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Imagine Freedom: Transforming Pain into Political and Spiritual Power
by Rahiel TesfamariamA social activist, journalist, public theologian, and international speaker who has become a powerful and brilliant voice of her generation offers a bold path to liberation and healing for people of African descent struggling in the shadows of the American Dream. The United States is at a critical juncture in its history. Not since the 1960s has the nation been so racially divided. White supremacy remains America’s Achilles’ heel—a moral failure that haunts us and holds us back from being the great nation we profess. For centuries, people of African descent have endured unimaginable hatred and discrimination which has manifested in pain and trauma passed from generation to generation. To break free from this historical cycle of suffering and be truly free at last, Black and brown people must reimagine ourselves, our communities, this country, and our relationship to Africa.Weaving storytelling, socioeconomic analysis, and cultural criticism with the spiritual and political threads of liberation theology and Pan Africanism, Imagine Freedom empowers us to begin the difficult but necessary work of decolonizing our minds and overcoming the lies we have been told about ourselves for centuries. Sobering and inspiring, filled with despair and hope, Rahiel Tesfamariam dares us to see the world through a larger historical and global lens— to understand how our quests for freedom and healing are intrinsically connected to our past, present, and future. By widening our vision, we discover new ways of imagining self, community, nation, and world, and most importantly, a new way to achieve the freedom that has been too long denied.
Imagine Meeting Him: Soul-Stirring Encounters with the Son of God
by Robert RasmussenOriginal and inspiring, this unique volume offers readers a collection of creative writings based on Scriptures that relate to the life of Christ. Each episode takes the reader through a cycle of friendship with Jesus-from acquaintance to deeply committed friend. Along the way, the reader will be drawn closer to Jesus through the eyes of characters who literally met him and, in so doing, discovered the likability and lovability of the Master.
Imagine More: Do What You Love, Discover Your Potential
by Stephanie NelsonDiscouraged that you will never fulfill your dreams? Stephanie Nelson, creator of the wildly successful Coupon Mom movement, provides a road map to achieving dreams that feel too big to come true and using your unique gifts to create a positive impact on the world. For those who feel stuck in life, unable to make progress toward your deepest hopes and dreams, Stephanie Nelson brings a practical roadmap to reaching your full potential. The creator of the Coupon Mom and jump-starter of the coupon craze that started in 2008 with the recession, Stephanie can relate to holding onto dreams that seem bigger than your abilities. Using her story to unpack life lessons, she shares a path to banish fear and embrace opportunity, develop a vision and pursue dreams, identify God's plan to use your abilities to help others, and build community by including others in your success. It's never too late to imagine more, chase your dreams, and have an impact on the world through using your unique gifts and talents, and Stephanie will show readers how to exchange their ordinary for God's extraordinary. Imagine More is a guide for anyone who wants to use their passions and skills to benefit others and fulfill their most cherished dreams.
Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities
by Daniel Boyarin Carlin A. BartonWhat do we fail to see when we force other, earlier cultures into the Procrustean bed of concepts that organize our contemporary world? In Imagine No Religion, Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin map the myriad meanings of the Latin and Greek words religio and thrēskeia, frequently and reductively mistranslated as “religion,” in order to explore the manifold nuances of their uses within ancient Roman and Greek societies. In doing so, they reveal how we can conceptualize anew and speak of these cultures without invoking the anachronistic concept of religion. From Plautus to Tertullian, Herodotus to Josephus, Imagine No Religion illuminates cultural complexities otherwise obscured by our modern-day categories.
Imagine No Religion: The Autobiography of Blase Bonpane
by Blase BonpaneFrom Cleveland to all over the world, the life story of a former priest who spoke out against U.S. involvement in Guatemala and fought for peace. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council 1962-1965 many religious people, especially those serving in Latin America, began to understand a spirituality that transcended sectarianism. Having come from an upwardly mobile Italian American family marked by southern Italian anti-clericalism, Blase was accustomed to hearing his parents express real differences with their institutional church. He went into the seminary despite the avid protests of his parents.Blase&’s odyssey takes us from his high school and college years, through his service in Guatemala during a violent revolution, to his expulsion from that country for &“subversion.&” After receiving a gag order from the Church—which he could not in good conscience accept—Blase met with the editorial board of the Washington Post and released all the material he had regarding the U.S. military presence in Guatemala. This action led to his separation from the Maryknoll Fathers.Blase went on to teach at UCLA where he met the former Maryknoll Sister Theresa Killeen, who had served in Southern Chile. They married in 1970. Together they worked directly with Cesar Chavez at his headquarters in La Paz, California, built solidarity with the Central American Revolution, formed the Office of the Americas in Los Angeles, worked on the forefront of the international movement for justice and peace, and raised two children. But his work did not end there . . .&“Read Blase Bonpane&’s autobiography. If you can aspire to a fraction of what he has achieved, you will look back on a life well lived.&” —Noam Chomsky
Imagine That: Discovering Your Unique Role as a Christian Artist
by Manuel LuzWhy are we artists? How does God experience art? What is the artist&’s calling in relation to God, the church, and the world? Drawing from his experiences performing Mozart, playing &“dive bars", and leading worship and the arts in the church, author Manuel Luz seeks to answer the questions that artists often ask. Laced with humorous and sometimes poignant anecdotes, Imagine That is a thought-provoking journey through the convergence of art and faith. Luz has been a working musician, writer, pastor, and even amateur cartoonist for more than 40 years, and in Imagine That he lays out his case for a uniquely Christian approach to the vocation of artist, using theologically rich and artist-friendly language. In the end, Imagine That affirms and equips Christian artists for the special kind of ministry that only they can do.
