A Matter Of Faith

Caroline Studeman is a bright young physician with everything to live for: a new marriage, a baby on the way and deep relationships with youngsters who need her healing touch. But her path to adulthood was marked by secrets and grief that even her husband knows nothing about. When a terrible accident leaves her comatose, the walls she built to protect her past begin to crumble. As her family and friends reconstruct the shocking truths of her childhood and her turmoiled years at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics, old hurts and grievances emerge. Carolineâs family finally learns the depths of her love â and they learn what they must do to bring healing into their own lives.

"Moral values" dominated the post-election headlines in 2004. Analysts pointed to exit polls, strong turnout among evangelicals, and controversy over gay marriage as evidence that the election had been decided along religious lines. Soon, however, this explanation was called into question. In A Matter of Faith, distinguished scholars go beyond the headlines to assess the role of religion in the 2004 election. Were issues such as stem cell research really more influential than the economy and Iraq? Did deeply religious Americans necessarily vote Republican? Was the morality factor really a dramatic new development? David E. Campbell and his colleagues examine the religious affiliations of voters and party elite and evaluate the claim that moral values were decisive in 2004. The authors analyze strategies used to mobilize religious conservatives and examine the voting behavior of a broad range of groups, including evangelicals, African-Americans, and the understudied religious left. This rich perspective on faith and politics is essential reading on a critical aspect of American politics. Contributors include John Green (University of Akron; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life), James Guth (Furman University), Sunshine Hillygus (Harvard University), Laura Hussey (University of Baltimore), John Jackson (University of Southern Illinois), Scott Keeter (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press), Lyman Kellstedt (Wheaton College), Geoffrey Layman (University of Maryland), David Leal (University of Texas at Austin), David Leege (Notre Dame), Eric McDaniel (University of Texas at Austin),Quin Monson (Brigham Young University), Barbara Norrander (University of Arizona), Jan Norrander (University of Minnesota), Baxter Oliphant (Brigham Young University), Corwin Smidt (Calvin College), and Matthew Wilson (Southern Methodist University).

Designed for those who wish to review their faith and life, each chapter, in this series can serve as Catechism companions/supplements, personal devotional material, or as curriculum for a study class. Questions and thought-provokers included with each chapter work well for private reflection or group discussion.

From the author of Catching Genius, a novel of a young man's search for faith-and its unintended consequences. At age twelve, Marshall Tobias saw his best friend killed by a train. It was then that he began his search for faith-delving into one tradition, then discarding it for another. His parents, however, have little time for spiritual contemplation. Their focus has been on his little sister Megan, who suffers from severe food allergies. Now Marshall is home from college with his first real girlfriend, but there is more to Ada than meets the eye-including her beliefs about the evils of medical intervention. What follows is a crisis that tests not only faith, but the limits of family, forgiveness, and our need to believe.

While the question "Is faith reasonable?" has continually occupied philosophers and theologians, little attention has been paid to what faith itself is. The Act of Faith remedies this neglect by looking at what it means for a person of Christian faith to believe. Eric Springsted contrasts modern views of faith with the Christian tradition running from Augustine through Aquinas and Calvin. In reviewing such thinkers as Locke and Hume, Springsted discovers that behind modern discussions of the reasonableness of faith lie key assumptions about the human self, including the views that the good is a matter of choice and that we can exercise objective, uninvolved reason. According to Springsted, however, the church has not viewed faith in this way. His survey of the Augustinian tradition shows that the self our most esteemed Christian thinkers had in mind when talking about faith was a "moral self"--one defined by character and self-involvement. Christian faith is at root a participation in the good, and reasoning within faith is reasoning within the life of God. Drawing on contemporary philosophers and theologians like John Henry Newman and Simone Weil, Springsted builds a fresh understanding of faith for today. He shows how the "inner act" of faith is ultimately a radical willingness to be open to God, and he argues that the faithful self is one that develops within a community that shapes its members through the morally formative activities of interaction, teaching, and sacramental practice.

"Justification by faith alone" labels theologically the motor that energizes the Reformation. The dynamic behind the language can still mean renewal for theology and church today, but only if that legal metaphor is not left to stand alone. Gerhard Forde calls for a recovery of Paul's equally vital metaphor of death-resurrection, which speaks of our dying to the old and being raised to new life in Christ. Justification, he contends, is death and rising, and where these complementary metaphors are allowed to interpret one another the Gospel can once again explode with all its original power. This fresh appropriation of the confessional witness contributes not only to an enhanced understanding of Reformation teachings, but also to an ecumenical dialogue that is zeroing in more closely on the catholic provenance and current vitality of the Augsburg Confession.

We live in a secular world and cinema is part of that secular edifice. There is no expectation, in modern times, that filmmakers should be believers – any more than we would expect that to be the case of novelists, poets and painters. Yet for all that this is true, many of the greatest directors of classic European cinema (the period from the end of World War II to roughly the middle of the 1980s) were passionately interested not only in the spiritual life but in the complexities of religion itself. In his new book Mark Le Fanu examines religion, and specifically Christianity, not as the repository of theological dogma but rather as an energizing cultural force – an 'inflexion' – that has shaped the narrative of many of the most striking films of the twentieth century. Discussing the work of such cineastes as Eisenstein and Tarkovsky from Russia; Wajda, Zanussi and Kieslowski from Poland; France's Rohmer and Bresson; Pasolini, Fellini and Rossellini from Italy; the Spanish masterpieces of Buñuel, and Bergman and Dreyer from Scandinavia, this book makes a singular contribution to both film and religious studies.