The Incorporeal God: An insight into the higher realms This is an awakening collection of essays, lucidly manifested to discern fact from fiction, where epistemology and the innate knowledge of the higher parameter are truly cultivated. The Incorporeal God insightfully delves into the nature of God, existence, consciousness, the fine-tuning of the universe, and faith-oriented phenomena. The Incorporeal God is an eye-opening masterpiece that insightfully covers spirituality, psychology, morality, and expressing on the essential merits, but is not coerced or deliberate in provoking conflict. It penetrates socio-cultural, socio-economic, and socio-political renditions of our contemporary lifestyle. Compellingly enough, it quenches the thirst of those inquisitive minds and gratifies the curiosity of the intellectuals that are apt to acknowledge the authenticity of the magnificent traces of God that is explicit and evidenced to the human mind and the nervous system via our senses. Present-day attainment is in modern science, in the quantum world, the world of string theory and the like have astonished even the most scholarly minded scientists and prominent philosophers beyond the times of Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, placing them in awe. So many show reverence for the subatomic particles, the unseen world, as most attesting to what we do not see, manages what we see, leaving no chance to sustain ideologies infested with superstition and construed with the idolatrous reasoning for upholding the truth behind existence. It tackles the ambiguities head-on, facing God and existence, where the immaculate traces of our phenomenal universe can solely lead to a supreme being and infinitely intelligent designer. As scientists tell us, even mass energy wears out, which calls for a creator to harness and deal with it, since with energy depletion, no life, from its infinitesimal to cosmically macro-level, is ever possible. “Superstition sets the whole world in flame, philosophy quenches them” (Voltaire). we live in an awakening era, it seems that beautiful minds are influenced with premonition as if they are mandated with a mission to perform gynecology into the womb of Mother Nature and give birth to yet another treasure, leaping into unveiling the mysteries of nature’s obscurities to emancipate man from the clutches of ignorance.

Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem

Are there Old Testament roots of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary? Margaret Barker traces the roots of the devotion to Mary as Mother of the Lord back to the Old Testament and the first temple in Jerusalem. The evidence is consistent over more than a millennium: there had been a female deity in Israel, the Mother figure in the Royal cult, who had been abandoned about 600BCE. She was almost written out of the Hebrew text, almost excluded from the canon. This first of two volumes traces the history of the Lady in the Temple, and looks forward to the second volume in which Barker will show how the Lady of the Temple is reclaimed in the advent of Christianity, and becomes the Lady in the Church. The result is breathtaking, and like all Barker's work, is impossible to put down.

What does it mean for Christ to be the "image of God"? And, if Christ is the "image of God," can the human person also unequivocally be understood to be the "image of God"? Augustine's Early Theology of Image examines Augustine's conception of the imago dei and makes the case that it represents a significant departure from the Latin pro-Nicene theologies of Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus, and Ambrose of Milan only a generation earlier. Augustine's predecessors understood the imago dei principally as a Christological term designating the unity of divine substance. But, Gerald P. Boersma argues, Augustine affirms that Christ is an image of equal likeness, while the human person is an image of unequal likeness. Boersma's careful study thus argues that a Platonic and participatory evaluation of the nature of "image" enables Augustine's early theology of the image of God to move beyond that of his Latin predecessors and affirm the imago dei both of Christ and of the human person.

An exposition challenging inveterate verdicts ingrained in the historical / theological mindset about Origen, who is shown to have produced a sheerly new theory of Time, the Christian one. Claims attributing the tenet of a 'beginningless world' to him are disproved. The author challenges the widespread impression about this theology being bowled head over heels by its encounter with Platonism or Neoplatonism, casting new light on Origen's grasp of the relation between Hellenism, Hebrew thought and Christianity.

Within the field of Islamic Studies, scientific research of Muslim theology is a comparatively young discipline. Much progress has been achieved over the past decades with respect both to discoveries of new materials and to scholarly approaches to the field. The Oxford Handbook of IslamicTheology provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the current state of the field. It provides a variegated picture of the state of the art and at the same time suggests new directions for future research.Part One covers the various strands of Islamic theology during the formative and early middle periods, rational as well as scripturalist. To demonstrate the continuous interaction among the various theological strands and its repercussions (during the formative and early middle period and beyond),Part Two offers a number of case studies. These focus on specific theological issues that have developed through the dilemmatic and often polemical interactions between the different theological schools and thinkers. Part Three covers Islamic theology during the later middle and early modernperiods. One of the characteristics of this period is the growing amalgamation of theology with philosophy (Peripatetic and Illuminationist) and mysticism. Part Four addresses the impact of political and social developments on theology through a number of case studies: the famous mihna instituted byal-Ma'mun (r. 189/813-218/833) as well as the mihna to which Ibn 'Aqil (d. 769/1367) was subjected; the religious policy of the Almohads; as well as the shifting interpretations throughout history (particularly during Mamluk and Ottoman times) of the relation between Ash'arism and Maturidism thatwere often motivated by political motives. Part Five considers Islamic theological thought from the end of the early modern and during the modern period.

This volume is the first complete English translation of Hasdai Crescas's Light of the Lord. Light of the Lord is widely acknowledged as a seminal work of medieval Jewish philosophy and second in importance only to Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. Crescas takes on not only Maimonides but, through him, Aristotle, and challenges views of physics and metaphysics that had become entrenched in medieval thought. Once the Aristotelian underpinnings of medieval thought are dislodged, Crescas introduces alternative physical views and reinstates the classical Jewish God as a God of love and benefaction rather than a self-intellecting intellect. The end for humankind then is to become attached in love to the God of love through devoted service.

Have you ever had a "glory" moment, one when you suddenly realized some deep truth and knew your life would never be the same? What if you could experience more of those? "From Glory to Glory" is the revelation of spiritual truths I have come to understand and wish to share. The major questions put forth in this book are: Who is God? Who is Jesus? and Who are We? Also explored: What is sin? What is worship? What is prayer? and more. The answers I discovered are astounding!