Imagine That: Discovering Your Unique Role as a Christian Artist
by Manuel LuzWhy are we artists? How does God experience art? What is the artist&’s calling in relation to God, the church, and the world? Drawing from his experiences performing Mozart, playing &“dive bars", and leading worship and the arts in the church, author Manuel Luz seeks to answer the questions that artists often ask. Laced with humorous and sometimes poignant anecdotes, Imagine That is a thought-provoking journey through the convergence of art and faith. Luz has been a working musician, writer, pastor, and even amateur cartoonist for more than 40 years, and in Imagine That he lays out his case for a uniquely Christian approach to the vocation of artist, using theologically rich and artist-friendly language. In the end, Imagine That affirms and equips Christian artists for the special kind of ministry that only they can do.
Imagine There's No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World
by Mitchell StephensThe historical achievements of religious belief have been large and well chronicled. But what about the accomplishments of those who have challenged religion? Traveling from classical Greece to twenty-first century America, Imagine There's No Heaven explores the role of disbelief in shaping Western civilization. At each juncture common themes emerge: by questioning the role of gods in the heavens or the role of a God in creating man on earth, nonbelievers help move science forward. By challenging the divine right of monarchs and the strictures of holy books, nonbelievers, including Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, help expand human liberties, and influence the early founding of the United States. Revolutions in science, in politics, in philosophy, in art, and in psychology have been led, on multiple occasions, by those who are free of the constraints of religious life. Mitchell Stephens tells the often-courageous tales of history's most important atheists— like Denis Diderot and Salman Rushdie. Stephens makes a strong and original case for their importance not only to today's New Atheist movement but to the way many of us—believers and nonbelievers—now think and live.
Imagine What Is Possible
by Stephan BaumanImagine What Is Possible saying yes to changing the worldAcross the world, people are refusing to accept evil and injustice. Entrepreneurs, artists, mothers, musicians, students, teachers, techies, bloggers, advocates--they dare to believe they can meaningfully impact the world.Imagine what is possible...for you.Drawing on his experience on the front lines of suffering, Stephan Bauman, CEO of World Relief, shows how true change happens, where it starts, and why, with God, all things are possible.
Imagine Your Life Without Fear: Imagine Your Life Without Fear
by Max LucadoEach sunrise seems to bring fresh reasons for fear.They're talking layoffs at work, slowdowns in the economy, flare-ups in the Middle East, turnovers at headquarters, downturns in the housing market, upswings in global warming. The plague of our day, terrorism, begins with the word terror. Fear, it seems, has taken up a hundred-year lease on the building next door and set up shop. Oversized and rude, fear herds us into a prison and slams the doors. Wouldn't it be great to walk out?Imagine your life, wholly untouched by angst. What if faith, not fear, was your default reaction to threats? If you could hover a fear magnet over your heart and extract every last shaving of dread, insecurity, and doubt, what would remain? Envision a day, just one day, when you could trustmore and fear less. Can you imagine your life without fear?The booklet contains Chapter 1 of Fearless with additional content.
