The failures that come as a result of sin are expressed in widespread unhappiness and in that most misunderstood of the seven deadly sins, sloth. Hud Hudson provides a constructive proposal for responding to this predicament featuring the virtue of obedience.
This series looks at ancient philosophy's questions about the good life and what those answers might mean for contemporary culture.
Does God break the laws of nature when he acts in the world?
Is the human mind uniquely nonphysical or even spiritual, such that divine intentions can meet physical realities? As scholars in science and religion have spent decades attempting to identify a 'causal joint' between God and the natural world, human consciousness has been often privileged as just such a locus of divine-human interaction. Resisting this intuitively dualistic model, as well as contemporary noninterventionist theories divine action theories, Sarah Lane Ritchie argues that a theologically robust theistic naturalism, which she believes offers a more compelling vision of divine action in the mind.
In this book, the product of Denis Alexander's Gifford Lectures, he addresses the complex interplay between biological claims about genes, philosophical claims about determinism and theological claims about God.
Divine action is bound up with our notions of causality. The way God acts in the world is unlike any other agent, because he is the Cause of all other causes, the Creator and Sustainer of everything that exists. In Unlocking Divine Action, Michael Dodds reframes the conversation about divine action. He retrieves some of Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on causality and applies those ideas to the doctrines of freedom, providence, prayer, and miracles.
What is chance? How is it different from randomness? What place do these concepts have within Christian faith and understanding?