Australian theologian Scott Cowdell explores how having faith has changed under the influence of modernity and post-modernity in the West. He returns faith from pious sentimentality and arid philosophy of religion to the realm of participating knowing, paradigmatic imagination, and personal transformation where it belongs as a form of life, shaped by encounter with Jesus Christ and worked out through the Eucharistic community. This is shown to have been the typical understanding of faith from Saint Paul to the Fathers to the medieval monastic theologians. Since the rise of nominalism, however, modern individuals have struggled to maintain this participatory vision of faith as a formative habitat. Mysticism is as close as modernity got, while officially faith was annexed by modern Western culture, coming to share its anxious need for certainty and control--systemic, exclusive, and violent-tending. Scott Cowdell has written a wide-ranging book, bringing together several normally separate debates while tackling the problem from a distinctive perspective. He explores faith against the backdrop of secularization, the collapse of community, and the encroachment of an intentionally destabilizing consumer culture. He expounds the nature of desire in terms of imitation and rivalry, and the violent false-sacred roots of cultural formation evident in the modern West's many victims, all according to the uniquely comprehensive vision of Rene Girard. Finally, he dismisses today's growing mood of militant religious skepticism as philosophically outdated and out of its depth before the resilient confidence of a genuine living faith. What Cowdell calls abiding faith emerges as a venerable yet strikingly contemporary possibility. This is good news for today's homeless hearts--there is the gift of a secure identity and a mature spirituality on offer, within a liberating, inclusive, world-affirming, ecclesial form of life.

Product Description: This book addresses five of the deadliest threats confronting the faith community today, and presents the keys to vibrant spiritual living in the face of unique twenty-first century challenges.The twenty-first century is a crowded convergence of cultures, ideas, and beliefs...read more

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Product Description: The United States is one of history's great Christian nations, but our unique history, success, and global impact have seduced us into believing we are something more-God's New Israel, the new order of the ages, the last best hope of mankind, a redeemer nation...read more

Product Description: Building on the success of One Step Closer: Why U2 Matters to Those Seeking God, Christian Scharen shows how to engage faith and culture through a wide range of popular music, including the blues, hiphop, and rock. He examines artists such as Arcade Fire, Kanye West, Leonard Cohen, and Billie Holiday, offering a fresh, compelling theology of culture in conversation with C...read more

Product Description: Maybe God doesn’t speak through prophets as often these days because he knows people wouldn’t listen. Maybe God speaks to us in different ways—and in the places he knows where we congregate: in our movie theaters, living rooms, iPods, and smartphones...read more

Product Description: Engage your passion to be the one that makes a difference. Whether you are a CEO, housewife, student, manager, or church leader, you have a circle of influence and the ability to shape your culture for God’s purpose--to be a change agent...read more

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Product Description: A common basis for the project on which this volume is based is that one cannot understand religion and ethics without paying attention to the different contexts in, and by means of which, these cultural elements are expressed. This approach makes both religion and ethics liquid, and allows us to see them as based on specific contingencies rather than as expressions of some essential features...read more