Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Religious Studies

The father of the intelligent design movement, Phillip E. Johnson, thinks the new atheists are right! How? They’ve put serious discussion about God back on the public agenda. Despite their conclusions, folks like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett are asking the right questions. They’re making belief in any religion an issue again, especially in the university context where, for decades, questions about faith and reason have been taken off the table for serious discussion. Open debate is exactly what we need on the topics of God, evolution, and creation.

In Cult Following, Ocker sheds light on the terrifying attraction of cults, demonstrating the elasticity of belief, the desperateness of belonging, and the tragedy of trust.

Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews” are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. In this provocative book, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

In this biography of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, Alberto Manguel examines the question of his universal appeal. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.

C. S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia tales and Christian apologetics, works that have sold more than 100 million copies. But Lewis was also a trained philosopher and a professor at Cambridge and Oxford. An intellectual giant, he fiercely and extensively critiqued the fashionable dogma known as scientism - the idea that science is the only path to knowledge, and matter the fundamental reality.

In the spring of 2020, government mandates forced churches across North America to close their doors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As societal fear and unrest increased, Christians were forced to grapple with how God wanted them to respond to these state-imposed restrictions. After all, didn’t the closure of churches pose a serious threat in a time when people needed spiritual direction more than ever?

Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to “health and safety”—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. Can true, fact-based discovery be redeemed? In Science in an Age of Unreason, legendary professor of psychology and biology, John Staddon, unveils the identity crisis afflicting today’s scientific community, and provides an actionable path to recovery. 

In today’s polarized context, Christians often have committed, biblical rationales for very different positions. How can Christians navigate disagreements with both truth and love? Tim Muehlhoff and Rick Langer provide lessons from conflict theory and church history on how to negotiate differing biblical convictions in order to move toward Christian unity.

Public schools are indoctrinating a generation of children to see themselves as either victims of systemic racial oppression or members of a wicked oppressor class. Leonydus Johnson, a black writer and podcaster, exposes the poisonous ideology embedded in "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" programs. We must teach our children the truth that their identity comes not from their race but from Christ.

In This Earthly Frame, David Sehat describes the making of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and most significant detractors. He shows how its foundations were laid in the US Constitution and how it fully emerged only in the 20th century.

Phillip E. Johnson pries the lid off public debate about questions of ultimate concern - questions often suppressed by our society’s intellectual elite. Moving far beyond matters of creation and evolution, Johnson outlines the questions we all ought to be asking about the meaning of human history, the limits of scientific inquiry, religion and education in a pluralistic society, truth, liberty and moral choices, and God and his word, Jesus Christ.

Science is the supreme authority in our culture. Science speaks so authoritatively in our culture that many are tempted to use its clout to back claims that go beyond the available evidence. How can we identify when such ideological sleight of hand has taken place? This wedge of truth does not “wedge out” a necessary foundation of rational thought. But it does “wedge in” the much-needed acknowledgment that reason encompasses more than mere scientific investigation.