LITMIR.BIZ

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has become one of the most controversial films ever made, and it is already a blockbuster of cinematography. Its defenders passionately regard it as one of the most moving and influential pieces of religious art ever created. But its detractors argue with comparable vehemence that the violence and gore it contains, its alleged anti-Semitism, a particular take on the Christian message, and the lack of historical and Biblical accuracy, make it nothing more than a kind of political propaganda. Father Thomas Rosica hailed as one of the great masterpieces of religious art, but the secular humanist Paul Kurtz thinks of it as a political weapon in the hands of the religious right. Film critics are divided in their judgment, giving the film anywhere from no stars to five stars. Regardless of what one thinks of the film, however, its impact both personal and social is beyond question.

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One of the great tasks of Mortimer Adler’s illustrious life was his search for a watertight proof of the existence of God. Adler believed that his search had been successful.Adler spent years studying the classic proofs of God’s existence, especially Aquinas’s Five Ways, and found shortcomings in all of them, as conventionally understood. But he thought that some of them contained ideas which, if properly developed, could be improved, and he continued to search for a satisfying and logically unassailable proof. Toward the end of the 1970s, he believed he had arrived at such a proof, which he presented in his historic work, How to Think about God (1980). In the writings assembled in How to Prove There Is a God, Adler gives us his approach to the question of God’s existence in fresh and popular form. He defends his position against critics, both believers and skeptics. The book includes a transcript of one of Adler’s appearances on William Buckley’s Firing Line, Adler’s revealing interview with Edward Wakin, the exchange of views on natural theology between Adler and Owen Gingerich, and John Cramer’s eloquent argument that the trend of modern cosmology supports Adler’s early struggles with the question of God's existence.

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Atheism Explained explores the claims made both for and against the existence of God. On the pro side: that the wonders of the world can only be explained by an intelligent creator; that the universe had to start somewhere; telepathy, out-of-body experiences, and other paranormal phenomena demonstrate the existence of a spirit world; and that those who experience God directly provide evidence as real as any physical finding. After disputing these arguments through calm, careful criticism, author David Ramsay Steele presents the reasons why God cannot exist: monstrous, appalling evils; the impossibility of omniscience; and the senseless concept that God is a thinking mind without a brain. He also explores controversial topics such as Intelligent Design, the power of prayer, religion without God, and whether a belief in God makes people happier and healthier. Steele’s rational, easy-to-understand prose helps readers form their own conclusions about this eternally thorny topic.

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History illustrates the power of religion to bring about change. Mary Evelyn Tucker describes how world religions have begun to move from a focus on God-human and human-human relations to encompass human-earth relations. She argues that, in light of the environmental crisis, religion should move from isolated orthodoxy to interrelated dialogue and use its authority for liberation rather than oppression.

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In antiquity, “son of god”—meaning a ruler designated by the gods to carry out their will—was a title used by the Roman emperor Augustus and his successors as a way to reinforce their divinely appointed status. But this title was also used by early Christians to speak about Jesus, borrowing the idiom from Israelite and early Jewish discourses on monarchy. This interdisciplinary volume explores what it means to be God’s son(s) in ancient Jewish and early Christian literature. Through close readings of relevant texts from multiple ancient corpora, including the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greco-Roman texts and inscriptions, early Christian and Islamic texts, and apocalyptic literature, the chapters in this volume engage a range of issues including messianism, deification, eschatological figures, Jesus, interreligious polemics, and the Roman and Jewish backgrounds of early Christianity and the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The essays in this collection demonstrate that divine sonship is an ideal prism through which to better understand the deep interrelationship of ancient religions and their politics of kingship and divinity. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Richard Bauckham, Max Botner, George J. Brooke, Jan Joosten, Menahem Kister, Reinhard Kratz, Mateusz Kusio, Michael A. Lyons, Matthew V. Novenson, Michael Peppard, Sarah Whittle, and N. T. Wright.

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Lady at the Window chronicles the last Holy Week in Julian of Norwich’s life.
In her secret journal (because women are forbidden to write in English) the great English mystic chronicles her inner life, including her relationship with the “courteous Lord,” who when she was young was a constant presence in her life, but now in her old age feels to be more of a constant absence, Deus Absconditus.
There are two windows in Lady Julian’s anchorage: one looks upon the interior of St. Julian’s Church with its high altar and tabernacle; the other opens onto the city of Norwich with its publicans, sinners, poor, people in the marketplace, and neighbors. Among these there are those in deep distress who find their way to Lady Julian, now famous for her wisdom and holy counsel. There is the young woman with a child outside of marriage. There is a wounded young soldier, jobless, homeless, and afraid. There is a man who has betrayed his betrothed. And others. No one leaves Julian’s window without psychological and spiritual uplifting.
But the underlying theme of this novella is Lady Julian’s dark night of the soul. As with other mystics who came after her, e.g., St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Calcutta, Julian abides in a cloud of unknowing, praying daily that her darkness be dispelled by divine light.

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Margaret B. Ingraham’s collection Exploring this Terrain bids the reader to join her in a journey of discovery. In a world in which speed is increasingly regarded as a virtue and distraction is its inevitable consequence, each of these poems offers escape and consolation. One by one they invite the reader to be still, to observe, to listen, to “taste and see” – and ultimately to experience the wonder that only attention can discover hiding in the thin places within the various terrains of our everyday lives.
“What is the terrain that Margaret Ingraham explores in Exploring this Terrain? It ranges from the Blue Ridge Mountains to Pluto. The path crosses the trails of memory and illness, the natural world and disintegration, and various parts unseen. Yet it stays, as Margaret says near the end of the book, in the ‘secret places of my brokenness.’ It is the beautiful landscape of wonder, the uneven country of love, the difficult ground of faith.” —Loren Graham, author of Places I Was Dreaming.

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This collection of poems engages in new and animating ways with one of the profoundest texts of our past, the Book of Psalms. These poems are Clarke's response to his experience of reading the Psalter through once every month according to Cranmer’s divisions in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.

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Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor is a collection of 101 sonnets that channel the voice of celebrated fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor. In these poems, poet and scholar Angela Alaimo O’Donnell imagines the rich interior life Flannery lived during the last fourteen years of her life in rural Georgia on her family’s farm named “Andalusia.” Each poem begins with an epigraph taken from O’Connor’s essays, stories, or letters; the poet then plumbs Flannery’s thoughts and the poignant circumstances behind them, welcoming the reader into O’Connor’s private world. Together the poems tell the story of a brilliant young woman who enjoyed a bright and promising childhood, was struck with lupus just as her writing career hit its stride, and was forced to return home and live out her days in exile, far from the literary world she loved. By turns tragic and comic, the poems in Andalusian Hours explore Flannery’s loves and losses, her complex relationship with her mother, her battle with her illness and disability, and her passion for her writing. The poems mark time in keeping with the liturgical hours O’Connor herself honored in her prayer life and in her quasi-monastic devotion to her vocation and to the home she learned to love, Andalusia.

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The Complete Prayers of St. Francis and St. Clare, with Selections from Brother Juniper, St. Anthony of Padua, and Other Early Franciscans
We do not immediately associate Francis and Clare with prayer and praying. St. Francis, according to the most common legends, rarely sat still. St. Clare did, more so, but that was probably mostly because of the convent and the grille and the conventions of the time: she couldn’t be a walkabout friar. However, they did sit still. And they stood. And they danced. And they fasted. And they sang. In all these ways, Francis and Clare prayed for hours each day, as did the brothers and sisters who came after them on the Franciscan way. This prayer book gathers the stories and words of the prayer life and prayers of these remarkable Christians.

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