This second, expanded edition of Arthur Peacocke's seminal work now includes the author's Gifford Lectures, as well as a new part three, in which he deals roundly with the central corpus of Christian belief for a scientific age. Distinctively theological commitments are being rethought in light of scientific apprehensions of nature.--Ted Peters, Zygon.

This highly practical step-by-step look at the life and role of the pastor is helpful for newly ordained clergy as well as the experienced pastors looking for guidance, practical wisdom, and renewal. Bloede offers specific advice and concrete examples: honing personal skills: communicating, leading, supervising, planning, and reflecting; sharpening program delivery, administration, pastoral care, worship, preaching, Christian education, and evangelism; and renewing personal resources: continuing education, taking care of one's self, and renewing faith.

Worthing describes the critique of traditional arguments for God's existence by physicists. He then examines three Christian doctrines in light of theoretical physics--God and creation out of nothing in relation to the Big Bang Theory; God and continuing creation in relation to field theory, Bell's theorem, providence, entropy, and theodicy; and God and the consummation of creation.

Ellis and Murphy show how contemporary sciences actually support a religiously based ethic of nonviolence, not by appealing to the Enlightment's mechanismic Creator God or revelation's Father God but by discerning the transcendent ground in the laws of nature, the emergence of intelligent freedom, and the echoes of "knoetic" self-giving in cosmology and biology.

How does the mind experience the sacred? What biological mechanisms are involved in mystical states and trances? Is there a neurological basis for patterns in comparative religions? Does religion have an evolutionary function? This pathbreaking work by two leading medical researchers explores the neurophysiology of religious experience. Building on an explanation of the basic structure of the brain, the authors focus on parts most relevant to human experience, emotion, and cognition. On this basis, they plot how the brain is involved in mystical experiences. Successive chapters apply this...

Santmire's much-acclaimed The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology documented the unfortunate legacy of many Christian theological notions in the use, abuse, and destruction of the natural world, along with its positive aspects. This new brief, but penetrating, look at Christian theological concepts of nature returns to the fray, this time to reclaim classic, mostly pre-modern Christian themes and re-envision them in light of the global environmental and cultural crisis. This revisionist work-"to revise the classical Christian story in order to identify...

In this provocative new addition to the Theology and the Sciences series, Patricia Williams assays the original sin doctrine with a scientific lens and, based on sociobiology, offers an alternative Christian account of human nature's foibles and future.

Focusing on the Genesis 2 and 3 account, Williams shows how its "historical" interpretation in early Christianity not only misread the text but derived an idea of being human profoundly at odds with experience and contemporary science. After gauging Christianity's several competing notions of human nature -- Protestant, Catholic, and...

Christopher Knight uses the notion of revelation to ask whether scientifically literate people need to be as simplistic in their religion as they are sophisticated in their science. Knight extends the dialogue begun in John Polkinghorne's and Arthur Peacocke's work to explore new possibilities. Their stress on natural processes as the form of divine immanence and the locus of divine action opens the way to Knight's rethinking the psychology of religious experience as a medium of divine revelation.