Imagine the Life You'd Love to Live, Then Live It
by M.A. Maggie Oman Shannon Peg ConleyPeg Conley has been an artist all her life but, like many of us, took a long detour into the working world where she was a "corporate sales queen" in Seattle with a lot of success and a happy, busy family. Art became the thing she did on vacations, weekends and when she could carve time out of her busy life. Something gnawed at her, a nagging feeling that life might hold something else for her in the midst of it all. Then came the big "aha" moment-Peg heard a still small voice inside: "Imagine the life you want to live, then live it. It's that simple!" Her family encouraged Peg to pursue her passion.Despite a great deal of fear, Peg Conley did the thing she thought she could not do and dropped her big job, big house and big life and moved to San Francisco to start a business based on her artisan stationery. From a handful of handpainted cards, calendars and posters, her company Words & Watercolors was born and has been inspiring people, winning awards and raking in the sales ever since. Peg's intention with her work is to inspire and her art and writing all speak to life's great truths and those aha moments for which we all need reminders.What do you "imagine" your Ideal Life to be? It may take some time for it to unveil itself. You will need to have an idea of what it is you are looking to create. Spend some time in contemplation. For some that means a quiet meditation where images might come to you. For others, you might write about something you've always had a longing to create, or a dream that seemed far away and not attainable yet it doesn't go away. The dream nudges at you, asking you to pay attention. Where words work for some people, pictures work for others. You may want to create a vision board. Gather your old magazines and begin ripping out the pictures that appeal to you, or draw your own images. Your Ideal Life will come alive via the images that resonate with you. Don't hesitate to pick up a pen, pencil or crayons even and fill the blank pages with doodles of any kind. Do you still think of becoming a nurse? Don't be disheartened, go online and research classes you can take at your local college to start the process. As someone once said, if you don't start now, 5 years from now you still will be where you are but if you begin with baby steps, in 5 years you could be in a completely different place! So ask yourself the question: "What does the life I long to live look like?" Imagine it! Draw it, write it, collage it and just plain dream it. Believe you can have it and then go about creating it as you take daily steps towards becoming an enhanced version of yourself! All successful people are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
Imagine the Life You'd Love to Live, Then Live It: 52 Inspired Habits and Playful Prompts
by Peg Conley Maggie ShannonPeg Conley has been an artist all her life but, like many of us, took a long detour into the working world where she was a "corporate sales queen" in Seattle with a lot of success and a happy, busy family. Art became the thing she did on vacations, weekends and when she could carve time out of her busy life. Something gnawed at her, a nagging feeling that life might hold something else for her in the midst of it all. Then came the big "aha" moment--Peg heard a still small voice inside: "Imagine the life you want to live, then live it. It's that simple!" Her family encouraged Peg to pursue her passion. Despite a great deal of fear, Peg Conley did the thing she thought she could not do and dropped her big job, big house and big life and moved to San Francisco to start a business based on her artisan stationery. From a handful of handpainted cards, calendars and posters, her company Words & Watercolors was born and has been inspiring people, winning awards and raking in the sales ever since. Peg's intention with her work is to inspire and her art and writing all speak to life's great truths and those aha moments for which we all need reminders. What do you "imagine" your Ideal Life to be? It may take some time for it to unveil itself. You will need to have an idea of what it is you are looking to create. Spend some time in contemplation. For some that means a quiet meditation where images might come to you. For others, you might write about something you've always had a longing to create, or a dream that seemed far away and not attainable yet it doesn't go away. The dream nudges at you, asking you to pay attention. Where words work for some people, pictures work for others. You may want to create a vision board. Gather your old magazines and begin ripping out the pictures that appeal to you, or draw your own images. Your Ideal Life will come alive via the images that resonate with you. Don't hesitate to pick up a pen, pencil or crayons even and fill the blank pages with doodles of any kind. Do you still think of becoming a nurse? Don't be disheartened, go online and research classes you can take at your local college to start the process. As someone once said, if you don't start now, 5 years from now you still will be where you are but if you begin with baby steps, in 5 years you could be in a completely different place! So ask yourself the question: "What does the life I long to live look like?" Imagine it! Draw it, write it, collage it and just plain dream it. Believe you can have it and then go about creating it as you take daily steps towards becoming an enhanced version of yourself! All successful people are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts
by Steve TurnerImagine music, movies, books and paintings of the highest quality! Imagine art that permeates society, challenging conventional thinking and standard morals to their core! Imagine that it is all created by Christians! This is the bold vision of Steve Turner, someone who has worked among artists--many Christian and many not--for three decades.
Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts
by Steve TurnerImagine art that is risky, complex, and subtle. Imagine music, movies, books, and paintings of the highest quality. Imagine art that permeates society, challenging conventional thinking and standard morals to their core. Imagine that it is all created by Christians! This is the bold vision of Steve Turner, who has worked among a wide variety of artists for decades. He believes Christians should confront society and the church using art's powerful impact. Art can faithfully chronicle the lives of ordinary people and express the transcendence of God. And Christians should be involved in every level of the art world and in every medium. In this revised and expanded edition of a contemporary classic, Turner builds a compelling case for Christians in the arts. If Jesus is Lord of all of life and creation, then art is part of his cultural mandate. It can and should be a way of expressing faith through creatively, beautifully, and truthfully arranged words, sounds, and sights. Now includes study questions for individual reflection or group discussion.
