The Transcended Christian

The Transcended Christian
Author: Daniel A. Helminiak
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2013-09
Genre: Christian life
ISBN: 9781492850045

Spiritual crisis is symptomatic of our age. In a global society, even in our own neighborhoods, we know of many religions. They all claim to be true, yet their teachings differ. How do you know what to believe? What is it today to really follow God's way? The Transcended Christian addresses these questions head on. It's about staying deeply rooted in Jesus while branching out to a world of diversity. It's about religion outside the box. Daniel Helminiak made that trek himself. He was ordained a Catholic priest in Rome. He ministered in a large suburban parish. He earned a PhD in theology. He taught graduate theology to seminary students. He realized he's gay and learned how it feels to be a religious outcast. He earned a second PhD in psychology and made spiritual growth his focus. Still a practicing Catholic, he is a Professor in the humanistic and transpersonal Department of Psychology at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta, where he lives. In a series of essays on all facets of Christianity, Daniel shares the wisdom he learned along his spiritual journey. He is also author of eight other books on religion, spirituality, psychology, and sexuality. He is most widely known for the international best-seller What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality. Visit him on line at www.visionsofdaniel.net.

Transcending Mission

Transcending Mission
Author: Michael W. Stroope
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2017-02-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830882251

Is the language of mission clearly evident across the broad reaches of time? Or has the modern missionary enterprise distorted our view of the past? Michael Stroope investigates how the modern church has come to understand, speak of, and engage in the global expansion of Christianity, offering a hopeful way forward in this pressing conversation.

Transhumanism and Transcendence

Transhumanism and Transcendence
Author: Ronald Cole-Turner
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2011-09-29
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1589017943

The timeless human desire to be more beautiful, intelligent, healthy, athletic, or young has given rise in our time to technologies of human enhancement. Athletes use drugs to increase their strength or stamina; cosmetic surgery is widely used to improve physical appearance; millions of men take drugs like Viagra to enhance sexual performance. And today researchers are exploring technologies such as cell regeneration and implantable devices that interact directly with the brain. Some condemn these developments as a new kind of cheating—not just in sports but in life itself—promising rewards without effort and depriving us most of all of what it means to be authentic human beings. “Transhumanists,” on the other hand, reject what they see as a rationalizing of human limits, as if being human means being content forever with underachieving bodies and brains. To be human, they insist, is to be restless with possibilities, always eager to transcend biological limits. As the debate grows in urgency, how should theology respond? Christian theologians recognize truth on both sides of the argument, pointing out how the yearnings of the transhumanists—if not their technological methods—find deep affinities in Christian belief. In this volume, Ronald Cole-Turner has joined seasoned scholars and younger, emerging voices together to bring fresh insight into the technologies that are already reshaping the future of Christian life and hope.

Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity

Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity
Author: Jeremy M. Schott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812203461

In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.

Do I Stay Christian?

Do I Stay Christian?
Author: Brian D. McLaren
Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-05-24
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1250262801

Dubbed "a heroic gate-crasher" by New York Times bestselling author Glennon Doyle, Brian D. McLaren explores reasons to leave or stay within the church and if so how... "Brian's new book on remaining Christian knocks it out of the ballpark in terms of framing and naming the questions. I cannot stop reading it. Thank you, Brian!" —Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, author of The Universal Christ "Any thoughtful Christian has been asking the questions McLaren tackles here, but many of us are afraid to voice them aloud. In Do I Stay Christian? we’re gifted a gentle guide who opens ideas and voices the questions we cannot, naming our frustration, fear, and hesitant hope." —Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, former Senior Minister, The Riverside Church; Founder, Invested Faith Do I Stay Christian? addresses in public the powerful question that surprising numbers of people—including pastors, priests, and other religious leaders—are asking in private. Picking up where Faith After Doubt leaves off, Do I Stay Christian? is not McLaren's attempt to persuade Christians to dig in their heels or run for the exit. Instead, he combines his own experience with that of thousands of people who have confided in him over the years to help readers make a responsible, honest, ethical decision about their religious identity. There is a way to say both yes and no to the question of staying Christian, McLaren says, by shifting the focus from whether we stay Christian to how we stay human. If Do I Stay Christian? is the question you're asking—or if it's a question that someone you love is asking—this is the book you've been waiting for.

