LITMIR.BIZ

What is the Good Life? Learn from some of the greatest minds in Greek, Jewish, and Christian thought. Comparing their thought reveals a new apex reached in the age-old question concerning the relationship of Jerusalem and Athens, faith and reason. Few have been more influential in Judaism and Christianity than Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, yet Aristotle influenced them both in significant ways. By adopting and adapting some of Aristotle's best thinking, we can appreciate Maimonides' and Aquinas' search for the Good Life from their respective views, ranging from the fall to human perfectibility. This examines human nature, the human telos, and how each would prescribe the route to the Good Life. For all three, it is ultimately about the knowledge of God. But what does that mean? The comparative approach is more illuminating than if considered in isolation. Comparatively, Aristotle's approach may be characterized as informational, Maimonides' as instructional, and Aquinas' as pneumatic-relational. The role of faith as a virtue in both Maimonides and Aquinas makes a substantive difference over Aristotle's in philosophical and practical ways. It is used to exploit their accounts of the human fall, moral perfection, and ultimate human perfection–the knowledge of God.

Подробнее

What would you do if a child in your life rejected their natal gender? Would you blindly follow the counsel of a culture that advocates for hormone treatment at an early age in order to suppress puberty and facilitate gender transition? Before you commit to long-term use of a powerful, expensive, and experimental synthetic hormone treatment plan, would you be willing to take the time to examine the ethics surrounding a course of action that will permanently affect the life of the child? Several serious questions are presently being overlooked in the rush to treat gender dysphoric and TGNC children with puberty-suppressing hormones, such as: Are puberty-suppressing hormones medically necessary? Is there any evidence to prove that hormone treatment is helpful, and not harmful, to gender-dysphoric children? Does hormone treatment resolve gender dysphoria? Do other treatment options exist to address the underlying causes of gender dysphoria? Are parents, medical providers, and ministry professionals morally obligated to provide puberty suppressors for patients who self-diagnose? Does Scripture offer any insight into the treatment of gender dysphoric children? And finally, who really benefits from advocating for the early use of GnRH agonists? This book will answer these questions.

Подробнее

Martin Buber, one of the twentieth century's most distinguished and creative thinkers, famously argued that the fundamental fact of human existence is person with person, and that practicing genuine dialogue is necessary for anyone who wishes to become authentically human. This book seeks to unleash and reassemble the core elements for practicing dialogue–turning and addressing, and then listening and responding. Despite what many say, the innermost growth of the self does not come in relation to one's self. Rather, attaining one's authentic human existence (one's innate self-realization) emerges again and again through genuine dialogue, through «participatory consciousness.» We become authentically human in and through our relationships with others. Here's the point–instead of having dialogues, human beings mutually become dialogue with others. Individual human beings in dialogue with one another become memorable mutualities found nowhere else, opening out into the world.

Подробнее

The linguistic aspect of Womanism offers learners values as any other social language. While most French learners get a glimpse into the history of Napoleon and many Chinese speakers are familiar with an Asian lifestyle, English non-native speakers like us need to understand the language in a broader scope. Since English is our shared method of communication, we have to adapt to not just one culture, but also variants in accents or vocabularies from multiple English-speaking countries. Similarly, Womanism serves the same purpose among the black community. By speaking Womanism, they are able to understand and embrace each other's values and virtues, while making their history known to the rest of the world.

Подробнее

In Bearing Witness, Courtney S. Campbell draws on his experience as a teacher, scholar, and a bioethics consultant to propose an innovative interpretation of the significance of religious values and traditions for bioethics and health care. The book offers a distinctive exposition of a covenantal ethic of gift-response-responsibility-transformation that informs a quest for meaning in the profound choices that patients, families, and professionals face in creating, sustaining, and ending life. Campbell's account of «bearing witness» offers new understandings of formative ethical concepts, situates medicine as a calling and vocation rooted in concepts of healing, affirms professional commitments of presence for suffering and dying persons, and presents a prophetic critique of medical-assisted death. This book offers compelling critiques of secular models of medical professionalism and of individualistic assumptions that distort the physician-patient relationship. This innovative interpretation bears witness to the relevance of religious perspectives on an array of bioethical issues from new reproductive technologies to genetics to debates over end-of-life ethics and bears witness against the oddities of a market-oriented and consumerist vision of health care that is especially salient for an era of health-care reform.

Подробнее

What is metaphysics? Metaphysics: A Basic Introduction in a Christian Key gives a simplified answer to this daunting question. Born under the shadow of the Parthenon by Aristotle and his contemporaries, metaphysics eventually enjoyed its heyday in the medieval era and is finding a resurgence today in modernity. This book explores the perennial question of being and its uptake in the world of Christian theology. Donald Wallenfang leads the reader through five navigable chapters that feature the most basic themes of metaphysics: the question of being, first principles, causality, cosmology, and morality. The abstract tendencies of metaphysics are brought down to earth with reference to the gospel of Jesus and the relevance of metaphysics for daily living. Altogether, the reader will be inspired to think toward the whole by asking questions that penetrate beneath the surface of things. Beauty, truth, and goodness will be unveiled to the degree that we accompany Jesus the metaphysician along his itinerary of being given.

Подробнее

One out of every thirty five women born is killed for cultural or sexual reasons. In the twentieth century more women were killed for those reasons than all the people who died in wars. Women everywhere live in the higher stages of Gregory Stanton's eight stage genocide scale. Pornography contributes to the peril, whether in the form of battlefield rape films, the rape chants of frat boys, or the massive distribution of violent images on the web and through other media. The United Nations definition of genocide must be changed to recognize women as a targeted group. Pornography and Genocide pulls together the evidence from legal scholars and a myriad of contemporary studies and news accounts from around the world. It is time to face the war against women.

Подробнее

This book is of vital interest to anyone who yearns to know how science, theology, ethics, art, and politics do really afford objective truths. Not only that, but how these truths in seemingly clashing areas are interrelated by common sense and rooted in our incontrovertible consciousness of Being itself. Being itself, as the basis for truth, is defended against truth-denying modern philosophers who, having headed in the wrong direction with tragic costs of murderous ideologies, have completely misunderstood the simple origin of truth in the realist tradition of Aristotle, Aquinas, Etienne Gilson, and others. Their profoundness is not bamboozled by the covert and corrupting sophism of today's teachings. Anyone interested in surmounting these teachings that include political correctness and a false divide of fact from value, which paralyze the very modern ethics that helped to create them, should read this book. The book reveals how ethics, art, and politics can be as true as the sciences that inform them.

Подробнее

Charles Peguy (1873-1914) was a French religious poet, philosophical essayist, publisher, social activist, Dreyfusard, and Catholic convert. There has recently been a renewed recognition of Peguy in France as a thinker of unique significance, a reconsideration inspired in large part by Gilles Deleuze's Difference et repetition, which ranked him with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. In the English-speaking world, however, access to Peguy has been hindered by a scarcity of translations of his work. This first complete translation of one of his most important prose works, with accompanying interpretive introduction and notes, will introduce English-speaking readers to a new voice, which speaks in a powerful and original way to a modern West in a condition of cultural and spiritual crisis. The immediate circumstance of the writing of this last prose essay, unfinished at the time of Peguy's early death, was the placing of Henri Bergson's philosophical works on the Catholic Index, and Peguy's undertaking to defend his former teacher from his critics, both Catholic and secular. But the subject of Bergson is also a springboard for the exploration of the perennial themes–philosophical, theological, and literary–most central to Peguy's thought.

Подробнее

After spending many years in a religious order, Dominic Kirkham describes how he was driven to meet the challenge of modern thinking, an exercise that has proved both freeing and frightening.
He says this has been «something of a personal odyssey, which now spans a lifetime of over six decades and is still ongoing.» He adds that «the presumption of the book is that this is of more than personal interest because the subject matter affects everyone; my personal journey will no doubt reflect that of many others.»
In a broad sweep from Neolithic times to the twenty-first century, he considers our human quest for meaning and a good life, and how we can engage in it today.

Подробнее