LITMIR.BIZ

What forms can a religiously informed, ethical Muslim life take? This book presents two important accounts of ideal Muslim subjectivity, one by 9th century moral pedagogue, al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 857) and the other by 20th century Kurdish Quran scholar, Said Nursi (d. 1960). It reconstructs Muhasibi’s and Nursi’s accounts of ideal Muslim consciousness and analyzes the discursive practices implicated in its formation and expression. The book discusses the range of psychic states and ethical relations that Muhasibi and Nursi consider critical for living an authentically Muslim life. It highlights the importance of discursive practices in Muslim religious and moral self-production. The author draws on Foucault's insights about ethics and practices of self-care to examine familiar Muslim discourses in ways that enrich contemporary conversations about identity, individuality, community, authority, moral agency and virtue in the fields of religious studies, Islamic studies and Muslim ethics. The book deepens our understanding of the fluidity and fragility of both the more familiar, obligation-centered ethics in Islamic thought and the less familiar, belief-centered modes of religio-moral being.

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Though the Mountains Tremble is a collection of random commentaries, from a biblical perspective, on issues and events in the contemporary world. Though most of the essays speak to specific events, they carry general observations that can provide insight into issues and events of any time. At the heart of these observations are a few basic assumptions–that God still works in history through nations and institutions, that God's purposes for the Creation are centered in Jesus Christ, that humankind was created to be God's representatives in caring for the world and all living things, that the crucial struggles in history are waged against the Powers and Principalities, and that both nations and individuals are held accountable to God for their actions. These reflections are rooted in the assumption that, although it is not an answer book or a spiritual almanac, the Bible bears testimony to the character of God and sets forth an ethos that can, if embraced, engender basic discernment in the midst of the world's chaos.

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Listened to by huge congregations in Britain, and perhaps the most recognizable British Methodist voice in the mid-twentieth century, W. E. Sangster was, in anyone's estimation, a giant of Methodism. «A preacher without peer in the world,» «a prince of preachers,» are just two of the labels attached to this preacher/theologian of the Methodist tradition. This volume captures the preaching of Sangster in his prime, on the occasion of the 1956 World Methodist Conference in Junaluska, North Carolina. Cheatle's research brings into the public domain ten sermons, nine previously unpublished in this form, delivered by Sangster at that great gathering of World Methodism. These sermons, being transcripts from recordings, picked up Sangster «in the raw,» at his most powerful, engaging with his listeners. This book is a resource, therefore, that aids students of homiletics and pastors in encountering a master at work, without the editorial polish of his extant sermons. The sermons on aspects of Christian holiness would be Sangster's first and last sequential series on the subject, placing before the reader some of his most mature thought on holiness and its application in daily life.

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This anthology is a collection of readings on the Christian life. They were carefully selected from every era of history and from across the spectrum of Christian traditions. They include letters, sermons, treatises and disputations, poems, songs and hymns, confessions, biblical commentary, and even part of a novel. In each case, the subject is life with God, life in God, life for God–life infused and enlivened by God's grace.
The editors introduce each selection, highlighting relevant aspects of the author's biography, spirituality, and historical context. Introductions are also provided for the major eras of the church which present theological, historical, and cultural perspectives to help the reader best engage the selections.
For individuals and groups, classrooms and seminars, this collection will generate dialogue between past and present, and between traditions familiar and unfamiliar. It is not merely a book on the Christian life but for the Christian life, making yesterday's witness to life with God a resource for the Church today.

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In this book Lutheran theologian Paul Hinlicky makes the deeply conflicted origins of Lutheran theology fruitful for the future. Exploring this intellectual and spiritual tradition of thought through its major historical chapters, Hinlicky rejects essentialist projects, exposing the debilitating binaries such programs engender and perpetuate, to establish an authentic Luther-theology or Lutheran theology. Hinlicky excavates the ways that throughout a five-hundred-year tradition the legacy of Luther texts has been appropriated, retooled, subverted, or developed. Readers of this introduction will thus be critically equipped to make intellectually honest appropriations of the Luther legacy in the plurality of contemporary contexts in which this iteration of Christian theology will continue.

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In Revolutionary Change and Democratic Religion, Celucien Joseph provides a fresh and careful reexamination of Haiti's intellectual history by focusing on the ideas and writings of five prominent thinkers and public intellectuals: Toussaint Louverture, Joseph Antenor Firmin, Jacques Roumain, Dantes Bellegarde, and Jean Price-Mars. The book articulates a twofold argument. First of all, Haiti has produced a strong intellectual tradition from the revolutionary era to the postcolonial present, and that Haitian thought is not homogeneous and monolithic. Joseph puts forth the idea that the general interweaving themes of rhetoric, the race concept, race vindication, universal emancipation, religious pluralism, secular humanism, the particular and the universal, and cosmopolitanism are representative of Haiti's intellectual tradition. Secondly, the book also contends that Haitian intellectuals have produced a religious discourse in the twentieth century that could be phrased religious metissage. The religious ideas of these thinkers have been shaped by various forces, ideologies, religious traditions, and philosophical schools. In the same way, the religious experience of the Haitian people should be understood in terms of conflicting, heterodox, and pluralistic manifestations of religious piety, as the people in Haiti reacted to the crisis of slavery, Western colonialism and imperialism, and the arrogance of race in modernity in their striving to reposition themselves within the framework of universal and human metanarratives. The book departs from the dominant (contemporary) Vodou scholarship that is often characteristic of North American and Western studies on the religious life of the Haitian people and Haitian thinkers.

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The Epistle of James is a collection of essays that applies to the book of James linguistic methods of analysis that are based on the same theoretical framework, namely Systemic-Functional Linguistics. This volume is unique in that it provides a theoretically consistent and unified approach to a single New Testament book, which makes the whole volume useful for researchers and students of James. Each essay makes its own creative use of this linguistic perspective to engage important critical questions and to pave new ground for Jacobean scholarship based on linguistic analysis. Various topics in this volume include the textual structure and cohesion of the letter, intertextuality, rhetorical strategies, ideological struggle, interpersonal relations, and other topics related to the letter's social context and language use.

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Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was Professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. A sociologist, historian, and Protestant lay theologian, Ellul is primarily known for his writings on technology, propaganda, and Christian anarchism. He influenced a wide array of thinkers including Ivan Illich, William Stringfellow, Thomas Merton, Paul Virilio, and Neil Postman. In this book, Jacob Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison guide readers through Ellul's most influential theological and sociological writings. By understanding Ellul's primary works, readers will be able to clearly grasp his social theory and theological ethics, profiting from his deep insight and prophetic wisdom.

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In this book, Johnson avoids the standard approach of many apologetic works that seek to «prove,» in systematic fashion, that Christianity is true. Rather, he takes the position of orthodox Christianity and looks at various challenges that have been raised against it. For example, should the horrors of the Holocaust force Christian thinkers to alter their view of God's goodness? Is Christianity inherently anti-Jewish for claiming that Jews must embrace Jesus as Messiah? Are revived «hallucination theories» about Christ's resurrection tenable explanations of the birth of the Christian movement? Is the «presuppositional» approach of certain Reformed thinkers useful for doing Christian apologetics? These and similar questions are addressed in this book.

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