The Sum of Our Gods


Book Description

Joe has been cursed. He must meet with Yahweh, the Creator, once a week for coffee, and listen to God complain. Unfortunately, Yahweh is a crotchety old deity with a pantheon of family problems. His son, Jesus, has been hiding out in the basement for 1700 years since he discovered his wife, the goddess of the Church, has been whoring it up with the gods of the state, of wealth, and now the goddess of anti-intellectualism. God's wife, Frigga, has basically stopped talking to Him, except to keep nagging Him about retiring. It seems like there will be a coup at every board meeting of the gods. Oh, and Jesus' estranged wife, Inanna, is plotting a terrorist attack to try to start a holy war. God is fed up with all the drama. He's perfectly tired and infinitely irritable. God doesn't seem too interested in human problems, but things are rocky between Joe and his wife, Christy, who is considering cheating with the handsome new adjunct professor who works with her at Western Oregon University. Also, the curse goes down to the fourth generation, so Joe has to figure out a way to protect his seven-year-old son, Dawkins, from sharing his fate. Joe's life is a comedy as black as God's coffee.




The Sum of Our Gods


Book Description

Joe has been cursed. He must meet with Yahweh, the Creator, once a week for coffee and listen to God complain. Yahweh is a crotchety old deity with a pantheon of family problems. His wife, Frigga, has basically stopped talking to Him, except to nag Him about retiring. His son, Jesus, suffers from crippling depression. Oh, and Jesus' estranged wife is planning a terrorist attack to start a holy war. God is fed up with all the drama. He's perfectly tired and infinitely irritable. Though God doesn't seem to care about human problems, Joe's little, mortal life isn't perfect, either. In fact, it's a comedy as black as God's coffee.




Sum


Book Description

At once funny, wistful and unsettling, Sum is a dazzling exploration of unexpected afterlives—each presented as a vignette that offers a stunning lens through which to see ourselves in the here and now. In one afterlife, you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. In another version, you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple, or that the universe is running backward, or that you are forced to live out your afterlife with annoying versions of who you could have been. With a probing imagination and deep understanding of the human condition, acclaimed neuroscientist David Eagleman offers wonderfully imagined tales that shine a brilliant light on the here and now.




Truth on Fire


Book Description

Knowing God truly, experiencing Him deeply. What would it look like to genuinely love God with our head AND our heart? To have a faith marked by right thinking AND right feeling? To know God deeply AND worship him passionately? Too often, Christians act as though these things are at odds with one another. But what if God intends for us to possess a Christianity that is radically committed to biblical truth, in a way that did not diminish the life of the heart, but actually intensified it? Adam Ramsey invites us to engage both our minds and our emotions in our walk with God as we gaze at him until our hearts sing. He sums it up like this: "My hope in these following pages is to paint a biblical portrait of what God is actually like, so that we can gaze upon him together until our hearts can’t help but sing. To behold him in such a way that our daily experience is transformed with a deepened awareness of who it is we pray to, who it is that is with us, and who it is that we are loved by. To let God’s truth set our hearts on fire." If you yearn for God but desire a clearer biblical picture of this God whom you love, or if you have been walking with God for a while now, but your experience of him has become settled or dry, then this book is for you.




The Footprints of God


Book Description

In this "New York Times" bestseller, Iles probes the terrifying possibility that the next phase of human evolution may not be human at all. Alarming, believable, and utterly consuming.--Dan Brown. Now available in a tall Premium Edition. Reissue.







How Big Is Your God?


Book Description

Do you have a real relationship with God, or do you just have a religion? Do you know God, or do you just know about God? In How Big Is Your God? Paul Coutinho, SJ, challenges us to grow stronger and deeper in our faith and in our relationship with God—a God whose love knows no bounds. To help us on our way, Coutinho introduces us to people in various world religions—from Hindu friends to Buddhist teachers to St. Ignatius of Loyola—who have shaped his spiritual life and made possible his deep, personal relationship with God.




A Place for Our Gods


Book Description

Study of some 150 Hindu families (and about 1000 persons) living in Edinburgh, and particularly about the fact that two associations exist among them, one of which is based on activities at a temple.




From Your Gods to Our Gods


Book Description

The global world debates secularism, freedom of belief, faith-based norms, the state's arbitration of religious conflicts, and the place of the sacred in the public sphere. In facing these issues, Britain, India, and South Africa stand out as unique laboratories. They have greatly influenced the rest of the world. As single countries and together as a whole, the three have moved from the colonial clash of antagonistic religions (of your gods) to an era when it has become impossible to dissociate your god from my god. Today both belong to the same blurred reality of our gods. Through a narrative account of British, South African, and Indian court cases from 1857 to 2009, the author draws an unconventional history of the process leading from the encounter with the gods of the other to the forging of a postmodern, common, and global religion. Across ages, borders, faiths, and laws, the three countries have experienced the ambivalent interaction of society, politics, and beliefs. Hence the lesson the world might learn from them: our gods promise an idealized purity, but they can only become real in the everyday creation of mixed identities, hybrid deities, and shared fears and hopes.




Gods Without Men


Book Description

In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing . . . It is God without men. —Honoré de Balzac, Une passion dans le désert, 1830 Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed—but not unchanged—the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them. Driven by the energy and cunning of Coyote, the mythic, shape-shifting trickster, Gods Without Men is full of big ideas, but centered on flesh-and-blood characters who converge at an odd, remote town in the shadow of a rock formation called the Pinnacles. Viscerally gripping and intellectually engaging, it is, above all, a heartfelt exploration of the search for pattern and meaning in a chaotic universe. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.




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