud Hussein refutes this by showing that it contradicts the very teachings of the Qur'an. Whereas God transcends time, His Word is inscribed within time. It is not a monologue, but a living exchange, through which God reveals to His Prophet different orders of truth, weaving together the absolute and the relative, the general and the particular, the eternal and the contingent. An international bestseller, Understanding the Qur'an today offers a new perspective on one of the world's most influential texts and adds an invaluable contribution to the debate on Islam and modernity.



The Birth of Modern Belief

Author : Ethan H. Shagan

Publisher : Princeton University Press

Page : 404 pages

File Size : 28,24 MB

Release : 2021-05-04

Category : History

ISBN : 0691217378

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Book Description

An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the West This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be. Shagan shows how religious belief enjoyed a special prestige in medieval Europe, one that set it apart from judgment, opinion, and the evidence of the senses. But with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the question of just what kind of knowledge religious belief was—and how it related to more mundane ways of knowing—was forced into the open. As the warring churches fought over the answer, each claimed belief as their exclusive possession, insisting that their rivals were unbelievers. Shagan challenges the common notion that modern belief was a gift of the Reformation, showing how it was as much a reaction against Luther and Calvin as it was against the Council of Trent. He describes how dissidents on both sides came to regard religious belief as something that needed to be justified by individual judgment, evidence, and argument. Brilliantly illuminating, The Birth of Modern Belief demonstrates how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.