Imagine: God Can Do More Than You Ever Dreamed (Women of Faith Study Guide Series)
by Women Of FaithImagine ties directly in to the 2010/2011 Conference theme: Imagine.The popular Women of Faith® Study Guide Series--renowned for its unique combination of personality and truth--offers fresh new messages in four new topical study guides. Women will grow in intimacy with God through this in-depth Bible study.Each study guide, teeming with insights and quotes from the Women of Faith Conference speakers, provides 12 weeks of Bible study and a leader's guide for small groups.
Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers and Exchanges (Austrian and Habsburg Studies #32)
by František ŠístekAs a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.
Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature
by Amelia DefalcoImagining Care brings literature and philosophy into dialogue by examining caregiving in literature by contemporary Canadian writers alongside ethics of care philosophy. Through close readings of fiction and memoirs by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ignatieff, Ian Brown, and David Chariandy, Amelia DeFalco argues that these narratives expose the tangled particularities of relations of care, dependency, and responsibility, as well as issues of marginalisation on the basis of gender, race, and class.DeFalco complicates the myth of Canada as an unwaveringly caring nation that is characterized by equality and compassion. Caregiving is unpredictable: one person's altruism can be another's narcissism; one's compassion, another's condescension or even cruelty. In a country that conceives of itself as a caring society, these texts depict in stark terms the ethical dilemmas that arise from our attempts to respond to the needs of others.
Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective
by Sharada SugirtharajahImagining Hinduism examines how Hinduism has been defined, interpreted and manufactured through Western categorizations, from the foreign interventions of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Orientalists and missionaries, to the present day. Sugirtharajah argues that ever since early Orientalists 'discovered' the ancient Sanskrit texts and the Hindu 'golden age', the West has nurtured a complex and ambivalent fascination with Hinduism, ranging from romantic admiration to ridicule. At the same time, Hindu discourse has drawn upon Orientalist representations in order to redefine Hindu identity.As the first comprehensive work to bring postcolonial critique to the study of Hinduism, this is essential reading for those seeking a full understanding of Hinduism.
Imagining Jesus Christ in Middle English Literature, 1275-1475: Royal Traitor, Heroic Lamb (The New Middle Ages)
by Theresa TinkleThis book interprets Jesus Christ as a complicated, disunified literary character in Middle English literature, where he appears variously as king, traitor, victorious conqueror, sacrificial lamb, heroic knight, lover, and spouse--often as several contradictory figures in a single work. These tropes derive from Scripture, doctrines about Christ's two natures, and theories of redemption. This book examines the full range of representations in Southern Passion, Northern Passion, Pepysian Gospel Harmony, Stanzaic Life of Christ, Cursor Mundi, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Sir John Mandeville’s Book, the York Play, and Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love. Although Christ's two natures are well represented in existing scholarship, many traditions have been overlooked, including commonplace treatments of Christ as both a traitor and king, conqueror and sacrificial lamb, hero and lover. As writers call upon audiences to feel compassion for Jesus's suffering, they almost universally express antipathy toward his Jewish torturers, complicating our ideas about affective piety. In these works, the Virgin Mary is less exemplary for her compassion than for her understanding of doctrine. In short, this book offers new perspectives on vernacular Christology between about 1275 and 1475. Theresa Tinkle is a Professor within the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, USA, as well as Director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. Previous publications include Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality and Hermeneutics in English Poetry (1996) and Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (Palgrave, 2010). Theresa’s academic training and publications include the study of medieval English and Latin literature, the medieval reception of the Bible, gender and sexuality studies, paleography and manuscript studies, composition and pedagogy, and disability studies.
Imagining Jewish Authenticity
by Ken Koltun-FrommExploring how visual media presents claims to Jewish authenticity, Imagining Jewish Authenticity argues that Jews imagine themselves and their place within America by appealing to a graphic sensibility. Ken Koltun-Fromm traces how American Jewish thinkers capture Jewish authenticity, and lingering fears of inauthenticity, in and through visual discourse and opens up the subtle connections between visual expectations, cultural knowledge, racial belonging, embodied identity, and the ways images and texts work together.
Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy
by K. Healan Gaston“Judeo-Christian” is a remarkably easy term to look right through. Judaism and Christianity obviously share tenets, texts, and beliefs that have strongly influenced American democracy. In this ambitious book, however, K. Healan Gaston challenges the myth of a monolithic Judeo-Christian America. She demonstrates that the idea is not only a recent and deliberate construct, but also a potentially dangerous one. From the time of its widespread adoption in the 1930s, the ostensible inclusiveness of Judeo-Christian terminology concealed efforts to promote particular conceptions of religion, secularism, and politics. Gaston also shows that this new language, originally rooted in arguments over the nature of democracy that intensified in the early Cold War years, later became a marker in the culture wars that continue today. She argues that the debate on what constituted Judeo-Christian—and American—identity has shaped the country’s religious and political culture much more extensively than previously recognized.
Imagining Mary: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Devotion to the Virgin Mother of God
by Daniel Rancour-LaferriereImagining Mary breaks new ground in the long tradition of Christian mariology. The book is an interdisciplinary investigation of some of the many Marys, East and West, from the New Testament Mary of Nazareth down to Our Lady of the Good Death in the twentieth century. In Imagining Mary, Professor Rancour-Laferriere examines the mother of God in her multireligious and pan-historical context. The book is a scholarly study, but it is written in a clear, straightforward style and will be comprehensible to an educated – and, above all, intellectually curious – general audience. It will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered, for example, about the flimsy scriptural basis of many beliefs about Mary; or the tendency of many mariologists to depict Mary as an incestuous "bride of Christ"; or the theological notion of Mary’s "loving consent" to her son’s crucifixion; or the idea that Mary was a "priest" officiating at the sacrifice of her son; or the unfortunate association of Mary with Christian anti-semitism; or the curious appeal of Mary to the terminally ill; and so on. Special attention is given to the psychology of representations of Mary, such as: the psychological basis for promoting Mary to the status of a "goddess"; the psychology of Mary’s compassion for her son at the foot of the cross; and the psychological conflict in Mary’s personal relationship with her son Jesus. These topics are admittedly diverse, but they all have long been on the minds of mariologists. The author takes a questioning approach to received wisdom about marian themes – including the assumption that one has to be a theist in order to understand the great appeal of Mary down the centuries. Indeed, Imagining Mary may be regarded as a first step in the direction of an atheist mariology.
Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith
by Jason BrunerMany American Christians have come to understand their relationship to other Christian denominations and traditions through the lens of religious persecution. This book provides a historical account of these developments, showing the global, theological, and political changes that made it possible for contemporary Christians to claim that there is a global war on Christians. Bruner does not advocate on behalf of particular repressed Christian communities, nor does it argue for the genuineness of certain Christians’ claims of persecution. Instead, this book is the first to examine the idea that there is a “global war on Christians” and its analytical implications. It does so by giving a concise history of categories such as "martyr" and theologies that have come together to produce a global Christian imagination premised upon the notion of shared suffering for one’s faith. This history does not deny certain instances of suffering or death; rather, it sets out to reflect upon and make meaning of the consequences for thinking about religious violence and Christianity worldwide using terms such as a “global war on Christians.”
Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism)
by Jonathan Z. SmithWith this influential book of essays, Jonathan Z. Smith has pointed the academic study of religion in a new theoretical direction, one neither theological nor willfully ideological. Making use of examples as apparently diverse and exotic as the Maori cults in nineteenth-century New Zealand and the events of Jonestown, Smith shows that religion must be construed as conventional, anthropological, historical, and as an exercise of imagination. In his analyses, religion emerges as the product of historically and geographically situated human ingenuity, cognition, and curiosity—simply put, as the result of human labor, one of the decisive but wholly ordinary ways human beings create the worlds in which they live and make sense of them. "These seven essays . . . display the critical intelligence, creativity, and sheer common sense that make Smith one of the most methodologically sophisticated and suggestive historians of religion writing today. . . . Smith scrutinizes the fundamental problems of taxonomy and comparison in religious studies, suggestively redescribes such basic categories as canon and ritual, and shows how frequently studied myths may more likely reflect situational incongruities than vaunted mimetic congruities. His final essay, on Jonestown, demonstrates the interpretive power of the historian of religion to render intelligible that in our own day which seems most bizarre."—Richard S. Sarason, Religious Studies Review
Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600–1830
by Alison Conway David AlvarezFormerly a site of study reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, scholarship on religious toleration, from the perspective of literary scholars, is fairly limited. Largely ignored and understudied techniques employed by writers to influence cultural understandings of tolerance are rich for exploration. In investigating the eighteenth-century novel, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance. Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contributions that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques that philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. Tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, the contributors delve into topics such as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare; the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire; and the ways in which writing can act as a call for tolerance.