Search Results for: ravi jain

Dominion

Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion — an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus — was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.

Strangers in a Strange Land

Charles J. Chaput’s Strangers in a Strange Land is a vivid critique of American life today, but also an empowering guide to how Christians―and particularly Catholics–can live their faith vigorously, with confidence and hope, in a post-Christian public square

From the author of Living the Catholic Faith and Render Unto Caesar comes a fresh, urgent, and ultimately hopeful treatise on the state of Catholic life and Christian community in the United States.

America today is different in kind, not just in degree, from the past. And this new reality is unlikely to be reversed. The reasons include, but aren’t limited to, the decline of a sustaining sense of family and community, the impact of new technologies and economic changes that widen the gulf between rich and poor, diminished religious belief among young people, significant demographic shifts, profound new patterns in sexual behavior and identity, the growth of federal power and its disregard for religious rights, and the growing isolation and elitism of our leadership classes.

But the author gives more than a penetrating diagnosis of the nation’s problems. Archbishop Chaput offers a compelling reflection on the person of Jesus Christ, the nature of the Church, the urgency of radical faith, and the redemptive power of beauty – all in the spirit of Psalm 8 and the enduring words of Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea

The law of God: these words conjure an image of Moses breaking the tablets at Mount Sinai, but the history of the alliance between law and divinity is so much longer, and its scope so much broader, than a single Judeo-Christian scene can possibly suggest. In his stunningly ambitious new history, Rémi Brague goes back three thousand years to trace this idea of divine law in the West from prehistoric religions to modern times—giving new depth to today’s discussions about the role of God in worldly affairs.
Brague masterfully describes the differing conceptions of divine law in Judaic, Islamic, and Christian traditions and illuminates these ideas with a wide range of philosophical, political, and religious sources. In conclusion, he addresses the recent break in the alliance between law and divinity—when modern societies, far from connecting the two, started to think of law simply as the rule human community gives itself. Exploring what this disconnection means for the contemporary world, Brague—powerfully expanding on the project he began with The Wisdom of the World—re-engages readers in a millennia-long intellectual tradition, ultimately arriving at a better comprehension of our own modernity.

The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought

When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Rémi Brague in this wide-ranging cultural history.

Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality.

Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own.