The Turn to Transcendence

The Turn to Transcendence
Author: Glenn W. Olsen
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press + ORM
Total Pages: 511
Release: 2012-07-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0813218020

“Phenomenal . . . A must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death and replace it with the only alternative” (The Imaginative Conservative). Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, historian Glenn W. Olsen—author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with American and Modernity—sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. The Turn to Transcendence traces both the loss of transcendence and attempts to recover it while making its own proposals. Neither reactionary nor modernist, it questions how—under conditions of modern life—some form of the sacred and some form of the secular might both flourish at the same time. But it also provides a warning that a religion unable to maintain itself with its own overt architecture, language, and calendars against an enveloping secular culture is destined for oblivion. “Glenn Olsen’s book could hardly be more pivotal or insightful. Confronting the growing amnesia regarding culture’s religious origin and transcendent purpose, Olsen proves both a masterful cartographer of modernity and a visionary of a culture that encourages and enables us to seek beyond ourselves.” —Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus “A brilliant book. It rests on an amazing amount of scholarship that is wide-ranging in history, literature, art, science, music, theology, and philosophy.” —James Hitchcock, professor of history, St. Louis University

From Shame to Sin

From Shame to Sin
Author: Kyle Harper
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674074564

The transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian is one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center was sex. Kyle Harper examines how Christianity changed the ethics of sexual behavior from shame to sin, and shows how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.

The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism

The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism
Author: Elesha J. Coffman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2013-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199938598

Since the 1972 publication of Dean M. Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, discussion of the Protestant mainline has focused on the tradition's decline. Elesha J. Coffman's The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism tells a different story, using the lens of the influential periodical The Christian Century to examine the rise of the mainline to a position of cultural prominence in the first half of the twentieth century.

Kissing Fish

Kissing Fish
Author: Roger Wolsey
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2011-01-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 145683942X

Christianity receives a lot of attention in the media, but the most frequently discussed version represents a type of Christianity that sometimes turns people away from the Church. Kissing Fish presents a postmodern systematic theology of progressive Christianity, a growing movement that reclaims the radical message of the Gospel. This informative, contemplative, and entertaining book will guide you through the beliefs that inspire us to love one another in the transformative way that Jesus proclaimed, including practices that will take your faith to a new level. Kissing Fish is a scholarly yet thoroughly accessible introduction to progressive Christianity. While the intended target audience for this work would seem to be those who have either left the Christian faith or never adopted it at all; the work is filled with pearls of wisdom for all of us, whether associated with Christianity or not. Kissing Fish is a truly remarkable work, serving both as a reminder of the beauty and grace that form the central tenets of the faith, while offering a graceful yet prophetic rebuttal to its more exclusionary tendencies. Kissing Fish is part theological text and part tell-all personal spiritual journey. Imagine a down-to-earth combination of the works of Marcus Borg, Anne Lamott, Jim Wallis, Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, Diana Butler-Bass, Brian McLaren, Walter Wink, Wes Howard-Brook, and Donald Miller. A profound romp that informs and inspires.

Celebrating God's Love

Celebrating God's Love
Author: Donald E. Messer
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501809512

This collection of essays offers a framework for reflection and study by United Methodist laity, clergy, and seminarians seeking to live into our faith’s commitment to ecumenism and interfaith relationships. The vision and voices of writers from around the world are indispensable in understanding the biblical, historical, and theological basis for ecumenical and interreligious work. The writers are Warner H. Brown, Jr. Sudarshana Devadhar, Gaspar Joao Domingos, Adam Hamilton, Benjamin L. Hartley, Hee Soo Jung, Gladys Mangiduyos, Glen A. Messer II, Bruce R. Ough, Stephen Sidorak, Jr., Mary Ann Swenson, and Rosemarie Wenner. Read what others are saying... “This sparkling book celebrates the wide-armed embrace of God’s love. Drawing from personal stories, historical narratives, texts of the Wesleyan and United Methodist traditions, and biblical witness, the authors challenge people to ponder ecumenical and interreligious relations. They offer perspectives and questions that are deeply biblical and Wesleyan and are urgent in a world torn by conflict. They shine light on polarizations and possibilities in the United Methodist Church, the Christian Church universal, and the whole human family. The book is an invitation to reflect but, more important, to pause and appreciate the largesse of God’s love that binds people across chasms of difference.” —Dean Mary Elizabeth Moore Boston University School of Theology “This book is a wonderful resource for all who take seriously the prayer for unity Jesus prayed in John 17:20-21. The authors represent a rich diversity of voices from across the globe, all calling us to focus on that which binds us together in love. I heartily recommend this book to all who are interested in building bridges of unity.” —Dr. Clayton Oliphint Senior Pastor, First United Methodist Church, Richardson, Texas "I urge all United Methodists to read Celebrating God's Love in preparation for the 2016 General Conference, because it serves as a valuable reminder of our commitment to ecumenical and interreligious relationships and dialogue." —Jim Winkler President and General Secretary National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA