In antiquity, the expertise of the Babylonians in matters of the heavens was legendary and the roots of both western astronomy and astrology are traceable in cuneiform tablets going back to the second and first millennia BC. The Heavenly Writing, first publsiehd in 2004, discusses the place of Babylonian celestial divination, horoscopy, and astronomy in Mesopotamian intellectual culture. Focusing chiefly on celestial divination and horoscopes, it traces the emergence of personal astrology from the tradition of celestial divination and the use of astronomical methods in horoscopes. It further takes up the historiographical and philosophical issue of the nature of these Mesopotamian 'celestial sciences' by examining elements traditionally of concern to the philosophy of science, without sacrificing the ancient methods, goals, and interests to a modern image of science. This book will be of particular interest to those concerned with the early history of science.

Publisher information from iPage.IngramContent.com.

Publisher information from iPage.IngramContent.com.

A collection of seventeen philosophical essays that systematically investigate heaven, or paradise, as conceived within theistic religious traditions.

Interesting and often unexpected achievements of the mechanics of space flight throw a new light onto several classical problems. The book’s emphasis is on analysis carried out on the level of graphs and drawings, and sometimes numbers, revealing the beauty of the research process leading to the results.

Cultural Writing. Memoir. HEAVENLY BREAKFAST is Samuel R. Delaney's wise and vivid essay on urban communes and cooperatives in the winter of 'Sixty-seven/'Sixty-eight. It examines their function, structure, permanence, and impermanence as precisely as a sociological study. Because its method is narrative and anecdotal, however, it reads like a passionate memoir--a marvelous document from an extraordinary time. Based on journals he kept at the time, these pages recount his encounters with other communes and experimental living arrangements-some gentle, some brutal; of encounters between those inside and those outside the countercultural life; of idealism and hopes pushing against a resistant reality.

Surveying the barriers that contemporary thinking has erected between the natural and the supernatural, between earth and heaven, Hans Boersma issues a wake-up call for Western Christianity. Both Catholics and evangelicals, he says, have moved too far away from a sacramental mindset, focusing more on the "here-and-now" than on the "then-and-there." Yet, as Boersma points out, the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and St. Augustine -- indeed, of most of Scripture and the church fathers -- is profoundly otherworldly, much more concerned with heavenly participation than with earthly enjoyment. In Heavenly Participation Boersma draws on the wisdom of great Christian minds ancient and modern -- Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, C. S. Lewis, Henri de Lubac, John Milbank, and many others. He urges Catholics and evangelicals alike to retrieve a sacramental worldview, to cultivate a greater awareness of eternal mysteries, to partake eagerly of the divine life that transcends and transforms all earthly realities.

"There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." So said Hamlet, but for some strange reason Christians seem to have bought this reductionistic view of the world. Have we forgotten the Bible? Our modern cosmology suggests that the universe can be explained through astronomy and mathematics. But this seems far too simplistic, not to mention rather dull. Are stars angels? Do satyrs truly exist? What does a seraph look like? Can demons tell the future? What does God's creation contain beyond the visible realm? In the following essays, such questions are not peremptorily dismissed, but are engaged with on the basis of what can be found in the Bible. We are not living in a world that can be easily dissected in a laboratory. Our universe is filled with intelligence and life, and the creativity behind it can only be understood fully through the Creator. This book includes essays from Evan and Douglas Wilson, Chris Schlect, Wes Callihan, and others.

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