Was God telling the truth when he said, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart”?
Families around the world celebrate faith in many different ways—through praying, singing, learning, helping, caring, and more. With stunning photographs from many cultures and religious traditions, Faith celebrates the ways in which people worship around the globe .
The first step on the journey of faith is to recognize that everything is moving onward to something else, inside us and outside.... We see that a self-image we've been holding doesn't need to define us forever, the next step is not the last step, what life was is not what it is now, and certainly not what it might yet be. Read More
Award-winning reporter and author Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ) once again uses his investigative skills to address the primary objections to Christianity. As a former atheist, Strobel understands the rational resistance to faith. He even names the eight most convincing arguments against Christian faith:
1) If there's a loving God, why does this pain-wracked world groan under so much suffering and evil?
2) If the miracles of God contradict science, then how can any rational person believe that they're true?
3) If God is morally pure, how can he sanction the slaughter of innocent children as the Old Testament says he did?
4) If God cares about the people he created, how could he consign so many of them to an eternity of torture in hell just because they didn't believe the right things about him?
5) If Jesus is the only way to heaven, then what about the millions of people who have never heard of him?
6) If God really created the universe, why does the evidence of science compel so many to conclude that the unguided process of evolution accounts for life?
7) If God is the ultimate overseer of the church, why has it been rife with hypocrisy and brutality throughout the ages?
8) If I'm still plagued by doubts, then is it still possible to be a Christian?
These are mighty tough questions, and Strobel fields them well. Rather than write a weighty dissertation about the merits of faith, he brings us along on his quest as we meet leaders in the Christian community, such as Peter Kreeft and William Lane Craig.
We also encounter his everyday friends and acquaintances that serendipitously fill in the holes in each of the eight arguments against faith. The use of dialogue from personal interviews and a scene-by-scene active narrative makes this an easy and engaging read.
However, easy does not mean breezy. This is a book of substance and merit, one that will help Christians defend their faith, especially during the hardest of times, when they have to defend their faith to themselves in moments of doubt. --Read more
Current world events show that we need to find fresh ways to think about faith. Just at the right moment, Buddhist teacher Salzberg (Lovingkindness) offers a deeply personal and luminously honest work that makes faith relevant to us all.
Faith from its usual association of adherence to systems of belief (and even the belief that we have no faith), she allows it to be a verb, an act of offering and affirmation that can heal and enlarge our lives. "Faith is the animation of the heart that says, `I choose life,' " she writes. "This spark of faith is ignited the moment we think, `I'm going to go for it. I'm going to try.' "
Like the great teachers of Buddhism, Salzberg relies on her stories to make the teachings relevant. She shifts effortlessly from the voice of a memoirist to the voice of a master teacher. Through her insights, we come to understand faith as a verb.
Faith means never giving up on the possibilities of each moment, always seeing "our own potential for happiness, for vibrant wisdom and sustained compassion--a potential that all beings share.
In 1970, as a shy, 18-year-old college student, Salzberg recounts, she decided to travel to India to learn to meditate. She had lived cocooned in sadness since her mother died when she was young, until a course in Buddhism sparked the intuition that life held possibilities that could make her future different than her past.
She went for it. In the rich stories that follow, Salzberg describes how that first flare of faith ignited the next, how a path appeared step by step, light by light, as she encountered teachers and friends and, finally, her own innate wisdom and compassion.
True faith, according to Salzberg, is the action of the heart opening to admit life in all its unknown potential. It does not need to constrict around a particular belief or view, because it flows from an inner sense of reality, "a homing instinct for freedom." Salzberg shows that, in its essence, faith is a love of life that breaks out as it is exposed to real forces. Truth feeds faith. This is a work of great truth and great heart. It will help everyone who reads it.
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