Issue: Human nature

In the Beginning Were Stories not Texts

The Christian Bible is fundamentally a story. Writers, painters, sculptors, artists, and indeed, people of all walks of life live by the telling of their stories. Stories are the most basic mode of human communication. Thus it is vital to ask why Christians and above all Christian theologians so often fail to express their faith in terms of story. The vast majority of the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, consist of stories. Jesus proclaimed and taught about the Reign of God through stories and parables. At the heart of the Christian faith are stories, not concepts, propositions, or ideas.

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Human Simulation: Perspectives, Insights, and Applications

This uniquely inspirational and practical book explores human simulation, which is the application of computational modeling and simulation to research subjects in the humanities disciplines. It delves into the fascinating process of collaboration among experts who usually don’t have much to do with one another – computer engineers and humanities scholars – from the perspective of the humanities scholars. It also explains the process of developing models and simulations in these interdisciplinary teams.

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Free of Charge: Gi ving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace

We are at our human best when we give and forgive.But we live in a world in which it makes little sense to do either one. In our increasingly graceless culture, where can we find the motivation to give? And how do we learn to forgive when forgiving seems counterintuitive or even futile? A deeply personal yet profoundly thoughtful book, Free of Charge explores these questions¬ – and the further questions to which they give rise – in light of God’s generosity and Christ’s sacrifice for us.

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Being Human

What is consciousness? Is the mind a machine? What makes us persons? How can we find the path to human maturity?

These are among the fundamental questions that Rowan Williams helps us to think about in this deeply engaging exploration of what it means to be human.

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In Gods We Trust

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

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